As the Liberal Party wilted in this year's federal election, and voters abandoned it in historic numbers, many non-Conservatives turned their minds to the challenge of "uniting the left" in Canada.
The idea, at its most basic, is this: When you add up the votes cast for the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens last month, you get more than 51 per cent of the electorate — a majority easily swamping the paltry 38 per cent for the Tories. Throw in the Bloc Québécois, and you reach an impressive 61 per cent.
Rick Salutin, in his Globe and Mail column, saw these facts as evidence of a continuing "social democratic bent" among the large majority of Canadians, unshaken by the two successive victories of Stephen Harper's Conservatives. The split among the four opposition parties, in this formulation, is frustrating the incipient left-of-centre majority. And it is up to those parties to fix this.
This argument has some appeal for those who don't like the Conservatives, and want to comfort themselves that most of their compatriots don't like them either. The former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy has used it to urge a parliamentary coalition of the opposition parties, at least an informal one. That would makes sense on some economic, social, and environmental issues that sharply divide the Conservatives from all the opposition parties.
But "uniting the left" is not a very useful organizing principle for reviving the fortunes of the Liberals. It is built on a misapplied analogy with the Conservatives' success in "uniting the right," mistaken assumptions about Canadian public opinion and a misreading of where former Liberal supporters have gone.
First of all, it was an ideological crisis on the right that shattered the mighty Progressive Conservative majority forged by Brian Mulroney in the 1990s. Reformers led by Preston Manning could not stomach the Mulroney government's apostasy on deficits, subsidies, social programs and regulation, or its many concessions to Quebec nationalism. And the Reform Party, along with the Bloc Québécois, reduced the PCs to rubble.
The Liberals, however, were not humbled by an ideological crisis as they tumbled from power in their turn. In fact, it may be strange to be talking at all about the Liberals as a party of the left, rather than a party that sometimes plays one on TV.
In 1993, when the Liberals defeated the Conservatives, they ran on a platform of reducing unemployment, changing NAFTA, replacing the GST, introducing a national system of daycare, and greatly increasing immigration. To their enormous good fortune, unemployment began to fall before they had time to bring down their first budget: nothing to do with their policies, in other words. None of the rest happened.
Instead, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin embarked on a decade-long attack on deficits and debt that went far beyond the Liberal campaign commitment to reduce the deficit to 3 per cent of GDP. For years this meant drastic cuts to social programs, among other things. This may have been good public policy, as many people think. But it was also an example of something that the party's critics have long complained about: the Liberals running campaigns from the left, then governing from the right.
A more generous view might be that the Liberal Party has liberal inclinations but not a liberal ideology, and that the absence of an important ideological strain distinguishes it from parties of both left and right.
Some, including me, find the Liberals' tendency to tack this way and that, often on fundamental issues, morally unsettling. But that's different from saying it doesn't work; it often does, because the overarching promise the Liberals make to Canadians at election time is actually not about left or right but about delivering sound and pragmatic government. Competence has been the core of the Liberal brand, wherever the political winds have blown their policies.
