Angry in the Great White North

The Liberal Party has presented itself to Canadians as the "just right" party for decades.

The Conservatives (aka Alliance aka Reform aka PC)? Too reactionary.

The NDP? Too radical.

Has this been the formula for effective government? Well, as long as the Liberals continued to steal the best ideas from either side and implement those ideas competently, it seemed so.

But the technique is doomed to failure for a number of reasons.

First, the true thinkers remain forever in opposition. The Conservatives and the NDP, each a home to a real vision of what Canada can be, attract visionaries. Those visionaries avoid the Liberal Party, seeing it as an operation rather than a force. As a result, the Liberal Party is populated from top to bottom with operators instead of leaders.

Second, the ability to implement other peoples' visions is always compromised, either by the political need to alter that stolen vision slightly in order to mask its true origin (and so protect the Liberal claim for credit), or by the practical problem of trying to cobble together mutually exclusive visions into a semi-coherent program. Since one of the problems is that the true owners of these visions live in other parties, the Liberals lack the wisdom to make the best possible compromise.

Third, the Liberals will always steer the middle course, even when circumstances might require an unbalanced approach. The Liberals will always say they occupy the centre, but the truth is that they are confined to it. Can you imagine a Liberal prime minister adopting a Thatcheresque program to re-invent Canada, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the 80s?

And that leads to a final, if somewhat partisan, point. The Liberals occupy a centre-left position rather than a true centre, if only because their "just right" approach has a serious compatibility problem with true conservatism. This is because conservatism, with its focus on personal freedom and personal responsibility, demands that government play a small role in people's lives. But that is a difficult thing to do in half-measure. Once you accept that the socialist approach of coercive management of behaviour is a good thing in general, and not just a necessary evil to be tolerated in very specific circumstances, then it's a matter of degree. The Liberals accept this to be true, not out of a philosophical commitment to socialism, but as part of their approach of stealing bits and pieces from either side. Of course, they also try to adopt elements of limited government from the conservatives. So we get socialized medicine but not socialized daycare. But then tomorrow, we'll have socialized daycare too. Socialism, since it represents an active presence of government and not an absence, has a creeping quality. It expands to fill the voids that conservatism attempts to leave empty.

When you attempt to make the two coexist within the same entity, socialism tends to win out, simply because it represents the accrual of power and influence for individuals within government, and unless you really believe in small government, that power will seduce just about anyone. Since the Liberals don't believe in anything, it's no wonder that they tilt left from the centre.

As a result, thanks to the Liberal "just right" technique of holding on to power, what Canadians see as the "centre" has been moving leftward for years. Compare that with the United States. There people and interest groups have a stark choice -- Republican right or Democratic left. Since both camps are home to both the practical politicians and the purist philosophers, both sides remain relatively true to their fundamentals, providing Americans a real choice at the polls. In Canada, we are a nation of Goldilocks, avoiding what seem like extreme ideas because there is always a mushy lukewarm safe choice in the middle.

What does all this mean with this election? If the Liberals fail, and a government forms out of an informal Conservative-NDP coalition, Canada will still have to muddle through the middle. But unlike Goldilocks and her warm porridge, our meal will have to made out of a mixture of too hot and too cold. I think that could be a good thing. When the Liberals steal ideas in order to cobble together their comfortably warm offering to Canadians, there is a only the commitment to holding on to power.

But if the Conservatives and the NDP are forced to build a program that both can live with, I know each side will be making demands and accepting compromises while being guided by a core philosophy that reaches past merely winning seats. It won't be easy, and the resulting porridge may be hotter or colder than it ought to be because of those imperfect compromises, but I have a feeling that honesty from both sides will serve Canadians well.

If nothing else, the experience might finally make us comfortable with expanding our political palate. I think Canada is long past being ready for something more than just a formless lump of room temperature porridge served as a comfortable and non-threatening substitute for vision.