The Liberals are an obstacle to true progressive policies
Jamey Heath, National Post | July 16, 2015
Monty Python’s timeless take on progressives pits the lamentable People’s Front of Judea against the woeful Judean People’s Front, hurling insults at one another across an empty Roman coliseum. Those, sad to say, were the days.
Today, the centre-left sprouts ever more new organizations not to disagree with each other, but to say much the same thing. Each week, it seems, brings another activist group dedicated to dealing with economic unfairness, or a changing climate, or … fill-in-the-issue-here. Policy differences are slight, the main thrust always the same: Stephen Harper is a wicked, wicked conservative who took Canada and wrecked it.
Disagreeing with Harper is all well and good. But too often tales are spun about the kind of country he inherited, whose core values he has since allegedly botched. They are mostly untrue. Under Harper, we used fiscal stimulus during a downturn. Equal marriage and abortion are untouched. We’re also still an environmental laggard — as we always were — despite Elizabeth May saying we were a world leader before Harper. It’s piffle.
When people do comparison shop among the centre-left parties, the sky doesn’t fall. Life goes on for the left despite Trudeau’s slide to the bottom of the polls, likely greased in part by Liberal support for Harper’s Bill C-51.
And the longer he’s in office, the worse the national myth-making gets. A big reason why is that the English-Canadian elite can’t stomach Barack Obama being president at the exact moment we’re stuck with “him.” This American-envy explains why many Democratic politicos now work in the centre-left here, for political parties or supposedly non-partisan groups.
I say “non-partisan” only because that’s how many have come to label their often curdling anti-Tory venom. It’s an absurd description, but makes warped sense if you believe Canada was indeed a quasi-pacifist, ever-green utopia of egalitarianism before Harper turned it into a snowy Mississippi. And the more time passes, the more people pine for things that never were.
This sort of false nostalgia is especially convenient to Liberals, the party that ruled over that mythical land. So it’s no wonder that Liberals, above all, are so anxious to retain our sadly splintered party system, in place of the two-way debate that other Western democracies enjoy. To their credit, Canadian conservatives came to realize the folly of this some years ago, which is why they got their act together and created a common vehicle for elections.
Canadian progressives have yet to really try. Instead, since they can all agree that Democrats are good/Republicans are bad, they spend their time mimicking American debates about economic or racial equality, immigration or social issues, which rarely apply north of the border. Our national discussion is much more about language than race; east-west, not north-south. Plus, on the centre-left’s usual trump card — economic fairness — our party of the 1% isn’t the Conservatives: it’s the Liberals.
Still, American critiques of economic unfairness find echoes elsewhere, so as usual Liberals tried to appropriate the discussion to themselves. Last time they were out of office, the environment was the big new idea, so they glommed onto that. Now, it’s the widening gap between rich and poor. It’s such a big deal, Conservative-turned-Liberal MP Eve Adams said, that it drove her away from Harper, to help Justin Trudeau spark a U.S.-style class war.
The intellectual heft for this campaign, we’re told, is supplied by Toronto Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland, a frequent commentator in the U.S. who returned to Canada, ostensibly, to create a fairer economy. It’s obvious which party she’d pick south of the border, but less clear north of it. The issue had preoccupied the Democrats, with whom she was aligned, for some time, though New Democrats haven’t exactly been mute about it over the years.
The federal Liberals . . . delayed introducing basic social programs for decades after comparable countries, including the U.S., got theirs. In the Nineties, they frayed the social safety net, then spent the surplus on an orgy of tax cuts
tilted to the very well-to-do
The federal Liberals, by contrast, delayed introducing basic social programs for decades after comparable countries, including the U.S., got theirs. In the Nineties, they frayed the social safety net, then spent the surplus on an orgy of tax cuts tilted to the very well-to-do. Yet there she sits, one more voice in the Harper-hating choir, in a party whose most likely contribution in the coming election will be to keep him in power.
Which brings us back to the growing number of splinter groups working on federal issues, and whether two-sided debates can be made to work when there are up to five parties. May’s basic case is that they do — that beating *him* is easier the more bellicose and divided the opposition becomes.
Still, when people do comparison shop among the centre-left parties, the sky doesn’t fall. Life goes on for the left despite Trudeau’s slide to the bottom of the polls, likely greased in part by Liberal support for Harper’s Bill C-51.
The mystery is why, with two-sided debate already here, there isn’t a louder clamour for some sort of arrangement among the parties of the left to help it work. Formal co-operation or merger is off the table for now (for Trudeau, tellingly, so is a coalition), but fixing the divide amongst progressives needn’t wait for the Liberal party to agree. Especially with the NDP well ahead in Quebec, and the Liberals led by their lightest leader, well, ever.
Our long overdue realignment, rather, can be nudged along in places like Freeland’s Toronto backyard, by the steady erosion of support for the main structural obstacle — the Liberal Party of Canada — to the creation of a single national voice for progressives. That won’t be music to many Liberals’ ears, but it should resonate with others who are tired of sounding like a comedy skit.
National Post
Jamey Heath is senior strategist at KTG Public Affairs and was former research and communications director for the NDP.
