9/11 opened door to a more polarized Canada
Before 9/11, the country’s Conservative movement was in disarray and the Canadian left had become a spent political force.
The end of the summer of 2001 found Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day living on borrowed time on the heels of a major caucus mutiny and former prime minister Joe Clark failing to breathe new life in the rival Progressive Conservative party.
Over its seven years in power, Jean Chrétien had successfully appropriated the major policies Preston Manning and the Reform Party had originally brought to Parliament Hill.
The Liberals were basking in the political credit they had earned by eliminating the deficit, putting a federal frame around future Quebec attempts to secede and cutting taxes.
Over on the left, the NDP was running hard just to hang on to an obscure next-to-last place in the House of Commons.
Finally in Quebec, the pendulum was swinging back to the federal Liberals for the first time in two decades.
Twenty-first century Canada seemed destined to belong to the Liberal party.
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center came tumbling down, the ground shifted from under the ruling party.
The Liberals, who had successfully straddled the left/right divide throughout the 1990s, were taken off stride by the events of 9/11.
Under more intense American pressure than any previous Canadian government had ever come under, they scrambled to adjust to an abruptly changed world order, sometimes dropping the civil rights ball in the process.
In the fall of 2001, a landmark Anti-Terrorism Act became law over a single parliamentary trimester. With the backing of the Conservative opposition, the Liberals used their majority to curtail debate.
It was also in those initial few months that the country was committed to an open-ended war in Afghanistan, a commitment twice expanded by successive Liberal prime ministers in no small part to make it easier to fend off pressing American invitations to join the Iraq fray and the U.S. missile defence program.