“By now you’ve heard the Conservatives say I have the wrong priorities,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau once said. “They mean, of course, that I don’t share their priorities. I couldn’t agree more.”
Much has been made of Trudeau’s resurrection of the Liberals. Four years ago the party was on the verge of extinction; today it stands a realistic chance of forming the next government.
It’s been a stunning turnaround, and Liberal supporters are beside themselves with delight.
But after nine straight years of Conservative rule, and 18 of the last 31 years under it, it’s fair to ask what would actually change if the Liberals took charge.
The answer? Not a heck of a lot.
“Under Mr. Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberals on most major files have become virtually indistinguishable from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives,” wrote John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail last week.
Ibbitson refers to Trudeau’s Harper-like tax, environmental, anti-terrorism and oil policies.
Beyond that, Trudeau has described the now-defunct long-gun registry, once a signature Liberal law, as a “failed” policy he will not revive.
And lest anyone think the Liberals are “NDP light,” Trudeau told reporters last week that a coalition with the NDP would not work because “there’s too many big issues on which the NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada have deep disagreements.”
Sheep’s clothing
Even before Trudeau, the Liberals were Conservatives in sheep’s clothing.
In the 1990s, the Liberals enacted the deepest health care cuts in Canadian history. They also devised what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called “swift and savage cuts” to social programs.
The Liberals slashed funding for CBC and offloaded costly services onto cash-strapped provinces and municipalities. They later “starved the beast,” as they say, by bringing in some of the biggest tax cuts in Canadian history.
In the 2000s, the Liberals publicly opposed the US-led war in Iraq while privately contributing more to the campaign than almost any “official” coalition member.
One leaked government memo confirmed Canada’s “commitment of armed-forces personnel, and billions of dollars worth of warships and warplanes to help wage the war,” according to COAT magazine.
After Iraq, the Liberals singlehandedly took Canada from peacekeeping to peacemaking in the Afghanistan war, parliamentary debate be damned.
The Liberals spent years appeasing the left wing of their party by endlessly promising goodies such as national daycare and then never delivering on those pledges.
It’s all an illustration of how the Liberals stayed in power for 13 straight years ending in 2006. If you can appeal to small-c conservatives with your governance and small-l liberals with your rhetoric, you’re assured of broad support.
All of this is quite frustrating for more leftist Liberals who want to believe they are voting for something new, fresh, progressive. To this day many of them gush every time they picture Jean Chrétien “refusing” to join the Iraq war. What a farce.
There are of course some differences between Canada’s two main parties, but none of them seem all that lucid or exciting.
The Conservatives continue to cling to the meaningless war against marijuana, a drug as ubiquitous as ever, while the Liberals promise to legalize the stuff.
The Tories and Liberals differed on the recent vote to extend and expand Canada’s military mission against ISIS. The mission, of course, goes on.
The Liberals will reverse the Tory decision to fine Canadians who refuse to fill out the long-form census due to privacy concerns. They’ll further “enhance” the Canada Pension Plan and build more affordable housing than the Conservatives are building.
Or so they say.
Whether the Conservatives or Liberals win the next election, things will basically stay the same.
And you know what? That must be what Canadians want.
