Bath Water Out With The Baby

Perusing the social media over the weekend, it was remarkable how many people are providing input into what the Liberal party must engage in to renew itself. It was comforting in its own way, though it left the lingering impression on me that my own meagre posts are likely inconsequential.A most helpful comment came in through Facebook from Jon, a London, Ontario journalist, and it was profound enough to sit me up to take a look at it once again. Here's what he said:

The Liberals in power embraced fiscal conservatism but so too have the Conservatives. As to social issues, it's long been clear the current PM simply has no desire to wave a far-right flag. There is no great void in the political centre and by pursuing it Ignatieff conceded the Left to the NDP. Now appears some of those who want to lead the Liberals are charging down the same path. A better path might be to talk about issues all national parties have largely avoided. May I suggest health care reform."

Think about what this would mean for the renewal of the Liberal party if we stopped angling for political position but instead concentrated our efforts on how best to apply ourselves to this country's greatest challenges.  Terry Fallis, in his fictional treatise on Canadian politics, The Best Laid Plans, talks revealingly of the bookending of policy between the CPOs (Cynical Policy Operators) and the IPWs (Idealist Policy Wonks). I've witnessed the ongoing tensions between these two groups in every party in the House and it's one of the most frustrating realities in Canadian politics - to see it from the inside can be deeply disillusioning. What it all means though is that politics becomes an incrementalist's game - move a bit to the right, left, or attempt to capture the middle. But never go too far lest it provides your opponent an opening or alienates you from the precious middle.But what if Jon is right? Perhaps part of the reason why Canadians themselves are largely centrist is because our political parties recognize it as the motherlode and, petrified of losing the middle ground, they present voters precious little imagination in their policies. With the Conservatives refusing the bait of veering too far to the right and the NDP pressing to the middle in order to capture the vote, how much ground does the Liberal party have to really stake out a centrist progressive vision? What if we, instead, applied ourselves to the greatest challenges facing our nation? What if we spent the next four years driving for solutions from both the bottom-up and vice-versa? Some examples.Healthcare - this is Jon's suggestion and it's a pertinent one, given that a new healthcare arrangement must be worked out between the feds and the provinces in the next two years. All parties are reticent to open this file because the implications are so ominous, and so they all stumble promising something like a 6% increase in healthcare spending over the next few years. That merely buys us a bit of time but doesn't get us any change.Environment - climate change and its effects are changing the future of this country whether we realize it or not. What if Liberals presented a dynamic new plan that involved all players and set those clear targets that will be required if we are to treat the problem seriously?Aboriginal renaissance - Paul Martin's Kelowna Accord was remarkable for its breadth and buy-in from all provinces, territories and aboriginal communities. This has been the most prickly problem in Canadian history and deserves generational change.Cities - distant cousins in our federal framework, our local communities are where the real action is at and yet still they beg for recognition. Time to make them full partners.Internationalism - With only 50 or so peacekeepers out of 100,000 in the UN, we have faded to obscurity. The world has changed since Lester Pearson's time; what do we have to do to capture global imagination again?Immigration - forget multiculturalism, we are a multi-culture. Successive governments tinker when we should be linking our ethnic communities with the remarkable economic and cultural opportunities available for Canadian smaller businesses overseas. Use the expertise of our newer Canadians instead of viewing them as a drain on the system.Good and Services - why do goods always cost more here than in the United States? Why do we permit trade restrictions with our American friends to drive us to disadvantage in comparison? For that matter, why can't we solve the problem of trade restrictions within our own provinces.If we truly believe in the ability of liberalism to bring imagination to any problem, why let ourselves be limited to acquiring an ever-shrinking piece of the centrist pie? Let's strike out in bold new directions, fully confronting the deepest challenges facing us and show how we as a party refuse to play the incrementalist game anymore and will truly lead. Let the CPOs and the IPWs go at it; they always will. Let's throw the bathwater out with the baby and just outflank them, driving solutions from the ground-up and with the help of Canadian experts in these various fields. Policy is vital but not when we politicize it so much that it limits us just in the telling of it. Let's just forget letting professional party people define us because, as Jon rightly concluded, "Perhaps the party's focus should be less about revitalizing the party and more about the revitalizing the country."