Will the Liberals Learn from their Recent History?

In April the Liberal Party of Canada will choose a new leader. What they require is a person with sound political judgement who can persuade the party to unite behind strategies which effectively challenge the government. The vital necessity of choosing such a leader is illustrated by the Liberal’ inability to seize a golden opportunity in the late fall of 2008 and the early winter of 2009 to reverse the decade-long decline which has seen them fall from majority government status in 2003 to 34 seats in the House of Commons and third party status today.

 The Liberals’ let that opportunity elude them because of two fatal tendencies they must overcome to again form a government. The first is a failure to recognize and exploit the mistakes of their opponents. The second is an obsession with internal divisions.

In the October 2008 election Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government increased its representation in the House of Commons from 124 to 143 while the Liberals fell from 103 seats to 77. As a result, Stephane Dion who had succeeded Paul Martin as Liberal leader in December 2006, asked the party to organize a leadership convention, announcing he would resign when a new leader was chosen. May 2, 2009 was set as the date for the convention.

The Conservatives position appeared to be strong. With three federal elections since June 2004 and the Official Opposition headed by a lame duck leader, the prospect of defeat in the House of Commons and an early return to the polls seemed remote.

However, the Conservatives faced a challenge of their own. The economy was steadily worsening. Unemployment was rising and production, incomes and demand for Canada’s exports were falling as the global economy experienced its worst downturn since the depression of the 1930’s.

How would the government respond to the deepening economic crisis? The answer and the Liberal opportunity came on November 27. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty rose in the House of Commons to preview the government’s budget in an Economic and Fiscal Statement, titled “Protecting Canada’s Future.” The policy proposed would have had disastrous consequences. Instead of focusing on stimulating the economy to restore growth and stabilize employment, the government’s priority was to restrain spending to produce “balanced budgets for the current and next five years.”

The three Opposition parties were stunned by the government’s complete misreading of national and international economic conditions, including its complacency in the face of a deepening world financial crisis and the need for prompt action to contain the damage at home. By day’s end each party had announced they would not support a budget that contained no stimulus package to spur Canada’s slumping economy, assist unemployed workers and prevent unemployment from worsening.

But if the opposition parties made good on their threat, the probable result would be a return to the polls, just months after the previous election and a further delay in the introduction of policies to meet the crisis. On December 1 the three opposition parties announced their response to that concern. In a joint statement, they informed the country and the Governor-General that should the Conservative government be defeated on their budget policy, a Liberal-NDP coalition government (led by Mr. Dion until his replacement by a new Liberal leader) was prepared to take its place and bring in a new budget, thereby avoiding an election. The Bloc Quebecois would not be part of the coalition government, but pledged to support it on confidence votes. 

Just months after a humiliating defeat, the Liberals appeared to have seized the golden opportunity handed to them by the Conservatives to defeat the government and return to office as the senior partners in a coalition. However, Mr. Dion’s strategy began almost at once to unravel.

Facing the imminent prospect of losing power, Prime Minister Harper launched a two-pronged counterattack. First, he moved to delay a motion of confidence by requesting a prorogation of Parliament from the Governor-General. Second, he attempted to sow division within the Liberals by arguing that they had entered into an unholy alliance with the separatist Bloc Quebecois.  

He succeeded on both counts. On December 4 Governor-General, Michäelle Jean, granted the request for prorogation. The House of Commons would not meet again until January 26.With the grant of prorogation, Liberal support for Dion’s coalition policy quickly disintegrated. Fearing Harper’s charge of being in bed with the Bloc, a majority in the Liberal caucus forced Mr. Dion’s resignation as leader of the party on December 6. He was replaced as interim leader by Michael Ignatieff, the runner-up at the December 2006 Liberal leadership convention. Mr. Ignatieff quickly made it known he did not support a Liberal-NDP coalition, dependent on the Bloc.  

While the Liberals were backing away from their opportunity to bring down the government, the Harper government was using the period of prorogation to radically change its budget plan. The Economic and Fiscal statement of November 27 proposed to let the economy and the unemployed fend for themselves, while the government focused on keeping spending down and the budget in balance.

The budget presented to the House of Commons on January 27took a diametrically opposite approach. In its “Economic Action Plan”, the Harper government proposed a $33.7 billion deficit, a raft of infrastructure spending programs, enriched income support for the unemployed, low income parents and low-earning workers, generous tax incentives to encourage home renovations and policies to stimulate lending. Now, it was the deficit that was left to fend for itself as the focus shifted to getting the economy back on its feet and maintaining the purchasing power of the recession’s victims. Even excluding massive purchases of securities by the Bank of Canada to enable lending institutions to provide money for homebuilding and business investment, the policies outlined in the budget were estimated to provide a stimulus to the economy equal to 2% of GDP- a far larger boost to domestic demand than budgets during the recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91 and larger (in relative terms) than the stimulus packages implemented by other G-7 countries.

When, despite their earlier plea for a stimulus package, the other two Opposition parties decided to vote against the new budget, the Liberals were given another opportunity. They could legitimately claim exclusive credit for the government’s massive reversal of policy. Did they seize it? Did they launch a damaging attack on the Conservatives’ boast of being credible economic managers? Did the Liberals remind Canadians of the suffering that Mr. Flaherty’s preferred original budget policy would have inflicted? They did not. Preoccupied by their internal divisions, they chose simply to remain silent and provide the votes necessary to enable the new budget’s provisions to take effect. 

By opposing the budget policy proposed in the economic and fiscal plan, working with the other Opposition parties to form a credible alternative government which frightened the Conservatives into adopting the Liberal stimulus policy, and then providing the crucial votes necessary to bring that policy into effect, the Liberals had made themselves the true parents of January 2009 budget policy. Yet, distracted by the embarrassment and internal controversy over their ill-fated and short-lived strategic alliance with the Opposition parties, rather than claiming that legitimate parentage, the Liberals orphaned the child they had created.

This was a major strategic error. For, in a classic vindication of the massive stimulus provided in the budget, Canada’s recovery from the 2008-09 recession, in terms of full-time employment, real domestic demand and real after-tax income was not only more rapid and complete than those of other G-7 countries; it was also much stronger than Canada’s recoveries from the 1981-82 and 1990-91 recessions.

With the Liberals silent and the NDP and the Bloc on record as voting against the 2009 budget, the door was left open for the Conservatives to claim the results of that policy as evidence of their superiority to the other parties as economic managers. That claim played a key role in gaining them a majority government in the May 2011 election and continues to be trumpeted in taxpayer-funded multi-media advertising. That their real preference had been a budget that would have lengthened and deepened the recession was forgotten.

By their March 2012 Budget, the Conservatives were quoting the 2010 Article IV Consultation Report on Canada by the International Monetary Fund which accounted  for the relative swiftness and strength of Canada’s economic recovery in the following words:  “The rapid turnaround of activity and vigorous domestic demand owes much to the government’s rightly-sized and well-targeted macroeconomic stimulus.”

The irony was now complete. The Conservatives, who rejected stimulus in November 2008, won the credit for its success from the IMF in 2010 and from the electorate in 2011. The Liberals, who consistently championed stimulus, were relegated to third-party status.

In his address to the Illinois Republican convention in June 1858, Abraham Lincoln told his party they could “better judge what to do and how to do it” if they rightly interpreted the events of the previous few years and their lessons. In April the Liberal Party of Canada will have the same challenge. For the sake of their future success, they need to choose a leader with the political judgement and strength of character to overcome the tendencies which prevented them from seizing the golden opportunities to reverse their decline which came in the fall of 2008 and the winter of 2009.  

Supporting a political party or cause is an emotional, as much as or often more than, an intellectual or a moral commitment. Ideas and ideals motivate us; but so do loves, hatreds, fears, jealousies and a lust for power. For most of us, the “emotional urges  are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary”[i] to the political engagement vigorous parties and a healthy democratic political dialogue depend on. But danger lurks when we allow those emotions to dominate our mental processes and moral outlook.

That danger is what I will call “ideological thinking” and what George Orwell described as “nationalism” in his important 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism”.  Its effects are dire. In Orwell’s words, “the sense of reality becomes unhinged” (and) “the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also.”[ii] Why?  Because  ideologues completely identify with their chosen ideology and the nation, party or cause associated with it. They place it “beyond good and evil “ and recognize “no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Ideological thinking is “power hunger tempered by self-deception.” Ideologues are so certain of  being in the right, they can justify to themselves any means to advance their cause. Again, to quote Orwell, ”there is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it.”[iii]

An important aspect of ideological thinking, pointed out by Orwell, is that it is the intelligentsia and activists associated with parties and causes who are most susceptible to it in its most extreme and dangerous forms. Seeking from politics the moral certainty provided by religious belief, and attracted by systems of thought offering doctrinaire, ready-made answers they want to believe to the issues presented by a complex and changing world they are more tempted than ordinary men and women to enter a mental world where “the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered and the plainest facts can be denied.” Illustrating this point, Orwell reported, “I have heard it confidently stated” (by leftist British intellectuals) “ that the American troops had been brought to Europe, not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” [iv]

In our own day technology has made it easier to enter into and inhabit such self-reinforcing  ideological environments  than was the case in 1945. By exposing ourselves only to those cable channels, talk show hosts and websites which reinforce what we would like to believe, we can succumb to the fantasy that what is at best a partial view of the truth is in fact the whole, that there really are no other valid ways of looking at the world.

Believing themselves to be entirely in the right, ideologues have no compunction about forcing their views on others and enforcing ideological purity even within their own groups. As the American Republican party has become increasingly ideological, for example, we have seen activists such as the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Grover Norquist denounce as RINOs (Republicans in name only) and threaten with primary challenges long-serving loyal elected party members. Why? Because they are willing to entertain such heresies as the possibilities that carbon emissions might indeed be linked to climate change, that tax increases on the wealthy might be part of the solution to reducing the deficit or that President Obama is not a doctrinaire socialist with whom there can be no collaboration or compromise that is not treasonous.

Yet, the choice is not between the follies and crimes of the ideologues and political indifference.  I agree with Orwell that deep and honest thinkers of all shades of political opinion “must engage in politics- using the word in a wide sense- and that one must have preferences …The emotional urges which are inescapable and perhaps even necessary to political action should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.” But in his time, as in our own, to be a committed advocate for a cause without becoming an ideologue “needs a moral effort” and too many of those most active and influential in the public life of all countries “are not prepared to make it.” 

Michael Hatfield, the author of this blog, has eclectic interests ranging from politics to poverty and income distribution, from economics to NCAA basketball, from demographics to baseball. He enjoys the music of Beethoven,Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Patsy Cline, Allison Krauss, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Hank Williams. He is an Arminian Baptist in religion, a Keynesian in economics and a communitarian traditionalist (Red Tory) in politics. His sports teams growing up in New Brunswick, Canada were the Boston Red Sox of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski and the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax in baseball; the Boston Celtics of Bob Cousy and Bill Russell in basketball and the Montreal Canadians of Doug Harvey, Jean Beliveau and Maurice and Henri Richard in hockey. His favourite writers are Alden Nowlan and George Orwell and his political heroes are Lincoln, Disraeli, Sir John A. and Flora Macdonald,Robert Stanfield and his late uncle, Richard Hatfield.