CANADIAN politics, globally inconsequential in themselves, serve an occasionally important role in public debate in the big countries of the Anglophone world.
Politicians in America and Britain, who generally could not tell you the name of more than one Canadian Cabinet minister, will, from time to time, cite developments in the vast, cold and underpopulated Commonwealth country as evidence of a global political trend uniquely favourable to them.
Canada represents then a sort of geopolitical Rorschach test, the psychological experiment where patients are asked to identify shapes in an abstract inkblot. What they see, psychologists find, is exactly what they want or what they are conditioned to see.
The general election in the country on Monday offers an especially useful clinical trial.
If opinion polls are accurate, the ruling Liberal Party will be swept from power, replaced by a Conservative party once written off as dead. The likely margin of victory is unclear. In recent days polls have shown a slight narrowing of the gap, enough to deprive the Tories, under their leader Stephen Harper, of an overall majority, but probably not enough to stop him heading at least a coalition government.
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There are lessons for everyone in this.
Take the Conservatives — the party that ruled for much of the 1980s but was dumped in 1993, reduced, famously, to two seats in Parliament. After 13 years and four election defeats, they are poised for a spectacular comeback.
For their British counterparts, this could hardly be more encouraging as they continue their own long hike back from the political wilderness. It offers a validation, of sorts, too, for David Cameron’s modernising approach — the Canadian Conservatives are a new party, formed two years ago from the ruins of the old one, which has jettisoned some of its fusty image and ideological baggage.
Then there’s the fate of Paul Martin, the Liberal Prime Minister who looks headed for defeat next week.
This cerebral left-of-centre politician waited for almost a decade to take over the top job. When the Liberals took power in 1993, he was convinced that he, not Jean Chrétien, should have been prime minister. Instead he settled in for a long stint as Finance Minister, building an impressive record as a man who brought discipline and rigour to the public finances.
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But the acrimony between him and an increasingly unpopular Prime Minister kept boiling to the surface. At long last he forced out the incumbent and achieved his dream of the top job, just as his party’s fortunes were failing. Now, barely two years later, he looks set to be swept away, victim as much of his predecessor’s failings as his own.
()Remind you of anyone?
In America, too, conservatives, having long dismissed Canada as a vast, bleak landscape of pinko, peacenik homosexuals debilitated by a socialist medical system, are starting to see a vitality there after all.
Mr Harper, they note, is a conservative in their own mould. He supported the Iraq war, is anti-abortion and vigorously opposed to gay marriage, the most divisive issue in Canadian politics after Parliament, prodded by the courts, legalised it last year.
Could the imminent victory for this somewhat dour, but straight-talking, man mark a turning point, the beginning of a conservative revolution well beyond the horizons of Alabama and Washington DC?
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Sadly, all of these extrapolations probably just prove that the Rorschach theory still works.
If the ruling Liberal Party is defeated, it will be for a Canadian reason. The party has been undone mainly by a financial scandal, involving the funnelling to its friends and supporters of more than $100 million (£49 million) in federal funds intended to promote national unity in separatist Quebec.
Which may be the real lesson from Canada — the latest evidence of a political truth that when a party has held power for too long, it grows tired, arrogant, heedless of public distrust and, often, corrupt. That, at least, ought to have resonance in the US and Britain.
HOW THEY STAND
Conservatives Have 98 seats. 37 per cent in polls. Leader: Stephen Harper, 46. Career politician from Calgary. Supported Iraq war, but will not send Canadian troops.
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Promises vote on whether to rescind recent law legalising gay marriage. Lukewarm on Kyoto agreement, but interested in joining a US anti-ballistic missile shield
Liberals Have 133 seats. 31 per cent in polls. Leader: Paul Martin, 67, above, former shipping magnate from Windsor, Ontario. Fiscal conservative. Environmentalist. Legalised gay marriage
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NDP (National Democratic Party) Has 18 seats. 17 per cent in polls. Leader: Jack Layton, 55, former city councillor from Toronto. Champions universal healthcare. Promises to increase child benefit and access to education
Bloc Quebecois Has 53 seats. 11 per cent in polls. Leader: Gilles Duceppe, 58, former trade-union negotiator. Left-leaning. Supports Quebec’s secession from Canada