The extreme views of Stockwell Day

Gloria Steinem once quipped that she was going to ask for political asylum in Canada. Michael Moore too talks about how much more progressive is Canada than the U.S. And up until recently, they have been right. In the long shadow cast by free trade and globalization, Canada is getting more and more Americanized. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rise of a right- wing party that deeply resembles the Republicans and that openly promotes making Canada more like the U.S.

This ultra right-wing party, formerly the Reform Party, now called the Canadian Alliance is the Official Opposition in Canada's Parliament. Their newly elected leader makes Newt Gingrich look progressive. Stockwell Day is a fundamentalist Christian with a history in the government of the province of Alberta of fighting abortion and gay rights.

In 1988, Stockwell Day said granting greater access to abortion would prompt a rise in child abuse. “The thinking is,” he said, “if you can cut a child to pieces or burn them alive with salt solution while they're still in the womb, what's wrong with knocking them around a little when they're outside the womb.”

He told the Ottawa Citizen: “I do believe life begins at conception. The very first time I ran for election, I took out an editorial in the local newspaper and said 'look I am a democrat. (But) on this issue, because I see it as a human rights issue, if you wanted me to vote to promote that I wouldn't be able to do that.”

Anti-abortion groups who played a major role in organizing support for his leadership campaign told the Vancouver Sun that they wouldn't expect abortion to be banned under a Stockwell Day government, at least not right away. They expect that the issue would once again come to the forefront and that Day would work, as he did in Alberta, to end funding for abortion services by pronouncing them medically unnecessary.

Of course the hopes of the anti-abortion groups don't fit very well with Day's radical decentralist positions. Neither do the hopes of religious minorities that Day will support public funding for religious schools. Nevertheless on CFRB radio in Toronto, an orthodox Jew, fundamentalist Moslem and a Mormon all called to say that Day had told their communities that he would support public funding of private religious schools. Not even the most centralist Canadian Prime Minister in history has interfered with primary education, which is provincial jurisdiction, yet Day promises to do so.

Day fiercely supports the rights of religious schools to teach whatever they want and to hire whomever they want. He told Alberta Report in 1984, “Standards of education are not set by government but by God, the Bible, the home and the school.”

On gay rights, he says he supports the Liberal position against gay marriage. But it was Day who tried to get his government in invoke the notwithstanding clause to overturn the Supreme Court decision writing protection of gays in the human rights code.

I was in the studio when BC talk show host Rafe Mair questioned Day about his views on gay rights at the beginning of his campaign for the Alliance leadership. After trying to dodge a series of hard questions, Day finally explained that he felt similarly when a constituent asked him to make bigamy legal.

“I told him, said Day, “ if you want to live with two women, that's your choice but we cannot make it legal.”

“Are you actually suggesting that a same sex relationship is the same as bigamy?” asked Mair incredulously.

Stockwell Day is a deeply conservative man reflecting views similar to the Moral Majority in the United States.

Day is trying to quietly shelve his views under the pressure of the desire for political power in a country where more than 80 percent are pro-choice and a significant majority support gay rights but that's not what he's done in Alberta. At the very least his election will give new voice and energy to the anti-feminist, anti-gay, fundamentalist religious forces who have been sidelined politically in the 1990's.

His fiscal policies are just as right-wing as his social policies. He supports a flat tax and radical decentralization of power, especially over social programmes to the provinces. He is raking money hand over fist from Canada's corporate elite which had refused to fund his predecessor, Preston Manning.

Day is being handled by very slick operators and he himself is both telegenic and street smart. His television performance is reminiscent of Ronald Regan. The corporate media in Canada, at first quite hostile to Day, has now taken a shine to him as the new kid on the block. With a Liberal government that is starting to look stale and arrogant in power and a social democratic party stuck at 10% in the polls, there is a real fear that if Day succeeds in putting his extreme social conservative views in the closet, he has a chance at significant electoral gains.

There is one silver lining in the cloud of Stockwell Day's leadership bid. Having such a strong opponent of women's and gay rights in the position of leader of the official opposition might just remobilise a women's movement that has lacked a central focus for while. It might also draw the attention of some of those young who are taking to the streets to fight globalization to what's happening in party politics right here at home.