"The Liberal Party of Canada’s core assumptions in politics are about power"

Political ideas (2)
That was how Alfred Apps, the president of the Liberal Party of Canada began an op ed summarizing what the party stands for. The op ed was excerpted from a speech he had made.

If you've spent much time around members of the party, it will be a very familiar line to you. My father, a card-carrying Liberal like his father before him, told me this over and over from when I was a boy in much the same tone as you might say, "that is the whole of the Torah, the rest is just commentary."

And when Liberals claim not to have an ideology, this is how they begin. But if you look at the rest of this piece, you will notice that Apps is also trying to accommodate this notion to something else.

First he gives us the traditional Liberal view:

... the primary ongoing role of the state should be to transfer power from the powerful to the less powerful.

In practice that has meant, that the government should act as a broker between interests or, as the Doug Saudners piece that began this discussion has it:

The big-tent parties functioned, during their glory years in the postwar decades, as the paternal overlords of protected, closed national economies, engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries ...

You might object that Apps description describes something more morally pure and that is true but in practice that purity transfers into the brokerage practice Saunders describes. And it matters little whether we are being moral idealists or hard-nosed pragmatists (two stances the Liberals have adopted as has suited their purpose of the moment) for that approach is different from this:

... because we believe in the primacy of the individual, we think of that power being placed in the hands of individuals to the maximum extent possible.

And here, we have, I think the real crux the Liberals face. They are a party whose real ideology—however much they deny having one—has been to continually expand the government's power to act as a broker between interest groups that is trying to adjust to a time when civic life has become much more individualistic (and see the post immediately below for evidence that Liberal issues are becoming less meaningful).

And it has become more individualistic in a large part because the project of serving interest groups has changed the way we see public goods. But that is a subject for net week.