Can Liberals become a truly liberal party?

Wilfrid Laurier may well guide policy under Trudeau

“Audacity and ambition, always,” Justin Trudeau declared within minutes of being named Liberal leader.

“We must have evidencebased decision-making,” Liberal MPs proclaim, virtually any time one of them is handed a live microphone.

Which begs this question: What manner of policy can we expect to eventually emerge from the latest iteration of the Liberal party, assuming its new leader intends to keep his promises?

The next Liberal platform, Trudeau has acknowledged, needs to be a reinvention. It must appeal to long-suffering, diehard Liberals, but also to those who’ve moved to the New Democrats, or the Conservatives, since 2004. The plan must be fully costed, as has been standard since Jean Chrétien’s Red Book of 1993. Taken together, it’s a tall order, some might say impossible. How will Trudeau manage it?

He hasn’t said, in so many words. But he has dropped broad hints. Last December, Trudeau referred to Sir Wilfrid Laurier as his “secondfavourite prime minister.”

Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s close friend and a senior adviser, has said that he and Trudeau are “classical liberals.” Trudeau’s speeches are peppered with references to free trade and, this week in the House, lower taxes. His economic and social policies, he has said, will be built around a single goal, that of improving the lot of the middle class. He often speaks about his father’s Charter of Rights, which guarantees equality for all before the law.

Here’s what all that points to: a peculiarly modern, Canadian brand of libertarianism. For Laurier — who was prime minister from 1896 to 1911 — was famously libertarian. Classical liberalism, in a Canadian context, begins with him. The nub of it is a belief in individual freedom and less, not more, state control over economic decisions, but also personal ones.

Libertarianism’s great intellectual virtue is that it is internally consistent, across the range of issues that any government faces. Its great drawback, in practical political terms, is that no Canadian government in modern memory has embraced it. Since Pierre Trudeau, Liberal governments in particular have been progressive socially but statist economically.

The deficit-fighting and trade agenda of the federal government in the 1990s may be the lone exception. But arguably, this partial outbreak of classical liberalism occurred not by design but by necessity. For a federal party to adopt classical liberalism by choice would be different and, in modern Canada, new.

Social policy in such a system would look distinctly left and economic policy distinctly right. The tactical political result would be a “fork” — a two-pronged attack from the centre, outflanking both Conservatives and New Democrats on what is now their home turf. In every case, policy would be “evidencebased,” in that outcomes could be measured against metrics of human liberty, equality, justice and prosperity for the middle class.

So for example, on drug and justice policy, in addition to legalizing marijuana, jail terms for non-violent crimes might be reduced through diversion. Prostitution might be legalized and regulated. At the same time, barriers to inter-provincial and international trade, investment and commerce might be systematically reduced. Business competition would be enhanced, state subsidies to corporations reduced.

Social policy would be measured against these barometers: Does the policy foster equality of opportunity and equality under the law? Does it foster individual freedom? Does it foster personal responsibility? Is it just?

Of course, there are enormous obstacles in the way of such idealistic and radical notions becoming Liberal party policy, let alone the policy of a future federal government. Chief among them is that most modern Liberals, that is any who remember governments from Lester B. Pearson onward, are not actually liberals; they’re social democrats. The philosophical shift would be painful for those who believe bigger and more government is always better. In order to be consistent, such a shift would also require some rethinking on Trudeau’s part. It’s difficult to see how supply management in dairy and poultry squares with a factbased system dedicated to fostering prosperity for consumers, i.e., the middle class.

But here’s the potential benefit: A classically liberal Liberal Party would be, for the first time in modern memory, about an ideal. It would be a party based on principle. And it would be distinct from either Mulcair’s NDP or the Harper Conservative Party, both of which are shifting to the centre these days, in pursuit of power.

This is one way Trudeau can deliver policy that is both true to his party’s history — though distantly — and to his father’s legacy, and to his promise to uphold the interests of the middle class. It may be the only way he can do so.

The trail of bread crumbs suggests he knows this and would like to try. Whether he will — and whether he’ll succeed, if he does try — remains to be seen.