Can the Liberal party find a centre with broad circumference?
By Paul Adams
Oct 15, 2012
In the late nineteenth century, the charismatic and eccentric British politician Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) toyed with creating a new Centre party. “All centre, no circumference,” one of his political foes remarked.
Until the last decade, Canada’s Liberal party had the broadest circumference of any centre party in the world. The question for Justin Trudeau or whoever next leads the Liberal party is whether there actually is a centre for the party to re-occupy.
The modern Liberal party was re-engineered a half century ago by Lester Pearson, who made it into the quintessential party of the “mixed economy”, a formula that was popular across the western world. The booming private sector would be guided by government, but not consumed by it. Keynesian fiscal policy would manage the ups and downs of the business cycle and social programs would allow the emergence of a capitalism with a human face.
In its day, this really was a politics of the centre. It expressed a very broad social and political consensus that extended from labour unions to chambers of commerce. Working people had good jobs in the private and the public sector, many of them unionized. They appreciated the additional economic security they got from public health care, old age pensions, and unemployment insurance.
The ideology and the demographics were a perfect fit.
In many countries, even conservative parties competed to be in the centre.
The British Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had actually written a book called The Middle Way. In the United States, Dwight Eisenhower beat the arch-conservative Robert Taft to take the Republican nomination in 1952, and governed as a centrist. A decade later Richard Nixon declared “We are all Keynesians now”, echoing Milton Friedman of all people.
But the centre did not hold, either here or elsewhere. The oil crisis of the 1970s introduced “stagflation” and overturned many of the economic assumptions of the old centrist politics.
In Britain, Margaret Thatcher won election in 1979, and she was very much not a centrist. Nor was Ronald Reagan, who was elected the next year. In Canada, we had Bill Bennett, Sterling Lyon, Mike Harris, and eventually Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.
Whether or not their analysis of the stagflation crisis was correct, their solutions were strong and clear: let the markets rule unfettered. The formula included deregulation, privatization, freer trade, lower government spending and taxes, and in theory at least, balanced budgets.
There was no longer a consensual centre at the heart of western politics, and the Liberals would have to choose. Startlingly, John Turner, the ultimate business Liberal, chose to reject Brian Mulroney’s free trade agreement with the U.S., calling it “the fight of my life”.
But Turner lost the election. His successor, Jean Chrétien moved the party away from its opposition to the free trade agreement – though the rhetoric lingered after the substance had changed.
In power after 1993, the Liberal party also moved decisively away from its centrist election platform, which called for “moderate” deficit reduction coupled with new social programs such as day care. Instead, the government cut funds for social programs, aimed to eliminate the deficit rather than reduce it, and eventually cut debt and taxes.
Significantly, Paul Martin adopted the “no deficit rule” – an explicit renunciation of the Keynesian notion that government fiscal policy should be used to manage the ups and downs of the business cycle. Jean Chrétien promised in the 1997 election that no more than half of future surpluses would be devoted to tax cuts and debt reduction, but that proved not to be the case.
In a surprising article in the Toronto Star last year, Paul Martin’s close advisor, pollster and campaign manager, David Herle, argued that growing inequality and the economic insecurity it has created for the middle class, are undermining the social basis for the Liberals’ consensus politics. He criticized the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff for their “unwillingness to veer from conservative economic orthodoxy” in addressing the problems of the middle class.
I would go further. Ignatieff called for the Harper Conservatives to introduce a stimulative budget in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, then turned around and attacked the government’s deficits. He rejected “big government” and said he wanted no new government programs, but when the campaign began, ran on the “Family Pack” of government programs. He also wanted to reduce the deficit along exactly the same track that Harper had proposed.
That wasn’t centrism. That was incoherence.
To his credit Thomas Mulcair, unlike Ignatieff or for that matter Jack Layton, has begun to show us the outlines of an economic policy that is distinct from that of the Harper government.
Mulcair wants to the oil sands to be developed according to environmental and national objectives, and not just those of the market. He’d like a lower dollar and wants a renewed emphasis on manufacturing. Soon, we will see whether he will lead his party towards more openness to international trade.
What we have in Canada today is not a consensus, and a battle over who best expresses it, but a difference of opinion on some of the fundamental issues of the economy, the sources of growth, inequality and the environment.
It is much, much harder in a time when there are such basic differences to find a political centre. Certainly, to be meaningful, “centrism” has to be more than a split-the-difference-ism, which Justin Trudeau sometimes seems to be advocating.
“We’re a pragmatic centrist party that is ready to take from the left or the right, depending on what actually works,” he said last week.
It is true that for many years most Canadians thought of themselves as centrists – whatever they might have meant by the term. There is some evidence that that may be changing. There is also evidence that Canadians are not distributed from left to right along a ideological spectrum, but clumped in the centre; rather they divide into a smaller, more cohesive conservative group and a larger, though more amorphous, progressive group.
As the Liberals struggle to rise again, they will find that for them the most persuadable voters are those on the left, not the right of the divide, and that there are relatively few in the central chasm in between.
It is sometimes said that to govern is to choose. It may be that to get back into contention for government, the Liberals may have to choose as well.
Follow Paul Adams on Twitter: @padams29
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