My Advice for Canada's Liberals Part One: Forward, Step by Step

Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; October 14 (Canadian Thanksgiving), 2024

When I was a teenager in Trenton, Ontario, I used to sit in front of the family television set to watch gavel to gavel coverage of the Democratic National Convention, usually as transmitted over the air from the CBS station across the lake in Rochester, New York. 

This was a solitary endeavour because no one I knew well enough to have a conversation with was interested in this sort of thing. I consider it as one of the experiences that made me what I am. 

The Republican equivalents during those years -- 1964, ‘68, ‘72 -- were never as interesting: Goldwater, Rockefeller, Nixon, Agnew, Nixon … .

I gave up on television a long, long time ago, and national conventions aren’t as consequential as they once were: We usually know the outcome in advance, and what transpires is mostly ritual. Nevertheless, through the internet and on the radio I saw and heard enough of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past summer to get a sense of the tone of this historic event. 

When all was said and done, I started thinking about the parallels between the mood among Democrats in the U.S. at that point and the tone set by Justin Trudeau after his electoral triumph nine years ago this month. This set in motion a train of thought that I’ll share in installments under the heading “My Advice for Canada’s Liberals.”

“Sunny Ways” is a distinctly Canadian phrase that harkens back to Sir Wilfrid Laurier during the formative years of the Liberal legacy, so it wasn’t part of the DNC 2024 vocabulary. But it could have been applied to what came across as a joyous response to the chain of recent events leading up to the nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. This was a happy occasion.

“Growing the middle class” is another Liberal catch phrase from a decade ago we heard repeatedly from the DNC podium. This struck me as a bit off the mark in 2015, and even more so in 2024. What our Liberals and their Democrats have in common is a near monopoly on what is considered the centre of the political spectrum as it has been defined for the last 250 years or so.

Representing the centre needn’t always mean taking a middling approach to things. The centre can be more than a just midpoint between extremes, it is also operating above the fray, but in ways that are more firmly grounded in what came before, in what is actually present, and in what is possible. The centre is the domain of the pragmatic, the reasonable and the realistic, and the home range of those of us who are comfortable with uncertainty.

The challenge of the centre is to avoid the twin pitfalls of, on the one hand, settling for the average, calculated according to lowest common denominator, and on the other, serving the interests of a majority, which almost always means a dominant plurality of some kind. The best way to stay clear of such dangers is to remain as inclusive as possible of minorities of all kinds, including differing points of view. Canada’s Liberals, who can convincingly claim, for our confederation as well as for their own legacy, that “Diversity is Our Strength,” have a definite advantage here.     

The assembly in Chicago stood out as more youthful, more diverse and more gender-balanced than had ever been seen before. The Trudeau government struck us the same way: “Because it’s 2015,” as our new Prime Minister famously explained. “Choose forward,” the slogan the Liberals adopted in 2019, tries to say much the same thing. At the DNC in Chicago this was expressed as a firm resolve that speaks directly to those who long to return to imagined past values and glories: “We’re not going back!” 

One important difference is that it is impossible to imagine, in a Canadian context, anything like the breadth and scope of the Democratic Party, and the extraordinary harmony that currently seems to prevail among its members and supporters. In Chicago, we witnessed the likes of Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, all in accord. They were joined by an unprecedented number of Republican voices alarmed at what’s become of what was once the Grand Old Party, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, his daughter Liz Cheney, and, according to one report, seventeen former staff members from the Reagan administration. 

This unprecedented harmony is mostly attributable to the toxic combination of forces that gradually infiltrated and eventually came to dominate the other main party. The crisis is perceived as existential, and therefore comparable to being in a wartime situation, when, of necessity, differences are set aside until the danger has passed. 

The fact that no new party configuration has been able to take root in the U.S. since the rise of the original Republican coalition of interests and concerns in 1854 is also part of the picture: There is nowhere else to go. 

Up here in Canada we left the standard two-party system behind going on a century ago, for better and for worse. If diversity is strength, our wider, more varied range of political choices should be an advantage. But when so many options are made available within a framework designed for two political parties with only minor differences between them, it opens a door to allowing a narrowly partisan interest to take near total control of a city, a province or the federation with the support of less than 20% of the electorate. For a democracy, this is living dangerously. 

Another striking difference between what we witnessed in Chicago and anything comparable here in Canada is the boisterous patriotic tone. It's hard to imagine a Canadian crowd uniting in a chant like “U - S - A.! … U - S - A.!” We usually only show this kind of exuberance in our sports arenas. 

Lorie Shaull - Kamala Harris on stage at the Democratic National Convention Thursday Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago - wikipedia

So what can Canada’s Liberals glean from all this? Well, for one thing they can take comfort in the fact that their counterparts on the other side of the border are only now catching up to where Trudeau and his team stood almost a decade ago, and apply this reassurance towards restoring some much-needed confidence in why the Liberal Party of Canada exists, and what it represents.   

The challenge before them is convincing Canadians that we don't want to go back to 2011, when a short-lived “orange wave” appeared to wipe out the Liberals as the last remaining “legacy party,” thereby giving the newly-formed Conservative Party of Canada under Harper their first and only majority.

Liberals will also need to convince the 40% of Canadians who work, live and vote here in Ontario that we don’t want to go back to 1995, when an orange collapse paved the way for Mike Harris and his Common Sense Revolution. But that’s about as far back as the new-fangled Conservative Party can go: 2011, 1995, or maybe 1993, when the rise of Western Reform marked the beginning of the end of the Progressive Conservative movement. 

So my advice to the Liberals is: Yes, “choose forward,” by all means, but also underscore the Liberal Party legacy by driving home the fact that they’ve been around since the very beginning, and are now our country’s last unbroken political party tradition. They remain the party of Laurier, King, St Laurent, Trudeau and Chretien in much the same way Democrats in the U.S. remain the party of Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. 

Conversely, just as the Republicans in the U.S. today are clearly no longer the Grand Old Party of Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, Hoover and Eisenhauer, those who operate under the Conservative banner in Canada today are no longer an the party of Macdonald, Borden, Diefenbaker, Mulroney or Campbell. In both cases, insurgent forces have taken over, and the ties that bind over time have been broken. 

Choosing forward means believing in the possibility of progress, and steering towards it. The Liberal Party of Canada has always been progressive in the root sense of the word: dedicated towards advancement or improvement, step by step. By the same token, Canada has been a work in progress from the very beginning. This is why the Liberals have always appeared to be Canada's "natural governing party.” 

It also helps explain why the Conservative Party decided to reconstitute itself in 1942, which is when they added “Progressive” to their name. In Canada, change has come peaceably, one step at a time, building on what exists, ever respectful of what came before: This country has always been a work in progress, but with a distinct conservatory bent, meaning  "having the quality of preserving” (from the Latin conservator “keeper, preserver, defender”).

That conservatory bent is rooted in the basic fact that Canada began as a saving remnant of French and British North America, which in turn began as settlements rooted in relationships with the Indigenous peoples of the continent, with the land itself, and with the various waters -- the rivers, the lakes, the bays, the gulfs, the oceans.

Those relationships have been fraught with difficulties, but none has ever been severed completely. The fact that we are a remainder nation state is what distinguishes us from the rebellious colonies that chose secession and a new beginning. They began as a deliberate, artificial political construct; we are a largely unintended, organic development.    

The Liberal Party of Canada exemplifies progress -- moving forward. Which is almost the same as saying Liberal means Canada, both in her progressive and her conservative aspects. Liberals should head into the next federal election with a determination to be resolute in refuting the notion that “Canada is broken.” In full confidence, they should counter this lack of faith, trust and confidence with an assertion that the very opposite is true: Canada is an idea whose time has come.

As part of a world where the revolutionary republican way has been dominant for almost 250 years, Canada has been an exception, especially in this hemisphere. “Conservative” has generally been seen as opposing innovation and resisting change: the antithesis of the progressive. The trajectory here in Canada has been, not towards the triumph of one side over the other, but a wondrous kind of reconciliation of apparent opposites. 

Memorial to the Lexington Minute Men (1948) by B. Paeff - wikipedia

Told this way, Canada’s story offers the promise of peace in a conflict that has been the source of so much death, suffering and destruction. One way of telling it is to say that it all started on April 19, 1775, which is the day when volunteers in the colonial settler militia and government soldiers started firing at one another at Lexington and Concord. The time for judgement has long passed. The point is, we can do better as 2025 approaches.

If Liberal means progress, it also signifies Canada, and Canada exemplifies harmonious transition. What we may be coming to here is nothing less than a recalibration of the political compass that will render left and right as generally understood in politics, irrelevant.