A NIGHT IN THE SWAMP.

For three long hours last Thursday evening the Public Policy Forum’s 30th annual awards dinner nominally celebrated “extraordinary Canadians at home and abroad.” It turned out to be an all-star Big “L” Liberal event that essentially doubled as a fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Canada policy agenda. About 1,500 attendees sat around 150 tables at $6,800 each to help produce at least $1 million in new funds the PPF can use to generate endless papers and reports providing ideological backing for Trudeau-style economic interventionism.

It wasn’t just the million bucks ( tax deductible) raised from government- influencing table buyers — Bombardier, Bell Canada, CBC/ Radio Canada, Enbridge, IBM Canada, GE Canada, Rogers, Suncor, the banks, management consultants, Unifor, lobby firms Earnscliffe, Hill+Knowlton and Navigator, major universities from Calgary to PEI.

The host was Edward Greenspon, former Globe and Mail editor, long-time Trudeauphile and now president and CEO of the forum. Greenspon’s tough role Thursday night in the cavernous Toronto convention centre was to introduce the evening’s master of ceremonies — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In others words, welcome to Canada’s undrained national policy swamp, where everybody knows the game — and everybody else’s name. The whole evening was a pretext for a Liberal hug-fest filled with deep-eyed handshakes and arm-grabbing congratulatory gestures.

How many policy operations would be able to snag the prime minister to act as feel- good Friars- Club host for an evening of self- indulgent, self- congratulatory monologues on the greatness of Canada as a diverse, caring nation that is masterfully governed by the bureaucrats, politicians and plugged-in corporate and private collaborators assembled in the room?

The PPF bills itself as “an independent, non-governmental organization dedicated to improving the quality of government in Canada.” But there was nothing independent about Thursday’s event. Trudeau used the opportunity to rehash some of his themes ( global anxiety, middle class, need for new government thinking, artificial intelligence, fintech) before he moved on to introduce the night’s awards.

Among the recipients were Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court Justice appointed by prime minister Jean Chrétien; squishy Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi; federal bureaucrat Yaprak Baltacıolu, who is now secretary of the Treasury Board; famed historian Margaret MacMillan; and speed skater Johann Koss, founder of Right to Play International.

That none of these undeniably accomplished Canadians (although Koss is Norwegian) would be card-carrying Liberals is beside the point. They all support the fundamental Liberal agenda.

One other achievement award Thursday night solidified the new PPF commitment to Trudeauism. It went to Dominic Barton, global managing partner with McKinsey & Company. Born in Canada, Barton is mostly based in London and travels the globe promoting McKinsey and his power-point ideas on economic policy. By amazing coincidence, Barton is also the head of Trudeau’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth.

So there on stage was the prime minister introducing one of his own top policy advisers to receive an award as a great Canadian, with PPF’s Greenspon warmly offering a congratulatory handshake and arm tug.

In his comments, Barton brazenly touted the Trudeau agenda as shaped through his advisory council, with talk of raising the median income in Canada and the Trudeau government’s “commitment… to do something fundamentally different.”

Earlier in the day, Barton delivered a keynote speech to a PPF breakfast summit on the release of a PPF national roundtables report on how to position Canada as an agrifood powerhouse or, as Greenspon described the venture: “Canada can seize this opportunity to be a global agrifood superpower.”

Also during his visit to Toronto, Barton dropped in on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition and into the warm embrace of Michael Enright, the soft-ball-lobbing leftist who let Barton roll out his interventionist ideas and his subversive plans for corporate governance.

Under Enright’s guidance, Barton was drawn to one of his favourite claims. Capitalism is in crisis, he says, because corporations are still overly focused on profits, short- termism and shareholder value. As he has in the past, Barton blamed this corporate myopia on Nobel economist Milton Friedman, who in 1970 wrote a New York Times commentary titled “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

As usual, Barton failed to inform Enright that Friedman opposed expanding corporate responsibility beyond profits and law-abiding productive activity because he feared an intolerable installation of undemocratic corporatist power.

Friedman’s commentary was framed as a warning about the true nature of a system that expanded corporate power into the social realm. “Here the businessman — self-selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders — is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds — all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on.”

Barton is also one of the editors of Re-imagining Capitalism, a 2016 book that aims to undermine free market capitalism and install something else. Friedman makes several straw- dog appearances in the book, but each reference by different authors manages to drop Friedman’s contextual warning. “The doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”

With the Barton award, the 30th annual Public Policy Forum event consolidated the PPF as a Liberal policy front. That’s not new ground for the PPF, but it has rarely been as dramatically confirmed as it was last Thursday.