Why the Tea Party wouldn't work in Canada

A new poll suggests voters would support a Canadian Tea Party, but the Liberals have much bigger things to worry about than a grassroots insurgency.

Political polls are tricky things. They seem to generate the news just as often as they report on existing trends. Take the recent Decima-Harris poll, which found that 19 per cent of Canadians would support a Canadian version of the Tea Party. Cue the headlines: Sarah Palin is about to take over Canada.

Not so fast, Tasha Kheirridin writes in the National Post. “The results would seem to indicate what recent elections in New Brunswick, and polls in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec already show,” Kheirridin says. “Voters are tired of their current crop of elected officials and want change.” This looks “less like a Tea Party lite … than plain old incumbency fatigue” brought on by economic woes and strong anti-elite messages currently trumpeted by politicians. Besides, Kheirridin argues, a Tea Party movement makes sense as a way to inject change into America’s two-party system, but Canada’s more flexible multi-party system precludes outsider infiltration.

In any case, the Tea Party may not really be what it says it is. Despite the invocation of revolutionary rhetoric, there’s no political sea change on the way in the U.S. according to the Post’s Dan Gardner. He points out that 411 of 418 Congressional incumbents won their party’s nomination for the November elections, which is hardly a grassroots coup.

Incumbent fatigue may be a factor in Canada, but the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin says federal Liberals could be facing another politically fatal force: bad luck. The Liberal premiers in the country’s three biggest provinces are all sliding in the polls: Quebec’s Jean Charest thanks to corruption allegations, B.C.’s Gordon Campbell thanks to his bungling of the HST, and Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty because, well, nobody likes him. Provincial Liberals aren’t directly associated with the federal party of course, but “when the Liberal brand name takes a hit in three great domains in the same time frame, it surely can’t help.” All three premiers have won multiple majority governments, and Martin says it will be a “luckless irony” if “the most successful Liberal premiers to come along in decades are detrimental to their federal hopes.”