Political Canada as we knew it is dead.
The federal general election of Oct. 21 will be its funeral. Tuesday, Oct. 22 will be the first day of the new Canada.
The newly elected Parliament will have the first chance to shape it.
The election campaign was unimpressive and the leaders were uninspiring.
The result, however, is that the political way of the late 20th century has been replaced by a new order.
Canada is embarking on its greatest political gamble since the end of the Second World War.
The left-versus-right of a three-party system that took care of Quebec and Ontario first and the rest of us as an afterthought, is gone.
That political Canada came into being in the 1960s when Prime Minster Lester Pearson navigated his minority government for five years in an unruly alliance with the NDP.
It ended in 2013 when Pearson’s Liberal Party elected a lightweight leader that they thought, to borrow a boxing metaphor, was the great white hope who hasn’t held his own against the changing tides.
The ballot question this year was who will lead the new Canada.
Now at stake is the shape the leaders will give to it for the 21st century.
They can shape the nation’s future deliberately.
Or, if they ignore the opportunity, it will happen by default as the sum of the power struggles of the regions and the provincial premiers, the little Caesars.
What political values will guide us? What public principles will we live by? To what national destiny will we aspire?
The new Canada is three times as large as the old Canada of which I am a child, 37.5 million people now versus 12.5 million in 1947 when I was born.
Political Canada is divided between the old and the new, between the boomers and the millennials, and the millennials hold the balance of power.
The boomers think in terms of political left and right. For boomers, debts and deficits are in the budgets.
Boomers expect politicians to prevaricate and backpedal.
The millennials think in terms of right and wrong. Debts and deficits are used to describe social and moral issues.
Millennials gamble on the future, not on the status quo and tradition. Millennials don't accept political rhetoric followed by excuses.
They are tolerant of choices, like hijab, and the LGBTQ rainbow.
Sure, a minority are intolerant and violent -- like skinheads and racists.
But they do not do very much except to show, by contrast, the value of things like the climate change extinction rebellion.
I am a boomer from the old political Canada, born 25 months after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 11 months before Prime Minster Mackenzie King resigned after 30 years as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
My generation is now politically obsolete. The gamble with the new Canada belongs to the next generation who are putting up the stakes.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
