The Liberal Paradox

Tom Walkom writes this morning that the public celebration of Jean Chretien's 80th birthday underscores the paradox which is the Liberal Party:

The Liberals are a paradox. They build institutions and then demolish them. They insist they walk the middle line even when they don’t.

They pride themselves on their crafty pragmatism. But they can be fooled time and time again by their own PR.

Consider what happened during Chretien's fifty years in politics:

He was lauded for being part of the Liberal government that, 50 years ago, worked to build and expand the great social programs of the 20th century. These included federally funded welfare, medicare and what is now called employment insurance.

Then he was lauded for decimating these same social programs when, as prime minister during the 1990s, he slashed spending in order to eliminate the federal deficit.

Which raises the question, what do the Liberals stand for? The answer seems to be that depends. Walkom recognizes that the eighties were a good time for conservatives:

He governed during a time when the right was in ascendency worldwide. And like any successful politician, he tried to balance interests — including his own.

But, when all is said and done, Chretien's career should serve as a cautionary tale. It's a story that Justin Trudeau  -- who doesn't seem to stand for much -- should read and re-read.

Another King?

Last Friday, in The Globe and Mail, Canadian historian Michael Bliss mused that Stephen Harper might be on the cusp of becoming another William Lyon MacKenzie King. It was King -- Canada's longest serving prime Minister -- who established the Liberals as Canada's "natural governing party." It was King, too, who had absolutely no political scrupples. "Sooner or later," Bliss wrote, "the contempt that many in our chattering classes still seem to feel for the Conservatives in general and Mr. Harper in particular is going to begin to give way to the realization that he is on the verge of becoming the next Mackenzie King."

Perhaps. Bliss conceded that -- like King -- Harper is "neither colourful nor lovable." But Bliss's central thrust, that "Conservatives hold the political centre so thoroughly that Liberals have no idea whether to attack the government from the right . . . or from the left . . ." is dubious. He is right, however, when he claims that "the Liberal Party is floundering in uncertainty and disunity."

Canadians are far from certain that Harper is a centrist. I suspect that a majority of them would agree with W.E. Belliveau that Harper's "personal ideology remains far from the centre. His core beliefs are right wing and often anti-social." No, Belliveau concludes, Harper is a chameleon: "A chameleon can change colours at a drop of a hat. A chameleon is not a leader. A chameleon is a survivor, and that's the message of Mr. Harper's new found centre status." If one requires proof, one need look no further than his recent performance at the National Arts Centre, before an audience of black tie patrons of the arts who -- during the last election -- he dismissed as financial parasites.

Belliveau is on to something. But, however valid his analysis might be, it does not let the Liberals off the hook. They are in danger of reliving the fate of King's earnest but naive opponent, Arthur Meighen, who -- Bliss correctly noted -- "was consigned to the dustbin of history, where he wrote memoirs insisting that he had always been right."

When the Liberals chose Ignatieff, they chose a man of ideas who had absolutely no political experience. That lack of experience was undercored last week in the foolishness over the Liberal nomination in Outremont. More importantly, the party is still waiting for a policy conference, which is now scheduled for early next year. It would have been better to have had the conference sooner rather than later; and it would have been better to support the government on an issue by issue basis until the conference. Having sorted out its platform, the party would then be in a better position to withdraw its support wholesale.

Liberals' frustration boiled over this summer when they realized that to support Mr. Harper is to ride on the back of the tiger. He lives for the thrill of devouring his opponents. Anyone who believes he does anything for altrustic reasons -- even performing with Yo Yo Ma at the National Arts Centre -- is deluded.

"What?" Comes Before "Who?"

Now that Frank McKenna, John Manley, Gerard Kennedy and Martha Hall Findlay have left the Liberal leadership open to either Dominic Leblanc, Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae, some may conclude that life in the party will be more of the same. But the small coterie of leadership candidates allows the party to do what it should have done after its previous defeat. The prime directive -- for the moment -- is not to decide who will stand for the party, but to determine what the party will stand for.

This is not the first time the Liberals have been in this spot. After the Diefenbaker Progressive Conservatives sent the Liberals packing in 1957, the party held an historic policy conference in Kingston. Out of that conference came the document, "New Statements of Liberal Policy." As Tom Kent -- who was at that conference and who later became a senior advisor to Lester Pearson -- wrote in The Globe and Mail, the conference "set the party's direction through the years of gathering membership and onto the programs implemented by the Pearson government." Those programs included the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare and (although many have forgotten the cantankerous debate which surrounded it) the adoption of a distinctly Canadian flag.

The Kingston Conference concentrated on the future and thoroughly examined -- painful though it was -- why Canada's "natural governing party" had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. And it started, not from the proposition that the people were stupid, but from the realization that the world had changed.

The global financial crisis of the last year and the election of Barack Obama in the United States has, indeed, confirmed that -- once again -- the world has changed. Kent told his readers that it is time for the Liberals to engage again in such a far reaching rethink -- and he sketched out the general parameters of such an exercise: "In my view, the dominant aim should be to enable all families to nurture their youth in health, with early care and learning, and with the stimulating opportunities that can make good lives possible in the contemporary economy."

Last week, Deborah Coyne -- a long time Liberal activist -- tried to flesh out that vision. "National action -- from food safety to clean air and water, to removing toxins in our environment -- has, at best, been anemic, incoherent and after the fact. At worst, it has placed the public in jeopardy. Medicare is less and less a national program and more and more an uneven patchwork of medically required services across provinces with tragic consequences, as in the case of cancer pathology in Newfoundland. Our physical infrastructure is dangerously decayed and public transit is inadequate everywhere. Inequality of wealth and income among Canadians is increasing alarmingly. Even in the international arena, our national impact is weak and blurred as provinces multiply their independent initiatives abroad."

These effects are the naturally occurring consequences of neo-conservative policies, not just of the Harper government, but of previous Liberal governments. What Canada needs, Coyne writes, is a party "that gives us a sense of national purpose and pride, and sees national government as an instrument of the people, not as a business to be downsized."

The renewal which Liberals seek can only be accomplished from the bottom up. Before it meets in Vancouver next May, the party needs another Kingston Conference to set policy and to organize the grassroots. This is not to say that choosing a leader will be mere frosting on the cake. Stephane Dion's recent showing proves that being a good and decent man is not enough. The party needs an extraordinary leader. But before it chooses one, it needs an extraordinary platform.

Woe to the Witless

Michael Ignatieff sent the image makers of his party into fits of apoplexy last week, during the annual gathering of the Liberal caucus, which is held every year before the fall session of Parliament. It seems that the entire caucus -- meeting in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland -- boarded a ship, named the Atlantic Puffin, to do a little whale watching. Unfortunately, the whales refused to put in an appearance. When a reporter expressed his disappointment at not seeing any whales, Ignatieff tried to see the bright side of things. He took a couple of minutes to wax rhapsodic -- tongue in cheek -- about the bird which gave the boat its name.

"The puffin is a noble bird," said Ignatieff, "because it has good family values. They stay together for thirty years. I'm not kidding. They lay one egg and they put their excrement in one place. They hide their excrement. . . . They flap their wings very hard and they work like hell. This seems to me a symbol of what a party should be."

The strategists in the party were horrified. They immediately had visions of Conservative attack ads, featuring clips of Ignatieff commenting on the virtues of hiding one's excrement. Given past ads which the Harper government has run against Stephan Dion, they were not conjuring up imaginary chimeras. But sometimes the best way to deal with a bully is to laugh at him.

And, as Susan Delacourt wrote in Saturday's edition of The Toronto Star, Mr. Dion seems incapable of using humour in his defense or in a counterattack.. He "isn't able to arouse crowds to anything but polite laughter," she wrote, " and usually that's a line that has been written for him." As for the Prime Minister, Delacourt noted that, before he was elected to the cat bird seat, he was known to do "good spirited impersonations of Liberal cabinet ministers and some gentle pokes at his own party's foibles." But,"Harper's idea of a joke now is to say something mean or dismissive about his opponents. He also thinks it's funny to make a joke about the media almost every time he appears at a press conference." She concluded that "humour seems to have gone out of fashion in Harper's Ottawa."

The editors of The Globe and Mail have suggested that the Prime Minister learn to "lighten up." But The Globe's own Jeffrey Simpson has noted that among the many adjectives -- like "sober, serious, self assured, intelligent, controlling, decisive, cold, formal and, sometimes, imperious" -- which accurately describe the prime minister -- "humourous" is not one of them. "No politician who has a clothing and makeup adviser, as Mr. Harper does," writes Simpson, "will ever 'lighten up.'" So it would appear that, while both leaders of Canada's governing parties are "intelligent" (in an academic sense) neither has much of a sense of humour. That's a pity.

Over the weekend, my wife, our youngest son and I visited Sir John A. MacDonald's former residence in Kingston, Ontario. MacDonald was Canada's first prime minister and, as my son commented -- laughing as he did so, "Canada's most famous drunk." But he was also renowned for his sense of humour. My favourite MacDonald story is about the day MacDonald encountered one of his political rivals on a narrow sidewalk which both were trying to navigate. "I will not yield to a liar and a drunk!" huffed his opponent. MacDonald -- stepping off the sidewalk -- replied, "But I will!"

MacDonald's time was much like our own. Slander was standard political practice; and liquor fuelled most political discussions. But with his supporters and his rivals he managed to build a country which -- by land mass at least -- is the second largest in the world. He knew how to use humour to dissolve tension and outrage. Today we have a surplus of both. What we need is more humour.