Why All Progressive-Minded Canadians Should Celebrate Obama’s Victory

A Commentary by Doug Draper

The late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau once had this to say about Canada’s relationship with our neighbours to the south. – “Living next to the United States,” he said, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even tempered is the beast, … one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Obama campaign office at work in Buffalo, New York. Photo by Doug Draper

Given the close economic and cultural ties Canada continues to have with the United States, there is no reason to believe that Trudeau’s observation is any less relevant today than it was 30 or 40 years ago. And with that in mind, it continues to matter a great deal to the interests of Canadians (whether some of us care to believe it or not) who Americans elect as their president and commander –in-chief.

This November 6 presidential election, which saw U.S. President Barack Obama thread the needle to wind a second term in what was one of the tightest races for the White House in recent American history, held a good deal at stake for Canadians and Americans alike. For progressives in both countries and for everyone else among us who want to see us move forward with environmental protection and addressing the causes and impacts of climate change; who want to see a continued shift away from our dependence on coal and oil and to toward more sustainable, renewable sources of energy; who want to see us  move toward more sustainable transportation systems; who want to see us spend less on military ventures and more on educating our young people; and who want to ensure work toward the continued delivery of health care and other public services in ways that best serve those who need them at an affordable cost, a win by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would have been a disaster.

Romney, who made it clear throughout the presidential primaries that he would gut the role of government in the areas mentioned above, while at the same time offering more tax cuts to an upper echelon of corporate types on an already disproven promise that they will create more and better paying jobs, would surely have been a perfect soul mate for Canada’s neo-conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper and his caucus, among them former Ontario premier Mike Harris lieutenants Jim Flaherty and Tony Clement who never saw a program for the public gut they weren’t prepared to gut, would latch on to this Romney agenda like a sea lamprey sucking the life fluids out of a lake trout. They would use Romney’s cutting and gutting agenda to argue that Canada has to do the same thing, even if it means eliminating the minimum wage and decimating what is left of our publicly-owned and operated, universal health care system, if it wants to remain competitive with our neighbours to the south in the global economy.

So as much as I have shared the disappointment many others have felt over how slowly Obama has moved toward more progressive goals during his first term, at least he has served as an inhibitor on Harper and his fellow neo-cons up to this point. Everything up to and including a rapid approval of the controversial Keystone pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to refinery factories in Texas has at least been placed on hold until tighter public and environmental protection measures are put in place under a U.S. administration led by Barack Obama. Romney made it clear that if he were in charge, that pipeline would be under construction now and ‘Obamacare’ or what stands for the closest thing Americans have ever had to a universal health care system would be repealed. And that would just be the beginning of taking his country and possibly ours back to a time when a woman’s place was at home washing the laundry and people of colour sat at the back of the bus.

So thank God Obama won a second term and let’s hope he uses it – knowing he never has to stand for re-election again – to push through progressive programs on energy, addressing climate change and other issues that will make for a better, more prosperous life in this 21^st century for our children, for our grandchildren, and for generations to come.

I have a strong feeling that this is one guy who would want very much to leave a legacy like that.

(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. PLEASE NOTE that NAL only posts comments from individuals who also share their first and last names.)