A Republican Red Wave on Canada's Shores

The pundits try to sort out what the GOP's big gains in the American midterms mean for Canada.

Noting that Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton tried to ride Barack Obama’s liberal coattails to victory in 2008, the National Post’s Roy Green says a day after the Democrats’ thumping at the polls “you won’t find the Liberal and NDP leaders scrapping for microphone and camera space, exposing knobby knees while whirling pompoms and giggling ‘Yes we can.’” Funny, we missed that press conference. Green thinks there’s political capital to be gained by the Conservatives here, and says if they “prove themselves sufficiently politically savvy, you will … see CPC advertising reminding Canadian voters of Iggy and Jack’s co-leader status of the Canadian chapter of the Barack Obama Fan Club.” Green appears unaware that it was Americans, not Canadians, who just voted en mass the Republicans, and is assuming that Canadians suddenly find Obama more distasteful than a party that opposes national health care, gay marriage, and abortion, an assumption which is, to put it bluntly, stupid.

“What was bad news for Barack Obama … might not be so for Canadians,” writes the Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe, and by ‘Canadians’ she means people who like the oil sands industry and don’t like carbon regulations. “A U.S. carbon cap and trade scheme, outlined in the Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill, now seems a long way off,” she writes, which will give Stephen Harper room to blame Washington for delaying carbon legislation. The Republicans might even make Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s pipe dream come true by approving a proposed pipeline from the oil sands to Texas.

The idea that the voter anger running rampant in the U.S. is also thriving in Canada is overblown, writes the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom. The prime example favoured by the media is Rob Ford’s victory in Toronto, “portrayed variously as the victory of old white men over multicultural cosmopolites, the suburbs over the downtown or the working class over Toronto’s latte-sipping establishment.” In fact, more than half of his rival’s support came from the suburbs, and Ford “topped the polls not just in the middle class bungalow neighbourhoods of Etobicoke, but in high-income areas.”