The Centre-Right is there for the taking

Federal politics is in an interesting position in Canada right now. For the first time in all of the time I have been observing Canadian politics (almost 40 years) the centre-right is unoccupied by any of the Federal political parties.

The NDP would never move that far right. The current Liberal government has been the most progressive government since the government of Pierre Trudeau, meaning it has firmly planted itself in the centre-left, with some incursions into the centre proper. The Conservative Party of Canada, the Party you would expect to occupy the centre-right, has abandoned it and has moved far to the right, moving into populist, Trump, MAGA territory.

The Conservatives have a chance to move back to the centre as they are in the middle of a campaign to elect a new leader but the presumptive front-runner does not seem interested in that, one of the candidates that seemed to realize the opportunity was summarily disqualified from the contest and the other who seemed to realize the opportunity is a political has-been who probably has no chance of winning. There are still a number of weeks until the CPC announces the winner of that contest but it does not look like they will be electing a "moderate" conservative as their leader.

So, what are the Liberals to do?

I know that their instincts are to be progressive, to stay the current course. They have broken the old trick of campaigning from the left but governing from the right since 2015. However, they are a seven year old government, and counting, and they will be seeking a fourth mandate during the next election. The next election will be toughest one of all and they need to find a way to grow their support if they hope to win that fourth mandate. The Conservatives have given them an opening to do just that. 

Make no mistake there are many centre-right voters who would not vote Liberal no matter what. However, there are those who have voted Liberal in the past and would vote Liberal again if the party could find a way to appeal to them.

Most centre-right voters care about the economy and government spending and they are turned off by any kind of focus on social issues. With the economy seeming to be heading towards post-pandemic "normalcy" the government has the opportunity to address the economic and fiscal issues. Inflation appears to have peaked without the Bank of Canada raising interest rates too much. We will have to see but 2022 could just be the year of transition from the pandemic economy to a "normal" economy in 2023 and beyond. As well, as a result of this the government will be able to wind down the remaining pandemic relief programs, leading to less government spending and lower deficits. There are already signs that is happening with the government reporting a $10 billion surplus in the first quarter of this fiscal year. That will disappear in subsequent quarters but the surplus is something that can be used as a starting point for the economic update that will be delivered this fall and that can be expanded upon in the spring budget.

As for the social issues. The CPC is doing a good job of turning off centre-right voters by making them front and centre in their leadership election campaign.

Of course such an approach may alienate the NDP, which currently has a deal with the Liberals to support them in the minority Parliament but there is a way to deal with that, which I will write about in my next post.

For now, there are enough reasonable centre-right voters in this country, who are appalled by the direction that the CPC are heading and who would be looking for a political home during the next election. If the Liberals could capture their votes it could mean a rather convincing election victory for them.

You know what is really scary?

As I write this many of the historic and storied rivers in Europe are drying up. The Rhine, the Danube, the Loire and others are all reporting historically low water levels. I have a colleague who had to cancel her river cruise on the Danube in 2020 because of this thing call COVID-19. You may remember it. It was the talk of the town for a little while. She finally rescheduled for this Fall but now it might be canceled again or at least greatly reduced in duration and sites to see because of the low water levels of that river.

As I mentioned in my previous post one of the myths of climate change is the impacts would be felt in the lower latitudes first, because they are already the warmest latitudes in the world. Since most of the Third World is located in the Equatorial Region there were grand predictions of mass migrations from that region to the North and South temperate zones because it was believed that their climates would change for the better, increasing the size of the temperate zones as it warmed at the higher latitudes.

They were wrong. Less than a decade ago the average temperatures in the North began to increase dramatically, reducing sea ice in the Arctic to nearly zero, and causing the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica to melt at a prodigious rate, threatening the world with rising sea levels and changing ocean currents.

Now the impacts of climate change are being increasingly felt in the "temperate" latitudes. Prolonged droughts in the most agriculturally productive land on the planet are occurring everywhere. California, the great plains, the farm lands of Europe, the rice fields of Asia are all showing the impacts of these droughts and there appears to be no end in sight. We are already seeing the impacts of that with higher food prices, which were already increasing before the war in Ukraine and the latest round of punishing weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

So what is going to happen in the next decade or so? It was believed the impacts of climate change would start at the Equator and head towards the polls. Instead, it would appear they started at the polls and are moving towards the Equator. So it is very possible that the impacts predicted for the Equatorial Region are still going to happen, making an already very hot place even hotter, which could very well trigger the mass migrations that were predicted. Of course, those mass migrations are going to be people moving to the so called temperate zones, which will have been living with the impacts of climate change for almost two decades at that point.

That is the scary part. We may not be wrong in predicting the the Equatorial Region will become almost uninhabitable we we may only be wrong about the timing and about the fact that the so called temperate zones of the planet would be a suitable refuge for them.

The climate is a fickle thing so it could change again and the original predictions could come true. However, it is a little disconcerting to realize that it might not happen and we are heading for world that is much warmer and dryer everywhere. That is a recipe for disaster.

One Climate Change Myth Debunked

A persistent myth around global warming and climate change is that the earth and climate would warm and change for the worst at the lowest latitudes, such as around the equator, while more temperate and colder latitudes would become warmer, making countries such as Canada warmer and more livable.

The past few summers should make people rethink such myths. It has been remarkable that the places that have been feeling the greatest impacts of climate change have been temperate countries. Record heat waves in Europe and persistent decade long droughts in what was once prime agricultural regions of all of the continents is showing that our real time experiment with our climate is not working out as expected. Add to that the fact the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet and we can probably draw an initial conclusion that the original myths around climate change has been busted.