Chrystia Freeland should
be a fabulous catch for the upcoming federal by-election in Toronto. This time,
Canada’s Liberal Party—the shoppers' party—has landed a young, public
intellectual with a growing reputation
in Washington, New York, and London. Why would a cosmopolitan problem-solver,
at the height of her career, want to represent old Rosedale as a member of the
oldest Liberal machine in the Western World? To my mind, that’s the question.
To pundits, however, and,
apparently, to Freeland this morning, the question now is whether she can talk
enthusiastically as a proud Canadian.
Blogging in Maclean’s Magazine, Paul Wells spots
trouble in this paragraph Freeland penned just last week in reviewing Obama’s
speech on the economy:
“Obama pointed to some of the familiar political
drivers of this shift — weaker unions and tax cuts at the top. But, to his credit,
he also noted the structural factors — in particular, technological change and
globalization — that have helped hollow out the middle class. These are the
heart of the problem, because they are both largely positive and hard to
change. We can’t stop them, and most of us don’t want to — but we surely do
want to reverse their devastating consequences for the middle class.”
The
problem, clearly, isn’t partisan. Indeed, at its heart are good things worth
preserving: technology and globalization. Is Freeland too realistic, too
capitalistic, and too committed to the liberal economic values of the past? No.
Of course not.
Rather,
Freeland used: “we” and “us” when referring to the economic challenge of our
time. How many times has she done this before? Will this issue carry along on
hundreds of little small legs?
Michael
Ignatieff, the last failed Liberal import, got in trouble using the term “we”
when he was addressing Americans for unique and arguable reasons.
He’d
made a living as a writer singing the virtues of Canadian nationalism and
Canada’s separateness from the US. Most important, he used “we” to promote
American jingoism and war in Iraq. There was no way to pretend that he was
trying to or even thinking about Canadians when he waved the flag of aggressive
American Exceptionalism.
Conversely,
there was nothing in what Freeland expressed that was exclusively American.
Surely, a majority of voters in Rosedale would agree that what she said applies
to Canada’s high wage economy as well. Furthermore, Canadians increasingly
accept that they also have a huge stake in a balanced US economic
recovery.
It’s
disappointing, therefore, to read Freeland’s newborn nationalism in her op-ed
piece The path leading to
middle-class Prosperity in this morning’s Globe and Mail:
“At
a time when the rest of the world is struggling to live with one of the human
consequences of globalization – mass immigration – Canada is a model for how to
make a multicultural, multilingual community really work. We can do the same
when it comes to ensuring middle class prosperity in the 21st century. Indeed,
we are much better at this than the United States, where income inequality has
become an economically and socially devastating chasm. We can’t let that happen
to us.”
There’s a smugness and
simplicity in that statement, and it belies the energy, passion, and optimism that
she has displayed in the past about the US and the West’s ability to restore
shared prosperity.
Freeland doesn’t have to
pander to anti-Americans to be a successful Canadian politician in a renewed
North American economy.
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