On October 14th, Canadians will deliver their verdicts on the leadership abilities of our political elites. Or perhaps more accurately, we will deliver our verdicts on each party’s ability to condense complex issues to sound bites, propaganda, and rhetoric. The business of actually assessing the merits of a leader is left to history.
Historians, unlike politicians, political strategists, and much of the media, do not concern themselves with debating the intricacies of near-irrelevant policies, like raising mandatory sentencing by a mere one year.
Historians instead focus on the positions particular leaders took on the biggest, most significant issues of their time. Each decade seems to furnish a few of these crucial issues that shape the course of history. Taking the 1930s as an example, we may safely say that the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes were the two most significant events of the decade.
How has history judged our Canadian leaders’ responses to these two grave events of the 1930s? Well, they actually come off rather poorly. Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett (1930-1935) is widely judged to have badly handled the Depression.
Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, on the other hand, who was both Bennett’s predecessor and successor, is often harshly criticized for his response to the rise of totalitarian states, particularly the Nazi regime. King was notoriously wrong in his opinion of Hitler, and confined in his diary that he both admired the man and thought he was someone who would never start a war.
But let us now focus our attention on the present decade, the first of a new century. The two single most important events, in my view, will be judged to have been the illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States, the United Kingdom, and various lesser allies, and the international response to climate change.
The war in Iraq polarized world opinion, divided even NATO, and has led to the deaths of untold thousands, and made two million people refugees. The price in blood has been enormous, and so has the price in dollars: the U.S. alone has spent 800 billion to date on the war. (Or put another way, an even greater sum of money than what is now needed to bailout Wall Street.)
Instances of torture by American soldiers of Iraqi detainees shocked the world, and the lies told by the Bush administration to justify the war, (i.e. all those non-existent weapons of mass destruction) seriously undermined the already shaky creditability of the American government. In Spain and elsewhere, governments fell for having found themselves on the wrong side of the debate over Iraq.
What sort of judgment did Stephen Harper demonstrate in the lead-up to this ill-conceived war? Well, if you recall, Harper at that time was the leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and in that position he passionately argued in favour of an American-led invasion of Iraq. He demonstrated shockingly naiveté in accepting at face value the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Moreover, Harper wrote letters to American publications in which he stated that Canadians should be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Americans in their invasion. He did this even though opinion polls indicated over eighty percent of Canadians opposed the war.
Conversely, Stéphane Dion, now the Liberal leader and at that time a senior cabinet minister in Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government, opposed the war, and fortunately, that was also Chrétien’s ultimate position.
So on this crucial issue of the decade, which future historians will doubtless scrutinize in great detail, it seems clear that Dion will be deemed to have displayed much better judgment than Harper.
On the other major issue of this decade, the international response to human-induced climate change, the responses of Dion and Harper have been even more at odds. Harper has denied the science behind climate change (even though he himself has no scientific expertise), dismantled all federal programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and proudly promised to kill Kyoto.
Dion on the other hand, was among the chief supporters of the Kyoto Accord in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, and in his capacity as Environment Minister, acted as president of the UN’s Montreal Summit on Climate Change in 2005. With his Green Shift, he has made addressing carbon emissions a central plank in his platform in this ongoing election.
If global warming continues as the world’s leading scientists predict it will, history shall not be kind to political leaders, like Harper, who led the fight against adopting measures to reduce carbon emissions and ignored the dire warnings of scientists.
Although Canadians seem poised to decisively reject Stéphane Dion’s leadership on October 14th, perhaps Dr. Dion can take some solace in the knowledge that history will be a much kinder judge of him than it likely will be of Stephen Harper.
Published by the Welland Tribune, October 1, 2008.
