Liberals have to create a new political centre - thestar.com

By David Eaves and Taylor Owens - from the Toronto Star

Canadians may have once valued the Liberal party, but they reject what it has become. The reason is simple. The centre is dead. Worse still, Liberals let it die. What once was the pragmatic core of Canadian politics, today is a wasteland devoid of an imaginative, progressive vision, occupied by a largely obsolete electoral strategy.

Don’t believe us? Consider the issues the Liberal party managed over the 20th century. The creation of universal health care and the social safety net. The management of the Canada-U.S. relationship by balancing opportunities for Canadian businesses with our desire to preserve our identity. Engaging Quebec and seeking to affirm its place within the country. Cultivating multiculturalism while simultaneously securing individual rights in a charter. Fostering peacekeeping to ensure local conflicts did not escalate into nuclear confrontation.

These were significant accomplishments that defined three generations of Canadians. They are also no longer relevant.

Today Canadians, especially young Canadians, are confident about themselves and their identity — no longer is there a “lament for a nation.” The sovereignty movement, while not dead, struggles. Individual rights continue to erode discrimination and the hierarchical relationships that impeded free expression and liberty. While some progressives continue to bang these drums, no one should be surprised that they no longer resonate.

In other cases, the solutions offered in the 20th century are no longer relevant. Canadians know — as health care threatens to eat up 50 per cent of provincial budgets and service levels remain mixed — that their health-care system is broken. Young Canadians don’t even pretend to believe a pension system will exist for them. Anyone can see that peacekeeping cannot solve today’s international conflicts.

Read more...

Liberals have to create a new political centre - thestar.com

Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail

By Neil Reynolds - from the Globe and Mail

Throughout his two minority governments, Prime Minister Stephen Harper endured incessant carping from the right: especially from conservatives who wanted more ideological purity. Mr. Harper wisely ignored them. The purer the ideology, the more problematic the politics. Mr. Harper diligently pursued the political centre (with right-ward forays: for example, unequivocal support for Israel). It all worked out fine. The Conservatives took the centre, held it and won a transformative majority in Election 2011. But conservatives now need, once again, to relax a bit. Nothing extraordinary is about to happen.

Mr. Harper made this clear in his election-night comments. He would govern, he said, for the whole country – not (he implied) for hard-core conservatives or soft-core libertarians. These people have their own work to do, in moving the political centre, but this philosophical task is fundamentally different than governing. In Canada’s democracy, social and economic change will inevitably be incremental and erratic. After all, if the more than 14 million Canadians who voted wanted more radical change, they could have voted Libertarian – as 6,017 of them did.

This isn’t to say that Mr. Harper won’t make fundamental reforms: especially toward freer trade with Europe (and other countries) and closer economic integration with the U.S. It is merely to observe that Canadians themselves – and not the federal government – will determine how far and how fast the political centre pivots.

The political centre in Canada has been drifting to the right for almost 30 years – since the last Liberal government (1984) of prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose excesses pushed the country toward conservatism. Every federal government since has governed to the right – with the single, ironic exception of Paul Martin (who had done so much for the country as finance minister). Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney (free trade with the U.S.), Liberal Jean Chrétien (fiscal restraint) and Conservative Stephen Harper (tax cuts): all remained firmly centred even as the country itself rotated, slowly, to the right.

Mr. Harper is the most impressive politician among all these small-c conservative prime ministers.

Read more...

Canada’s conservatives should ease up on Harper - The Globe and Mail

Does NDP pose more of a threat to national unity than the Bloc? - The Globe and Mail

by Adam Radwanski - from the Globe and Mail

The obvious, instinctive reaction is to cheer for Jack Layton – if not nationally, then in the province where he’s most caught fire.

Quebeckers have long parked their votes with the Bloc Québécois – a party that by its nature has no interest in building a better country. Mr. Layton’s NDP, which has seemingly come out of nowhere to lead the Bloc in popular support, offers the prospect of more constructive representation and more thoughtful consideration of Quebec’s role within Canada.

But before getting out the pompoms, Mr. Layton’s message in recent days raises an uncomfortable question: Could the federalist party pose more of a threat to national unity than the sovereigntist one?

To create the “winning conditions” that sovereigntists have long been seeking, and that will be in demand if the Parti Québécois defeats Jean Charest’s Liberals in the next provincial election, requires a strong sense of grievance. The oui side came so close to victory in the 1995 referendum largely because of the perception that Quebec’s interests had been rejected by the rest of Canada, through the defeats of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. But as of now, there’s nothing nearly so galvanizing in play.

For sovereigntists, it’s difficult to change that on their own. The PQ plans to try, with a stridently nationalist agenda aimed at provoking Ottawa. But Bloc MPs can make no serious claim to wanting to make federalism work, so it’s hard for them to help convey and spread a sense of disillusionment. Nor can they easily entice the federal government to launch into constitutional talks, of the sort that have previously ended in heartbreak, because no prime minister would be under any illusion that he or she could make them happy.

History suggests, however, that self-identified federalists are a different story. In the 1980s, Brian Mulroney built a coalition with soft nationalists, then tried to appease them. His reward was a chunk of his caucus breaking off to form the Bloc, a gesture with much more impact than anything the party they formed could do today. Their revolt, along with the frustration of the federalist provincial government of the day, helped set in motion the near-miss in 1995.

Since then, federal governments have stepped more carefully. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals went nowhere near constitutional talks, and took the opposite tack by introducing the Clarity Act. (That they also created all kinds of bad will with the sponsorship program is a different matter.) Paul Martin was more ambiguous – making former Bloc MP Jean Lapierre his Quebec lieutenant, and embracing “asymmetrical federalism” in a way Mr. Chrétien didn’t. But after dabbling with soft nationalism – giving the Québécois a “nation within Canada” designation, and engaging in a flirtation with Mario Dumont’s Action Démocratique du Québec – Stephen Harper has shifted back a little closer to where Mr. Chrétien was.

It remains highly unlikely that Mr. Layton will lead the government after May 2, but seat gains in Quebec and elsewhere could give him a big hand in shaping it. So it bears noting that there are a few shades of Mr. Mulroney’s approach in what he’s doing to win over Quebec.

The NDP has long had a commitment to provincial autonomy for Quebec that seems at odds with its interventionist message in the rest of the country. But Mr. Layton isn’t just promising not to impose federal programs. He backs extending Bill 101, Quebec’s controversial language legislation, into federally regulated workplaces. He is non-committal on the Clarity Act. He doesn’t want to add more seats in the House of Commons for underrepresented provinces such as Ontario and Alberta, without also adding more seats for Quebec so that it remains overrepresented. Read more...

Does NDP pose more of a threat to national unity than the Bloc? - The Globe and Mail