With all the opposition hand wringing and slightly forced indignation over the Guergis affair (sleazy politicians, like the poor, are always with us – so what’s the rumpus?) it was a pleasure last week to read Andrew Coyne’s thoughtful piece in Maclean’s on the long term misfortunes of the Liberal Party (the title is a dead give away: The End of the Liberal Empire). Put briefly, Coyne’s argument comes to this: lacking a constituency anywhere outside of Toronto, Montreal and Atlantic Canada, and lacking animating political principles, the Liberal Party is reduced to scandal mongering (see: Afghan detainees and political sleaze) and promising each other patronage jobs if they somehow fluke out a minority government after the next election (that last bit is my take, not Coyne’s).
Coyne’s prescription for what ails the Grits is to confront the hard choices facing the country rather than kicking those issues down the road a la Harper and his band of poll-driven “tough-on-crime” yes men and women. Coyne further suggests that instead of big government ambition, which in the deficit era is impossible anyway, the Liberals turn themselves into:
• The party of democratic reform. How we nominate candidates, how we choose leaders, how we elect members, how Parliament functions—there’s clearly lots of work to do here. This used to be a Conservative issue. Today, not so much.
• The party of individual rights. In 2006, Paul Martin proposed removing the notwithstanding clause from the Constitution. Less ambitiously, Liberals could propose shoring up our national commitment to freedom of expression, by abolishing the ban on hate speech (the “incitement to violence” provision is surely enough) and clipping the human rights commissions’ wings.
• The party of consumers. Every economist will tell you: protectionism is a conspiracy against consumers, notably our egregious tariffs on agricultural imports. More competition, domestic or foreign, is the best way to bring prices down, and productivity up.
• The party of taxpayers. Former Liberal MP Dennis Mills used to campaign vigorously for the flat tax, complete with postcard-sized tax form. A corollary would be reform of EI and social assistance, along the lines recommended by the impeccably Liberal Macdonald commission: a simplified, streamlined universal income guarantee.
• The party of pensioners. The Quebec Caisse de dépôt’s ill-fated plunge into asset-backed commercial paper shows the perils of trusting everyone’s pension savings to one big investment fund. Why wait for some similar misfortune to overtake the CPP? Liberals are talking now of adding a supplementary individual savings plan on top of the CPP, as a way of addressing pension shortfalls. Why not reverse-engineer the CPP on the same lines, breaking it up into individually owned plans? Oh, and one more:
• The party of the environment. Yes, that means a carbon tax. It’s a good idea, the only way Canada is ever going to come close to meeting its carbon emissions targets, and everyone knows it. Was it the carbon tax, as myth holds, that doomed the Liberals in the last election? Or was it because it was poorly designed and poorly presented? A better plan, better presented — a real “tax shift,” as implemented by Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government in B.C. — might be a winner.
And this, I’m afraid is where we part ways. Andrew Coyne wants to turn the Liberals into the sort of Tories he’d like to see running the country. Coyne is motivated by small c-conservative ideology to suggest that the state should get out of the way and let the market decide. And make no mistake, at various times that notion has had authentic political appeal. Just not now. In his New York Times review of David Remnick’s new book about Obama, The Bridge, Garry Wills writes: “Remnick takes as the keynote of his book a saying by Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights hero of the Selma march: 'Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.'"
There you have it. The reason Obama is the most successful politician since Ronald Reagan and the reason he’ll win four more years in a walk is that he continuously makes his candidacy about something bigger than “politics.” He associates himself with ideas that transcend the daily mess. Coyne admits in his piece that Liberals succeeded in the past by stealing NDP ideas and making thereby making them politically viable. “In 1960, the intellectual winds were blowing the party’s way. The solutions it proposed — public health care, public pensions, a vast expansion of the welfare state — were on the leading edge of contemporary thinking.”
What the Grits desperately need then is to find a way of connecting with Canadians in a manner that suggests a similarly updated awareness of contemporary concerns. Dare I say it yet again: coalition redux!
