The invention of differences in paradise

Forgetfulness about childbirth helps mothers continue to enjoy sex. And truly forgetting is liberating. On the other hand, forgetfulness about human history can lead to dead ends and trouble. Because Canada has only recently done something noteworthy on its own initiative, our forgetfulness tends to just support mediocrity and sentimentality. It’s not life-threatening. However, it does bother emigrants and irritable bloggers. 

Jeffrey Simpson is the most solid practitioner we have who writes with one foot on the data and the other on yesterday’s puffy white clouds. 

In his Globe column “A Party defined by its enemies, by choice,” Jeffrey Simpson reflected on the rupture of our political culture: from the clubby politics of our past to the divisive politics of Stephen Harper:

“This kind of political differentiation is new to Canada. Of course, there has always been political competition among parties. And of course, parties have heaped abuse on their adversaries, exaggerating their faults.

“In the past, this competition has tended to be between or among parties – a political game, if you like. But the Conservatives have now focused their sights on other institutions outside of politics to help with their strategy of differentiation.”               

If you’re going to be bitter about the present, first be bitter about the past.

Simpson ought to scan the archives of his own paper, even his own early stories, and shake himself free of the winsome spin of vanquished Liberals: the theme that public life was more gentlemanly, more responsible, when we were winning.

There were every bit as many injuries on the field when Liberals and other "nobodies" played the "political game."

Today’s Conservative PM attacks his partisan adversaries by: (1) complaining that Michael Ignatieff was working abroad for 30 years (2) attacking Stephen Dion’s written platform and his legal opinion that the Governor General, on his own council, could make him prime minister instead, and (3) marketing the notion that Justin Trudeau is shallow.

Yesterday’s Liberal PMs attacked their adversaries by: (1) claiming that they were soft on Quebec nationalists and servile toward the provinces generally, (2) dismissing New Democrats as extremists, (3) describing a Harvard economic gold-medalist Robert Stanfield’s anti-inflation suggestions as “Zap! You’re frozen,” and (4) in the '90s, dismissing Preston Manning and Stockwell Day as American right-wing puppets. They were incompetent if they couldn’t control their caucus, or bullies if they could.

(Dramatizing the awfulness of now, Liberal winners transform safely departed adversaries into public-spirited gentlemen, my first leader being designated harmlessly as “the best Prime Minister Canada never had.” Simpson sees them as “more pragmatic.”)

Simpson’s principal argument, however, is about scope: in the past, PMs were hard on other politicians, not other institutions. This is both arbitrary and, again, unfair. In fact, it implies that our politics today are more vicious and dangerous than before and that’s just crazy.

Harper’s Government has fought with public institutions — the PBO, the Chief Electoral Officer, crown agencies, regulators, political journalists, and, most famously, the Supreme Court and the Senate. Life within Harper’s Ottawa is quarrelsome and that ill-serves Harper with Canada’s peace-loving mainstream. However, is that inherently bad? Were yesterday’s political targets better able to protect themselves and less important to maintaining a tolerant democracy?

You can "savage" a young Canadian’s freedom and future prospects by throwing him in jail without a judge’s warrant, as Pierre Trudeau did in 1970. Yet are heads of public institutions, with fixed terms, public profiles, public mandates, and constitutional or Parliamentary protections, being "savaged" when Harper publicly questions their public positions?

Before political parties were subsidized — and, yes, when they were directly subsidized — monies, campaign workers, newspapers, leadership delegates, core voters, and swing voters were mobilized by fear of the other guy’s ideas and the promise of one’s own. We divided, often bitterly, on religion, the monarchy, republicanism, capitalism, socialism, the Vatican, the Cold War, US "imperialism," immigration welfare and work incentives, bilingualism, the official status of the French Language, capital gains taxes, and the character, health, and associations of our political enemies.

In Simpson’s alternative paradise, Liberals are "pragmatic" in office and their opponents are "pragmatic" once they retire. Ideology would have no place.

This is a fantasy and it's no fun. Popular democracy, most conspicuously in Quebec and the West, didn’t invent ruthless politics, divisive ideas, and ideologies. It simply let the people join in the fight. 

Liberal-NDP Coalition? What’s Trudeau’s Poison Pill?

Let’s agree for the time being that the concept of  "coalition government" and the real prospect of two Quebecers — a ruthless pol and neophyte — governing Canada at once won’t enthuse 905 and suburban Vancouver voters.  

Surely, the Liberals already will have seen the risks. However, Justin Trudeau hasn’t yet found a plausible way to kill the idea before next year’s federal election. What he desperately needs is a poison pill: a position (or positions) that would credibly deter a suitor with the intestinal fortitude of New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair.

Beyond institutional inertia, he doesn’t have one. Indeed, his Party’s weekend policy resolutions quietly took a promising one off the table.

Right there at the bottom of #31 of the Liberal Policy Resolutions that were (formally adopted) is this declaration:

“AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT immediately after the next election, an all-Party process be instituted, involving expert assistance and citizen participation, to report to Parliament within 12 months with recommendations for electoral reforms including, without limitation, a preferential ballot and/or a form of proportional representation, to represent Canadians more fairly and serve Canada better.”

The Liberal Party of Canada has thrived within the rules of the status quo. Further, up until now, its leader has entertained only the concept of a preferential ballot and explicitly rejected proportional representation. The New Democrats have long favored proportional representation. Nevertheless, the Liberal resolution is clear: for at least one year, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau may govern together with the same open-minded approach to electoral reform.

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?

Chrystia Freeland, you can come home and still say “we”

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.