Liberals Cannot Be Trapped By Form Over Substance

We Need Renewal, Not Dogma

Somehow the most annoying recurring Twitter discourse this year hasn’t been anything that’s happened in Canada, as frustrating as the Carleton-truthers or whatever other election nonsense has been, but the discourse about Abundance, both the book and the concept. I still haven’t read the book, but I engaged with enough of the interminable and never ending Klein and Thompson podcast tour to get their general point. And the reason the discourse is so fucking annoying is that people aren’t arguing about the ideas, but the various grievances that people bring to both the project and the broader movement.

This is true of the advocates for Abundance, in that yes Matt Yglesias and Klein and others can be annoying as shit and (especially MattY) use this as a reason to litigate his other beefs with the left of the Democratic movement, but also for the left critics. Focusing on the other people advocating for these ideas - corporate interests, usually - and ignoring the status quo they’re defending is always a mistake, but it’s one people make often. The reason is that people don’t like to admit they’re wrong.

Why do some people claim to be shocked Donald Trump is doing the things he very explicitly promised? Because they didn’t think he would, and so they don’t want to admit they were wrong to vote for him. Some people do admit explicitly that voting for Trump was a mistake - and more importantly a knowable mistake - but most don’t want to admit they could get got like that.

The same thing has happened on the left in both Canada and the US. In the US, blue states have created too many points of veto for any major project to actually get built or built at scale, as environmental law is often broad enough to allow for any sort to delay and kill projects. The fact that California High Speed Rail, authorized by ballot measure in 2008, didn’t get shovels in the ground until 2015 and won’t be open till 2031 - and likely won’t connect California’s two biggest cities at the speed promised - should cause a lot of people to reexamine their priors. Plenty of people have had their minds changed by new facts, and other refuse.

Immigration in Canada is another topic where we see a similar phenomenon, or at least did - and I must confess to having been one of those who engaged in this pseudo-intellectual nonsense of caring more about who made the arguments and not the merits of the arguments itself. The case for restrictionist immigration policy was so often made by odious people that it became easy to ignore their arguments, and it was a failure that haunted the government for years. The thing is, we’ve seen the government already significantly backtrack on the immigration levels, and it’s working.

An April report has rent in the GTA down 5% or more year over year basically everywhere. If your response to that is that 5% is a drop in the bucket compared to the rises in recent years, you’re not wrong, but it’s also worth pointing out that the immigration cuts are the first part of a multi pronged approach to help solve the housing crisis, and a lot of the solutions from the Housing Accelerator Fund and the various efforts towards liberalization of planning rules and zoning haven’t worked through the system yet. Plus the decline of interest rates has led to robust housing start figures everywhere outside Ontario. As more years of immigration cuts flow through - or more importantly, as foreign students who graduate and leave are replaced by fewer new students - we’re seeing considerable potential for considerable real terms rent reduction. Plus everything the Liberals promised in the platform, which will also help.

All told, it should probably make Liberals look inside themselves that the way they could deliver that is through deregulation and immigration restriction. It’s two ideas we are often opposed to, reflexively, and yet in these specific circumstances there is merit to them. And it’s worth attempting to use this time that having won the election gives us to figure out what other bits of Liberal orthodoxy don’t actually hold up to scrutiny.

The reason it’s worth doing is both political and practical. The political case is that breaking with your side’s political orthodoxy is a great way of being seen to be a Different Kind Of politician, which can win you seats your predecessors couldn’t. We saw that with Harper, whose political outcomes would have been much worse if he had continued to hold his old views on gay marriage and abortion - and more importantly had vocalized those views after about 2006. Tony Blair arguably went too far in moderating for political success, but it’s worth pointing out that he picked high profile fights with the left to get away with fairly left wing governance stances while looking like a moderate.

On the practical side, however, it’s clear that ideological rigidity doesn’t work. We wouldn’t be in this spot if it did. The problem that progressives have to face is that a lot of the ideas that we thought we had won the argument on weren’t won at all, either because we failed the politics or because the ideas were kind of shit. The aspirations of progressive politics are and remain good, and I’m proud to call myself a progressive, but some of the ideas were rubbish.

The solution for the Canadian left right now is not to dig our heels in and to pretend that everything is working fine when it’s not, but to embrace the fact that despite royally fucking up a lot of things, in an electoral sense we got lucky as shit to survive this election. We now have a chance to learn from our mistakes and prove that we can and will do better, as opposed to losing and having to beg the electorate to take it on faith we’re different.

On crime, on immigration, on the politics of equity and social progressivism, and on housing policy, the Liberal record is shit. We’ve already done the ditching of orthodoxy on housing and immigration and it’s starting to work. We need to embrace it further. We need to rethink how we advocate for the dispossessed and the marginalized, we need to rethink who we think of as dispossessed and marginalized, and we need to think about how efforts to do good actually land.

Much of the Liberal record in the last 9 years was about winning the announcement - getting good sounding announcements into the news. The focus now has to shift to getting good outcomes. If that means sounding like a Conservative I really, truly couldn’t give less of a shit. Not every conservative idea is bad, like not every Liberal idea is good. What matters is achieving outcomes, and too often we focus on policies with an all or nothing approach that conflates fealty to individual ideas with fealty to giving a shit about the general principle. That kind of fealty to form over substance must die. If it doesn’t, the Liberal Party’s reign in office will die instead.

(With the new Carney Cabinet coming this week, and provincial governance in this country continuing apace, I’m looking forward to continuing to make this site a meeting point for pragmatic progressivism, strong scrutiny of centre-left parties, and continue to serve as an ideas factory for candidates and parties. The election, and the general last six months, has been a whirlwind, and I hope it is the beginning of a renewed effort to be useful to the cause of good progressive governance.

Obviously on Saturday I broke the news of the Terrebonne recount flipping to the Liberals on Twitter, a fun bit of insider info that I was happy to share broadly. It’s interesting to be someone who actually gets told things, but it’s a testament to my readers that anybody cares enough to tell me anything. I’m so grateful for the doors you’ve opened for me, and for your trust as I walk through them.

Consider a paid subscription if you can - all of my work will as always remain free, but it’s a way to show appreciation and support me as the fight turns to Ontario and Quebec and everything that’s happening in Alberta, and wherever else this crazy political era we are in takes us.)