Liberal Party’s infatuation with American power politics

Trivia hunter alert: Next year’s Canadian election will be fought on the 50th anniversary of George Grant’s futile attack on Canadian Liberalism’s then-unbounded awe of American power and technique.

In 1965, Lament for a Nation ridiculed the country’s solemn Liberal leadership as philistines, with adolescent arms outstretched in love. Events and opportunities such as Watergate, the Tea Party, and the Iraq wars, not Grant’s scolding, however, put that love on ice.

Justin Trudeau’s father and every Liberal leader since have taken care to appear to never give Washington the benefit of the doubt. In addition, they conceived within their own intellectual circles a new nationalism that emphasized Canada’s worldliness, its multilateral associations, and not its North American alliance. They never missed a chance to display proper distance from and concern for the vitality of American governance. 

Liberals, in fact, designed highly effective election campaigns against Conservatives who could be suspected of being too influenced by Ronald Reagan’s charm, too optimistic about America’s future, or brainwashed by every wave of American rightwing extremism.

Last weekend’s Liberal policy convention and Justin Trudeau’s formal policy address, however, signaled an empathic return to their earlier passion: a heartfelt concern for America’s respect for us and a less-than-pure-hearted confidence that Harper’s problems with Obama can be exploited electorally.

Less noteworthy was their unselfconscious recruitment of American political and intellectual stars. Lawrence Summers is as appealing to Canadian conservatives as he is to liberal audiences, and Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, didn’t offer ideas on campaign tactics that winning US consultants aren’t already being paid to sell to audiences in other foreign democracies.

The most striking display of their reawakened American infatuation was the utterance of and audience response to two Ottawa-Gothic assertions by Trudeau:

“It is a fundamental economic responsibility for the Prime Minister of Canada to help get our resources to global markets. More and more, the way to do that is with a robust environmental policy that gives assurances to our trading partners that those resources are being developed responsibly.”

Analyst and author Paul Wells singularly noted that these statements received an exceptionally enthusiastic standing ovation.

Audiences of Canada’s "natural governing" party, of course, admire qualified sentences and are easily excited by expressions of concern for the good regard of governors elsewhere. Still, Trudeau and his audience last Saturday weren’t thinking about polluters in Beijing or inconsequential bureaucrats in shrinking European resource markets.

They’re convinced that as prime minister, Justin Trudeau would better impress Barack Obama and his administration than Stephen Harper. Also, they’re likely sure that the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline would grievously hurt Harper, especially in the growing affluent West that he absolutely must sweep to get re-elected. 

(This issue, for Liberals, unfortunately, has nothing to do with political integration; it’s strictly about sophisticated head-off government relations — the chemistry of two capitals, not the common qualities of their citizens.)

These new Liberal calculations may turn to dust if, eventually, Obama decides to go with the pro-pipeline majorities in Washington’s Republican and Democratic caucuses. Nevertheless, what’s historically interesting is the now-palpable eagerness of Liberals to attack Harper for not being cool in Obama’s bunker in Washington.

They seem sure that “standing up for Canada” with this President is counterproductive, unsophisticated, and embarrassing.

Is it inconceivable that Harper could turn and do to Justin Trudeau what Jean Chrétien did to Progressive Conservatives in the '90s?

Could, 50 years later, the least red Tory conservative since Lament for a Nation suffer at the fate of Grant’s doomed hero: John G. Diefenbaker?

Can those Trudeau Liberals just keep rewriting the rules?

Embracing China as the next American Empire

In the last paragraph of Lament for a Nation, 1965, George Grant sums up his contempt for the elites that would sell Canada out to the dazzling American juggernaut. He concentrated his fire on their vapid insistence that what’s next must be for the better.

“Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if the be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has ben told that process is not all. ‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.’”

(Virgi, Aeneid, Book V1: “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”)

Grant believed that American liberalism, in practice, was inferior to the British conservative ideals that young men of his time mimicked in Upper Canada and English-speaking Montreal. He was too hard on America; it’s still the essential champion of Western conservative and liberal values. 

Nevertheless, if Grant was alive today, imagine the wonderfully cruel things he would say about today’s leaders who argue that we have the finesse, the leverage, and the treasure to turn China into Canada’s 21st-century elixir.

Certainly, he’d feast on yesterday’s National Post. There, conveniently on one page, was a position paper by leadership candidate Justin Trudeau and a London speech by Vice-Chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Jim Prentice—both endorsing a $15-billion acquisition of a private Canadian energy company by CNOOC, an energy giant owned almost entirely by the Government of China.

Prentice asserted the commercial banking half and Trudeau asserted the can-do government half. Together, these two strategic thinkers took a very tricky issue about how to do business with a giant company owned by a superpower operating outside of Canada’s alliances and valves, and made the issue bigger and simpler at the same time.

Being squeamish about China is silly, even dangerous; after all, it’s the future.

Trudeau declared, without any elaboration, that the CNOOC offer is good for Canada because it’s a “foreign investment” and that “foreign investment raises productivity, and hence the living standards of Canadian families.”

Having logically disposed of the need for the foreign investment "net benefits" test, originally introduced by his father, he enthused that relations with the world’s second-biggest economy should be deepened, not tested, certainly, nor feared.

“We deceive ourselves by thinking that trade with Asia can be squeezed into the 20th-century mold. China, for one, sets its own rules and will continue to do so because it can. China has a game plan. There is nothing inherently sinister about that. They have needs and the world has resources to meet those needs. We Canadians have more of those resources — and therefore more leverage — than any nation on Earth.”

Trudeau writes like one of those WestPoint generals that knows how to seduce politicians into undertaking terrible risks: above all, sound incredibly tough.

Prentice doesn’t bother to sound tough. Instead, he finds comfort in the semantic possibilities of getting SOEs to sign protocols to promise to act like ordinary commercial business. He can’t resist, however, warning his old boss, Stephen Harper, that turning down CNOOC would cause offense.

“The fundamental point is that the Canadian government should not be – and, in my view, won’t be – concerned about the so-called “ethnicity of money.” We can’t and shouldn’t try to force China or other countries to be like us. Closing doors to investment is no way to open minds.”

Canadian nationalist politicians and deal-hungry commercial bankers wear the same blinkers.

They’re loathe to think about the power of their friendly neighbor or the power of China. Doing business with the SOE of a superpower can’t be "squeezed" into a business model might work for publically owned investors from technically competent and politically harmless countries like, say, France and South Korea.

No wonder Harper is taking so long.

Canadian progressive escapes Anti-American catch-22

Author and critic Linda McQuaig proves that you can be a trouble-maker and very funny—and not think like Anne Coulter. McQuaig is divisive and not a bully. She fights for long shots, not for those who have already won the lottery.

This week, McQuaig actually used the United States to make Canadians feel uncomfortable—a stunning tactical change for a Canadian reformer. But then again, these days, Canadian reformers need every weapon they can get their hands on.

In a column in the Toronto Star with the headline “The Great Northern Tax Haven,” she casts her complaint in familiar Canadian terms.

“While Canada’s reputation as a leading peacekeeping nation has taken a nosedive, we’re punching above our weight on the international scene on a new front — as a tax haven for the rich.”

This is an unsurprising progressive angle. Comparisons with others automatically make Canadians nervous. But what followed had nothing to do with Scandinavia.

“Barack Obama’s vow last week that he’d veto any debt reduction plan that didn’t include higher taxes on the rich — so that millionaires wouldn’t pay lower rates than their secretaries — apparently stirred no interest in Ottawa.

McQuaig concluded by teasing Canada’s federal social democrats without shifting her ground:

“Is it too much to hope that our most progressive party [NDP] would take a stand as progressive as the president of the United States and America’s second richest man [Warren Buffett]?”

Click on:  www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1060026--mcquaig-the-great-northern-tax-haven

This is a refreshing departure in left rhetoric.

Since the publication of “Lament for A Nation” by the eloquent conservative George Grant and the invention of the phrase “red Tory” by the Marxist tactician Gad Horowitz, progressives in Canada have steadily taken on as faith: that the United States is irredeemable and that the way to widen the left’s appeal in Canada was by being positive nationalists.

The British connection, the flag, home-grown capitalists and good old Tory families with their quaint affectations, magically, would be on the same side of history—benign kitsch in the noble struggle to resist the American empire. Private and public Canadian businesses and flag-waving would open up a space across the northern half of the continent for a more progressive and just society.

Nearly 50 years later, it’s clear that this strategy entailed an enfeebling catch-22. By propagating the defeatist idea that progressive change in our civilization’s dominant political culture and economy is impossible, the Canadian left has made it easier for Canadians to become smug trimmers—a Canada exquisitely alert to America’s shortcomings and infinitely forgiving about its own.

Reactionaries in Canada are not savaged by the left for what they’ve done to Canada but for hints of vulgar American imitation.

Linda McQuaig and the Canadian left should set aside the silken poetry of a Tory reactionary and recall one of the sturdy convictions of those reformers like America's William Jennings Bryan and Canada's JS Woodsworth who campaigned in harsher times. Nationalism, along with religion, makes people feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t inspire change. 

The American Dream came before American Exceptionalism, and it rallied reformers and changed—for the better—how people treat each other and set their goals for the future.

In finding grounds for hope in America, surely it would be easier to generate hope in Canada.