A Plan For The Future Of The Liberal Party

6 Ideas For Reform, Under Trudeau Or After Him

19% of Canadians believe the country is on the right track. 22% approve of the job the government is doing. 11% of people - including only 27% of 2021 Liberal Voters - think the government deserves to be re-elected. And the Liberal vote share is down to 20%, a 25% deficit. All of these findings are from Abacus’ latest, post-Freeland resignation poll. It’s consistent with a deteriorating government, as last night’s 50% loss in the formerly-Liberal held Cloverdale Langley City byelection showed. (Before anybody points out the turnout as a reason that doesn’t matter, maybe the complete lack of purpose from the Liberal Party is part of why nobody showed up.)

If you don’t think Justin Trudeau’s position is untenable, then you’re an idiot. I’m currently watching Marc Miller defend the idea of keeping Trudeau in the job, and it is making me genuinely wonder how stupid he thinks we all are. That the Minister For The Wedding Party refuses to say the Prime Minister is staying in the job is notable, I guess, but him flying into David Cochrane’s questions pretending that those facts from Abacus and every other pollster aren’t real just makes him look like he’s living with his head in the clouds. But that’s not what I want to rant about.

What I want to do is make a case for what the Liberal Party should and can be, one that is theoretically implementable by the new Cabinet of Justin Trudeau’s and also could be a mantle of a new leader or of leadership candidates. We need to articulate a purpose for the Liberal Party again, because for whatever you think about any specific policy or specific Ministry, it is nearly impossible to articulate what this government and what this party stands for. It is a mess of contradictions, a web of incoherence. Is it a party of pragmatism or of radicalism? Is it a party of managing the country well or of radically changing what the country looks like? Does the government look at the way that minority voters are moving right, not just in the US but also in Surrey at October’s BC election, and think the response is to move left on cultural issues or moderate? How does the party navigate the increasing tide of Conservatives using transphobia in specific circumstances (sports and parental consent, namely) as a political wedge issue? I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody knows.

That ambiguity is oftentimes presented as a virtue - the amorphous role the Liberal Party holds in Canadian politics allows them to be our great survivor politically. It has allowed the party to embrace deficit and debt reduction in the 90s and tax and spend welfare state expansion in the 60s and be the same party. It’s allowed us to revive ourselves without the ideological purity that holds the NDP back, and it’s stopped us from splitting and having to be cobbled back together like the Conservatives. But it allows the party to become anchored to personalities and resemble more a cult than a political party or a movement.

What we need is to use this opportunity to rebuild the Liberal Party into not a specific flavour of ideology, but into a fighting force that is not merely the inherited whims of the person who happens to win. We need to embrace core liberal and Liberal values that give the party a structure and a purpose even when leaders find it displeasing. We need to strengthen the party so that leaders cannot anoint themselves God-Kings, and we need to strengthen the accountability measures for when leaders fail us and those values. There are 1000 ideas of how to fix the Liberal Party, but in classic Scrimshaw fashion, here’s six of them.

Actually Embrace Expertise Even When It’s Difficult

For as much as “believe science” was said in the run up to 2015, the Liberal Party is exactly as anti-science and anti-expert as any other party when it suits them. Whether it’s economists decrying the GST holiday as a complete waste of money that won’t help those who need it, the party’s treatment of the housing and immigration issues in the majority years and in 2022, the Director of Public Prosecutions, or any number of other people who have been discarded or ignored from the party that made expertise a virtue, it’s not acceptable.

The party should create permanent Advisory Committees on key issues, from economics to climate to housing and any number of other issues. There is so much expertise that is willing and eager to help shape the future of the progressive movement in Canada. Let them do so, and make it a permanent part of the party. Obviously people can come and go, but make it a formal process with public recommendations and reports both in opposition and government so that we can be leading on issues and not having to hastily reverse all of our ideas once we’re in a crisis.

It would also elevate truth and honesty in politics by making it clear when a Minister or Prime Minister is acting in a ludicrous way. By having regular recommendations and keeping the pipeline of ideas clear, there will be a record of what independent experts think is the best way to, say, help the poor and working class with the cost of living, and make any dumb and bad populist, regressive measures look like crap. Ideally, the existence of the panel will kill dumb and bad measures from the start.

Biennial Leadership Reviews Of The Whole Membership

Leadership reviews are, in a general sense, a joke, because the only people who get to vote are the people who have the ability to pay for convention fees. Now, even then, the Liberals have ended the need for them entirely, a mechanism that deprives the membership of their right to voice an opinion. Now, in a sense it’s not that important to the governance of the country, but in another it is.

Justin Trudeau has gotten away with so much crap over the years - not changing the voting system, meddling with the decision of an independent Director of Public Prosecutions, trying to sole source a nearly billion dollar government contract to a charity run by his personal friends who had paid his mother 6 figures in speaking fees, focusing on demand side housing solutions for six years, bringing in millions of people to suppress wages, and more - in part because he feels no accountability measure. If he felt like he needed to be on his game it’s likely he’d make less terrible fucking decisions. But he doesn’t.

We live in an internet age, and it should be very easy for the whole of the membership to voice their opinion about their leader in a regular, confidential way. If the leadership felt the need to listen to the membership for their own survival, maybe a PM wouldn’t allow his head to get so firmly lodged up his ass in the first place, and allow a PMO culture where any dissent is viewed as treason.

Acknowledge That The Country Needs To Be Brought Along On Cultural Change

Remember when we changed the Canadian anthem in a span of months with no meaningful public debate? That was really fucking stupid. We did it because we felt bad that an MP who cared about this was dying so Parliament decided to honour him by passing the lyric change. It’s dumb, and go to any sporting event and listen to what the crowd is singing, it’s the old one. But it’s not just the anthem that makes people roll their eyes.

The left has embraced a huge amount of performative behaviour in the last decade, be it land acknowledgements before meetings, sensitivity trainings that are either complete wastes of time and money designed to make grifting consultancies rich or so insanely restrictive as to render almost any form of speech somehow offensive, or non-attendance at Pride being a sign of anti-queer bigotry, that do nothing to advance a cause.

If you want to advance opportunity and raise the living standards of Indigenous Canadians, increase how much you fund services for them and support accountability measures that expose corruption in on-reserve communities so that their funds are going as far as possible. If you want to actually advance the cause of a more anti-racist or anti-sexist world, don’t focus on trying to police word choice or jokes and focus on blind resume processes so that a guy named James doesn’t have a better chance of getting a job than an Alison or a Malik. And if you want to advance the cause of queer rights don’t focus on Pride and start coming up with a strategy to minimize the impacts on trans kids from the coming assaults on them that doesn’t give up on them or paint us as out of touch idiots.

What the left likes is these kinds of virtue signals because it stops us from having to actually do anything. You yelled at Pierre Poilievre for not going to Pride, that means you’re a good person. You acknowledged that you’re on stolen land, yippee. Guess what? Whether you acknowledge it or not doesn’t make the water any cleaner on reserve or reduce the disparity in poverty levels by race..

We need to ditch this virtue signalling nonsense so that when we advance policies to help specific groups of people - strengthening enforcement of pay equity laws, making hiring more colourblind, plugging gaps that become exposed in anti-discrimination law - we aren’t just tarred with the brush of bitching about diversity crap again. Proposals like the Ontario NDP’s Drag Bar Safety Zones are the exact kind of thing we should publicly admonish and drag through the mud as the anti-free speech, paternalist woke nonsense that it is. The country will not follow us blindly on culture wars. We have to listen and pick our fights carefully, and focus less on virtue signalling and more on actionable priorities for marginalized communities.

Embrace The Principle Of Fiscal Discipline

I’ve pitched this idea for Bonnie Crombie a thousand times now, but we need a permanent, standing Commission Of Audit at the federal level to identify waste and programs that have either delivered their intended purpose or are failing their purpose badly, and to identify where dollars can be used better. We need to embrace the principle that every tax dollar must be spent zealously and with the utmost care so we can deliver the policies we need without eye watering deficits.

If it exposes little, fine, we’ve at least shown the country we care about the issue. If it exposes billions in inefficiency and waste, great - that’s billions we get to spend on building more homes or funding more R&D or boosting health care access on reserves that we don’t need to borrow or tax our way to.

Empower Caucus To Hold The Leader Accountable

Membership accountability is important, and I want it too, but voting for The Reform Act at the start of every Parliament should be mandatory party policy and the right for caucus to enact Reform Act powers should be replicated in the party constitution.

Stop Treating Dissent As Treason

This is less a structural move and much more a cultural crisis in the party - any internal dissent is immediately met with hostility and contempt, and the impugning of motives. Both from a membership level and an elites level, anybody who is seen to oppose the Leader or the party or any policy is a traitor. When I was writing screeds about Pierre Poilievre sucked the PMO and senior staffers loved me. Now that I have been more critical of the leader and been calling for him to go my soft power - as much or little as I have ever had - is weakened. I am routinely called a conservative and even a puppet of foreign totalitarians as if that’s a normal and acceptable thing to say to people because there can be no alternative. It’s not that I have a core set of principles that don’t change just because Justin Trudeau needs them to, it’s that I’m somehow secretly a conservative (despite the fact that OLP/Crombie staff hate me these days for being too much of a progressive …).

We need a whole party embrace of dissent as a necessary and virtuous part of the process. If we continue to tar anybody who disagrees with Dear Leader as disloyal and ice them out of the party or of influence, we will languish in political obscurity. Worst of all, we will deserve it.