Meanwhile, in Canada, tax cuts won (and other lessons)

While nearly all Americans were celebrating Osama bin Laden’s surprise discovery that the 72 virgins in front him were actually 36 alternative-lifestyle couples who wanted nothing to do with him, the nation north of the 49th elected its 41st Parliament. The result was a series of surprises: the governing Conservatives won a majority in Parliament; the left-wing New Democrats broke the 100 seat barrier; the center-left Liberals (previously dubbed the Natural Governing party) were slammed into third place and practically wiped out west of the Atlantic Time Zone; and the Bloc Quebecois (supposedly the voice of Quebec) lost over 90% of their MPs (including their leader).

Now, Canada is not the United States, but there are a few things we can glean from the election results up north:

• Tax cuts, not tax hikes, still win elections: The governing Conservatives (a.k.a. Tories) ran defending the hardest kind of tax cuts to defend – corporate tax cuts (they’re easily the least visible to voters). Every other party used them as reason enough to send the party and its leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, packing. Yet Harper’s party rose in support from the last election (38% to 40%), and gained 22 seats in the House of Commons – moving from minority status (where he’s been dangling on a thread that the opposition parties nearly cut after the 2008 election) to majority status (where they can now pass whatever they like). Meanwhile, the second largest party – the lefty New Democrats – also had tax cuts in their platform (the only other party that did), albeit limited to “small businesses.” All in all, 70% of Canadians voted for parties that included or implemented business tax reductions.
• Voters need to know what they’re voting for – not just against: Once again, the only two parties that talked about what they would do were the governing Tories (we’d keep moving forward on what we’re doing) and the NDP (we’ll stop the nastiness and make Parliament work again). The other two parties basically screamed “STOP HARPER!” for five weeks. They were bereft of agendas; they are now bereft of MPs. This is not to say the Conservatives or New Democrats avoided throwing barbs at their opponents (the Tories were effective in their ads; the NDP’s leader eviscerated his Liberal counterpart in the debates), but that wasn’t all they did.
• Recessions are not re-election killers: The Conservatives may not have had control of Parliament before Monday night, but they have been the government for five years. They took over near the economic peak and presided over the trough and (depending on your viewpoint) either the slow and delicate recovery of the “dead-cat bounce.” Yet throughout the difficult times, they actually won special elections that traditionally were posion for incumbent parties (they picked off two seats from the other parties between the 2008 and 2011 elections) and then moved into majority territory this week. It’s clear that voters were more interested in how Harper et al responded to the downturn, rather than blaming them for just being there when it happened.

None of these are included in the usual “conventional wisdom.”

There are caveats, of course: Canada, like I said, is not the United States. We have nothing like Quebec. Canada’s Tories put forth their own stimulus (although, unlike the Obama Administration, they plan on bringing spending back down to pre-stimulus levels). Finally, of course, we have only two parties to their four (or, perhaps, three-and-a-half).

Still, the lesson can cross the border: avoid imposing more of a tax burden on the people; make sure voters know what you will do in addition to what you won’t; and reaction to the recession is more important than mere presence during it.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal

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About the author

D.J. McGuire

Former candidate for Board of Supervisors in Spotsylvania, current blogger, economics teacher, and long-rumored windbag. There are two causes closest to the heart: steering the country away from the social democratic nonsense that is sinking Europe, and convincing the rest of the "rightosphere" that the NBA really is a joy to watch.