All things Canadian are now regional

What About National Institutions?

One's place in history matters a great deal to prime ministers. No Canadian prime minister wants the country to break up under his or her watch. The preoccupation with national unity thus tends to re-evaluate other policy issues in terms of their impacts on Quebec and the likelihood of securing federal-provincial agreements. The participants involved in recasting the issues are, for the most part, political strategists or generalists operating at the centre. They are not usually specialists in health care, social or economic development policy and so on. They are also often directly tied to the prime minister and his office.

The media have also played an important role in the concentration of political power in Ottawa. The age of 24-hour television and the intense competition between the electronic and the written media have placed a relentless pressure on journalists to produce something new or provocative (Taras). In addition, the electronic media cannot follow the complexities of government decision-making process and have little interest in describing how it works. Their focus is on political actors and the one who matters most to their audiences and who is turned to for an answer to any question in any policy field is the prime minister.

During the elections above all the media also concentrate on party leaders rather than on selected regional party candidates, even those who are well-known. Journalists buy seats on the chartered aircraft of party leaders and follow them everywhere. In Canada, at least, the media and, by extension, the public, focus on the clash of party leaders. How well a leader does in the debates, for example, can have an important impact, or at least be perceived to have an important impact, on the election campaign, if not on the election itself Johnston et al.).

Increasingly, Canadian political leaders appear to be the only runners in the election race. Winning candidates on the government side are aware that their party leader's performance explains in large measure why they themselves were successful. It should come as no surprise then that if the leader is able to secure a majority mandate, the party is in his debt, and not the other way around. The leader no longer needs to rely on powerful local candidates to sell the party and its policies in the regions.

National political parties are today not much more than election-day organizations, providing the fundraising and workers needed to fight a campaign. They are hardly effective vehicles for generating public policy debates, for defining regional interests, for staking out policy positions or for ensuring their own party's competence once in office. Although regional cleavages have come to dominate the national public policy agenda, national political parties shy away from them for fear they will split the party along regional lines and hurt its chances at election time. The thinking goes, at least in the parties that have held power in Ottawa, that the issue is so sensitive and so politically explosive that it is better left in the hands of party leaders and a handful of advisers. This assumption may well have been wrong all along, given that our national political parties have become regionalized. The Liberal party is now largely an Ontario-based party, the Reform party remains Western-based, the Bloc Quebecois, by definition, is Quebec-based and the Progressive Conservative party is now essentially Atlantic-based.