Libertarians provide fresh air to the fringe
Remarkable it took this long to flourish
Libertarianism? Pshaw. The term evokes images of back-to-the-landers, crackpots, survivalists and bomb-shelter dwellers, etching out their isolationist manifestos in a perfect splendour of mad, theoretical bliss. Pure libertarians are a political breed apart, not so different from Communists, and just as likely to ever attain any kind of power in Canada. That’s the received wisdom, and it’s not all wrong. And yet, there’s this: This country increasingly could benefit from a libertarian option that is healthy, voluble and represented in all 338 federal ridings. What’s remarkable is that the movement hasn’t flowered more fully before now.
Let’s consider, first, the Libertarian Party of Canada; probably as good a representative of “pure” libertarianism as you will find. As fringe parties go, our Libertarians define the genre. They fielded just a handful of candidates in Ontario and British Columbia in the last election, and in no riding won more than a few hundred votes.
That’s likely because their policies are extreme. They advocate personal property rights, privacy rights, the right to free speech, gun rights, and all other individual rights, to the nth degree. They would place severe limitations on taxation and the size of government. They would adopt a policy of strict non-involvement in world affairs. They would cancel the minimum wage, and Medicare, and the Canada Pension Plan, and welfare. They would, of course, sell off the CBC. Oh, and they would end taxation. And that’s just for starters. Ack.
But now consider the flip side, through a less swiveleyed lens. What would a more moderate version of libertarianism, call it classical liberalism, have to say about some of the more intractable problems we face today? Libertarians believe in personal freedom and equality for every individual under the law. What might that look like, translated into policy in Canada in 2014?
As we have seen time and time again, the temptation for governments to borrow and spend as a means of keeping power is virtually irresistible, the brief interlude of austerity in the 1990s notwithstanding. A national libertarian or classical liberal movement would create pressure for greater responsibility and caution from governments at all levels in imposing new taxes, in borrowing, and in spending.
Classical liberals are of course free traders; given greater influence they’d increase pressure on government to scrap dairy supply management, which is a carbuncle of interventionist, regressive, consumer-unfriendly policy left over from a bygone age. Libertarians would not tolerate interprovincial trade barriers; nor could they countenance state-owned monopolies such as the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, or the big-beer compact.
A classical liberal wave would send an equally refreshing gust of common sense blasting through some of our more insoluble so- cial problems. Church and state must be strictly separate, from a libertarian point of view; therefore, no more quixotic and unfair separate school system in Ontario. You’d have an English system and a Frenchs ystem, perhaps, but both would be secular.
Gay marriage and LGBT rights? Not an issue, because libertarianism insists that all individuals have equal rights, regardless of race, faith, gender or sexual orientation. With respect to abortion, predictably, libertarianism is pro-choice. Recreational drugs? Of course they’d be legalized and controlled, if libertarians held greater sway. So would prostitution. What transactions free people decide upon, as adults, are none of the government’s business.
Euthanasia and the right to die? Individualism suggests people should be able to choose to end their lives, or sign an end-of-life declaration that stipulates at what point they’d like to cut short their suffering, in the event of a painful, life-ending illness.
Classical liberalism or libertarianism would have plenty to say about the Indian Act, which was drafted in 1876 and reflects the colonialism and parochialism of that era. No one who reads this racist tract can come away feeling anything less than shock and shame that it still stands as Canadian law. It should be abolished; a healthy libertarian movement could help bring that about.
Are such views not already reflected in the main Canadian federal parties? Well, no. Some Conservatives like to consider themselves libertarian, but their party’s policies over the past decade, as my colleague Andrew Coyne has often pointed out, have been anything but. Pierre Trudeau was something of a libertarian, philosophically, and Justin Trudeau has called himself a classical liberal. But the Liberal party’s broad tradition is actually a melding of Lester Pearson’s pragmatism with Tommy Douglas’s socialism.
For the Libertarian Party of Canada, with its current policies, to form government, would be unthinkable. But as an idea factory, with the moderation that greater influence confers, it could make a helpful contribution. In order for that contribution to manifest, Libertarians and other outriders require a system that respects and reflects their minority opinion.
It’s a case, yet again, for proportional representation; that is to say, a distribution of power more broadly reflective of the popular vote. Fringe parties aren’t annoyances to be dispensed with. They can be incubators of ideas the established parties lack the vigour to tackle.