The Liberal Party Is Worth Saving

On Anger And Frustration

(I am aware that it is a Monday, and that I have vaguely committed myself to a policy of US columns every Monday through the election. There’s rumours that the New York Times/Siena are in the field with (presumably) a national poll right now, and so I’ll punt this week’s column on Convention Bounces, Flooded Zones, and the Damage Done for a couple days to let them and any other media pollsters to come out with pre-debate national polls.)

Last week, I had a meltdown about the state of the Federal Liberal Party in these pages and on the Scrimshaw Show, a meltdown that I mostly do believe still. I do think the party needs a new leader, I do think our current malaise will risk killing the party, and I do think we are making a massive mistake pretending that voters who are worse off than in 2015 have some obligation to give a shit about the advances of others. It’s not considered selfish when the old vote for policies that protect their interests; our political interests would be better off if we stopped yelling at those significantly worse off than in 2015 (namely those who don’t own property and/or those who don’t have kids) to be grateful others are better off. (Yes, this is vaguely about the reaction to the Soo thing, but not solely that.)

My criticisms of this government in specific all stand up to the scrutiny of passed time, though the burn it all down temperament is probably unfair. Because this is a political party that, love the Liberal Party or loathe it, wants to hold power to achieve things. And given the current state of parts of the progressive left in this country, people who want to hold power are in fucking short supply. Elle Canada wrote about eight “incredible” women who broke glass ceilings in the last year on Sunday, a list that initially included ex-NDP MPP Sarah Jama. Jama, of course, was booted from the NDP caucus for lying to her leadership, not for supporting the Palestinian people as she lies, but she’s also an anti-Semite and a denier of Hamas’ atrocities, including explicitly claiming the IDF had admitted that the claims of Hamas raping victims were misinformation. (This is, of course, untrue, and Haaretz, the Guardian, the NYT, and others all independently managed to report and stand by claims of Israeli victims being raped.)

Fae Johnstone, a leading queer rights activist, made sure to show her support for Jama, a person who claimed that her removal from the NDP caucus and subsequent Legislative censure was proof that Zionists control the entire Ontario government. The NDP hit 15% in last week’s Leger polling, as Jagmeet Singh’s strategy of railing against a government he is literally responsible for propping up works about as well as getting an 8 pack by eating more pizza and drinking more beer. Nora Loreto, who is what passes for a pseudo-intellectual thinker on the Canadian Left these days, called Hamas an “imperfect group” last night on Twitter.

So yeah, the Liberal Party doesn’t seem so fucking bad now, compared to the utter shit show of the non-Liberal left in this country. Obviously there are many smart and respectable people on the left who reside beside some of the dumbest people on the internet, but those who give a single shit about achieving progressive outcomes have to remember that the choice is not between the Liberals as they are and some magical left alternative that’s puppies and rainbows, but the actual Canadian left that cannot get their heads out of their asses for long enough to get behind the idea that someone who claims a Zionist conspiracy is responsible for her own decisions is someone to shun, not to embrace. 

I know I spend a lot of time shitting on the crank conspiracists both inside and outside the Liberal tent these days, but there’s a good reason for it. The Canadian left in general and the Liberal Party of Canada in specific need to rise to the moment. We are facing a very real threat in a Pierre Poilievre government. I don’t believe he represents a properly Trumpian threat, but I don’t think that matters. A bad Conservative government ends with people dying and dead, like the people in Alberta who got cancer diagnoses so late in the process due to wait lists they’re too far gone for treatment. It’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that the last time I was in hospital in Ontario it took 10 hours to be seen. To the extent that Canada is broken, the roots of that brokenness lie in the 20 years from Chretien’s (necessary) austerity budget of 1995 through 2015. Yes, Trudeau’s fucked up plenty, but the cuts to future spending under Chrétien that never really got undone in a meaningful way have led to atrophy.

Had Chrétien used the surplus after the lean years of the late 90s differently - instead of the early 2000s tax cuts, he had gone for higher spending - this country would have been in a much better place. If Doug Ford took all the money he’s wasting on highways to save 30 seconds and subsidizing license plate stickers and getting booze in stores sooner then maybe we’d not have quite so many school teachers setting up their classes in fucking portables. That’s the cost of Conservative and conservative governance, and that’s a high fucking cost at a time when the country desperately needs more investment in capacity and not less.

The Liberal Party angers me because I have seen what it can do at its best. The Liberal Party is an institution that saved the country from constitutional strife, introduced universal health care, the CPP, kept us out of Iraq against an almighty pressure campaign and intense public anger, that cut child poverty functionally in half in a four year term and is making it ever easier for women to enter the workforce. This government has done a lot of good, and even though almost none of it has helped me I still feel a bit of pride in having helped elect it in 2015. That said, it’s worth being angry at it.

The Liberal Party is too important an institution in this country to accept its descent into vanity and ego. The Liberal Party is too important to let it be led astray by the vainglorious and the delusional. It is worth fighting for if only because it is the only vehicle we have to enact progressive change. The broad anti-Liberal left have shown themselves to be utterly useless, failing very basic tests of seriousness on an ongoing basis. The NDP cannot be a useful vehicle, weighed down by the decision to get bearhugged by the Liberals and their refusal to get rid of the most useless major party leader since Iggy. So it’s up to those of us who want progress to live in reality and take the path available to us. The Liberal Party is the only mechanism we have to progressive change.

Progressives and liberals do not help our party by denying how utterly fucked we are. If we continue to stick our heads in the sand we will get royally fucked at the next election, and Poilievre will have such a big majority that it will take 3 terms for us to come back from the damage. As Bonnie Crombie’s showing us in Ontario, it’s easy to get seduced by the pitch of one quick fix to save us. There is no guarantee that unpopularity from the Conservatives will bring us back to the front easily. Denying the fact that Justin Trudeau cannot be the leader at the next election if we want to keep Poilievre under 200 seats is a recipe for Skippy to win 235.

Will Anita Anand or whoever else keep Skippy to 185? No idea, but I know Justin can’t. The guy who lost St. Paul’s cannot be the guy to try and salvage Halton. It won’t work, and the Liberal Party is too important to let poll denialism and personal affection change what needs to happen.