Donald Trump’s talk of Canada as a 51st state has made Canadians realize again we have a lot to be proud of and that we treasure our sovereignty. We are a land of a better balance of fairness and prosperity and opportunity, and of community and individual rights, than most other countries we can think of.
Yet we collectively seem to know that these achievements are at risk in the present moment. From the outside, because of the threats from our neighbour, and from the inside because of stagnant economic growth.
Canadians instinctively realize that on the current path we may find ourselves a fair country but not a prosperous one. A country where health care and education can only be funded by increased tax rates that put the brakes on investment and stifle initiative.
"The equal sharing of miseries" (Churchill) is not what we dream of for our country’s future, but that seems to be where we are headed.
In that context, the polls are telling us we are about to annihilate the governing Liberal party in the upcoming election. The party itself is imploding, with the leader resigning only after huge internal pressure, and many of its MPs and ministers choosing not to run again, including Oakville’s Pam Damoff and Cabinet Minister Anita Anand. Excellent people committed to public service who do not see a way to continue within this environment.
Since Confederation, the Liberal party has governed Canada about three-fifths of the time. They can rightly take some credit for building the Canada we love and believe in.
The rest of the time the government has been led by Conservative parties, who can also lay claim to decisions, like free trade with the United States, which have helped us prosper and to have the wherewithal to share and build a fairer country.
These two parties were centrist. They were pragmatic. Both, until recently, understood and cared about business as the creator of wealth, and understood and cared about creating equality of opportunity, a level playing field, and the social supports that create community and the peace and stability in which business can prosper. Their differences were of emphasis, and they competed more on competence than on ideology. Lucky us, we had two parties fighting for control of the centre.
For much of our history, we have had a third party, the NDP, which has sometimes been in a position to influence the dividing of the national pie and has been behind some of those social supports. Canadians have over time put in place governments, majority and minority, which have led to the national compromise we are proud of.
We have so far escaped what we see in many other ostensibly democratic countries…the lurching between governments of the left and of the right, where each new government has to dismantle the very structures of the one it replaced, and, instead of incremental progress, there are radical ideological shifts, and in the worst cases, corrupt kleptocracies and democracy in name only.
These countries, we could smugly observe, swung between tax and spend handout parties and greedy parties focused on the enrichment of a select few, while Canada, up until recently, made sure the pie got bigger for the benefit of everyone.
We may not be so smug soon: we are in danger of following in the footsteps of other countries and losing our much vaunted genius for compromise to a polarized political environment in which voters will have a choice between a party of enterprise and opportunity with little regard for social inequality, and a party of handouts which takes the creation of wealth for granted and offers a levelling down which stifles initiative.
In such an environment, Canadians will choose enterprise over equality. Conservative parties will dominate government. This, according to John Ibbitson, was Stephen Harper’s goal: eliminate the Liberal party and leave Canadians a choice between the Conservatives and the NDP. In such an environment he believed Conservatives would never lose.
An ideological commitment to private over public in all cases would likely erode our social fabric and wealth and power would concentrate. This would lead in the long run to the kind of hereditary opportunity that characterizes the United Kingdom and the United States.
Our strong public infrastructure in education in particular, as well as our history of two centrist parties, has kept us from this polarization. It has provided an environment of opportunity, and of equality of opportunity and social mobility which is the envy of the world.
Paradoxically, it is the current Liberal government that has made Stephen Harper’s dream come true. It has moved from being a centrist party that cared about business and enterprise and growing the country’s prosperity to a party obsessed with noble progressive ideas without an understanding of how they are funded. A tax and spend party with ideological rather than pragmatic approaches which is comfortable in bed with the NDP.
We are right I think to be disgusted with the current government. Under it there is less pie to share as GDP per person has started to shrink. Government overheads have grown as the civil service has expanded faster than the population while huge sums are spent on consultants with dubious value for money.
It has not been all bad. We made it out of the pandemic better than most countries, and the Team Canada approach the Liberal government led when our trade opportunities were challenged by the first Trump administration was a success. And it is not that initiatives like $10 a day childcare are not laudable. Indeed, they have the potential to liberate forces in the economy and create greater opportunity.
But when the Finance Minister says we need to take more of the economy in tax to avoid burdening future generations with debt, she is burdening the productive parts of the economy in the present. The right approach would have been to try to create economic policies that would foster growth to reduce the need for debt: increase the tax take by increasing the size of the economy, and reduce the administrative burden of government.
We are the richest country per capita in terms of natural resources and have one of the best educated populations in the world. There is no good reason we would not be able to grow our economy faster than anyone else.
It is little wonder we are where we are. A look at the Liberal caucus finds career politicians and lawyers, nary an entrepreneur or successful business person. Many of these are fine people and they have a role in our civil life, but without any commercially-minded perspective, idealism trumps pragmatism in a very un-Canadian way.
Most Canadians work in the private sector. They have seen first-hand how entrepreneurs and owner-operators marshall resources and take risks to position their businesses for a future they can only attempt to predict. By delivering goods and services Canadians need and want they create employment and opportunity. Most Canadians do not want handouts, they want opportunity with some security
Canadians rightly perceive that the current government does not really understand how the pie they share is baked. This accusation, traditionally levelled at the NDP, can fairly be made to the Liberals in their current form.
If we are to avoid the polarization that afflicts most other countries, we need two pragmatic centrist parties, each holding the other back from moving too far to either extreme.
But to be one of these, the Liberal party must change. It must move back to the centre and start caring about entrepreneurship and wealth creation. It must reduce the share of the economy that goes to administrative overhead to free up resources for growth and for the delivery of the health and educational services that are key to our prosperity and social stability: to our peace, order and good government.
Again paradoxically, it was Stephen Harper who resurrected the Conservative party and restored genuine competition to government when it looked like divided conservatives would leave a fat dumb and happy Liberal majority uncontested. Maintaining two viable centrist parties is key to our having a healthy democracy where we can focus on improving our country rather than dividing it.
In the next election, we may need to punish the Liberals. But if we administer the death penalty, we will be punishing ourselves, pushing us into a right versus left divide that would be a betrayal of our history and our potential.
