The Great Big Liberal in the Sky

Michael Coren tells us about how Stephane Dion is using God to win votes. Blue Like You covered this nicely so I won’t go too much into the idiocy of this strategy. I would instead like to bring your attention to one particular portion of Mr. Coren’s article;

"You see, the Catholics can be relied on to vote Liberal, always, but the Protestants much less so," [Dion] explained.

I laughed out loud when I saw this. There was truth to this once upon a time but I sincerely doubt that it’s true now.

The Liberal Party and the Catholic Church have a long and not always easy history. It is also a history that can be divided between Ontario and Quebec. In Quebec the Catholic Church began by being at war with the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party was a descendent of the Rouge, who was militantly anti-clerical. Bishops in Quebec would routinely tell their flock that they would not receive the sacrament if they voted for the God-hating Liberals.

In Ontario the reverse was true. The Conservative Party was dominated, to a large extent, by Toronto’s Orange Order. The Orange Order was an anti-Catholic monarchist coalition of Protestants. The reason for their hatred is long and complicated and also has very little to do with Canada, so I’ll skip it. It is enough to say that riots would often break out between Orange members and the Catholic population of Toronto (in particular the Irish). This meant that the Catholic priesthood strongly supported the Liberal Party.

After the hanging of Louis Riel the Quebec clergy went with the masses and supported the federal Liberals. They had no choice really. The Conservatives, provincially and federally, were dead in Quebec for a generation.

So a pattern became clear in Canadian party politics. If you were Catholic you would vote Liberal and Protestants vote Conservative. This wasn’t a perfect rule, social ‘science’ has never created a ‘rule’ that wasn’t also a contradiction. For example the Tory leader John Thompson was a Catholic convert, though this kept him from being leader for several years.

It’s not clear when this pattern changed. I doubt that there is one single event that did it. Likely it came with the decline of the importance of religion in Canadian life. The fall of the Orange Lodge also must have contributed to the shift. The Quite Revolution was for sure a huge factor in changing of voting patterns.

The truth is that religious domination no longer matters as a reason to vote for a particular party. Religion could make a difference in someone’s values bundle, but their vote would then be about policy and not an automatic tribal reaction.

The real question is, “What Universe is Dion living in?” or rather, “What time period is Dion living in?”