Canada’s religious right and the shifting political landscape

Even if Harper has proved less of a torch-bearer than social and religious conservatives dreamed back in 2006 when they first helped boost him to power, he remains their main man—one who has dispensed incremental policy shifts and thousands of patronage plums with a mixture of caution and stealth that is gradually transforming some of the country’s leading institutions, including its public service and its courts.
Some may find the pace frustrating, but they’re secure in the knowledge that Harper needs them and never more so than when he’s angling for yet another term. The number of right-leaning Christians in Canada may not be as high as those who have commandeered the Republican party in the U.S., but they’re as vital to Conservative Party fortunes as those economic conservatives who make up the other half of Harper’s core constituency. Pollster Andrew Grenville of Angus Reid Public Opinion has already demonstrated how devout English-speaking Catholics and conservative Protestants (by which he largely means evangelicals) came together in a definitive new block of support for the Conservatives that helped get Harper elected in 2006. As I outlined in The Armageddon Factor, by the time the 2008 election rolled around, that block had solidified into a definable Canadian religious right.

Now, in a new pre-election poll first reported by the Vancouver Sun’s Douglas Todd, Grenville has found that more than half of devout mass-going Catholics and two-thirds of church-going Protestants say they intend to cast their votes for the Conservative Party on May 2nd. The gelling of such conservative Christian support around Harper comes at the expense of the Liberals, and for Todd, that drift means one thing: “Canadians are experiencing increasing political polarization over the Christian faith,” he writes, “in somewhat the same way religion splits U.S. Republicans from Democrats.”

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