After the firewall

Red-Green colourblindness is a thing. Plus, an important visitor

It says “Red,” right?

To understand why some Ontario Liberals are eager to have the province’s Green Party leader Mike Schreiner lead them, it helps if you recall that the gap between the two parties has never been smaller. Liberals and Greens were separated by 1.96 million votes and 72 seats in 2003. By last autumn’s election, the gap had shrunk to 838,000 votes and 7 seats. If this goes on, the Liberals are going to owe Schreiner seats anyway, so what the heck. Brian Lilley’s column says the provincial Liberal party “looks foolish” by reaching out to Schreiner. Fair enough, but do they particularly look more foolish this week than they did before?

I saw a Liberal acquaintance on TV saying the Draft Schreiner gang “don’t represent” the party. Which is surprising, because several of them just did: eight of the signatories were candidates in the 2022 election. So there are as many 2022 Liberal candidates sitting on that letter as there are sitting in the provincial legislature. Other signatories include a former leader of the party, Lyn McLeod, and Pat Sorbara, who ran the last campaign the Liberals won in 2014. Maybe, for all anyone knows, the last they’ll ever win.

To be honest, I have no dog in this race. Ontario’s provincial Liberals have more than enough trouble on their hands without having to worry about advice from me. Looking back at my coverage of the main leaders’ debate in last year’s election, I see I forgot to take notes every time Schreiner spoke. Maybe that’s a selling point! Mostly today I just want to say that reaching outside the party for a saviour isn’t inherently anti-Liberal. In fact, as leadership recruitment tactics go, it’s about as common as giving lifers a try.

Time for a remedial walk down memory lane. John English’s biography of Pierre Trudeau reminds us that he supported the NDP in the mid-’60s, joining the Liberals only because he didn’t think his party of natural inclination could win power. Every serious candidate in the 1968 federal leadership race had been an elected Liberal, at the federal or provincial level, for longer than Trudeau. Michael Ignatieff’’s chief selling point in 2006 was that he’d been safely distant during the party’s then-recent calamities; same for Gerard Kennedy. The other presumed front-runner in that race was the notorious lifelong Liberal, Bob Rae. (The surprise winner that year was Stéphane Dion, who by 2006 was able to run as the candidate of Liberal stability — even though when Jean Chrétien plucked him from academe a decade earlier, the knock against Dion was precisely that he didn’t know the party’s traditions.) In a long electoral career, Rae ran against Liberals in way more elections than he ran with them. Dominique Anglade ran for Quebec’s Coalition Avenir Québec in 2012 before leading the province’s Liberals. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little parties, and the Ontario Liberals didn’t use to be one.

You say Schreiner is a doctrinaire who favours a massive expansion of the state in pursuit of some dream of ideological purity? Wait — are you sure he’s not a Liberal? I mean, we’ve got one of those in Ottawa.

The main reason I’m more fascinated by the Draft Schreiner movement than I ever was with Mike Schreiner is that sometimes, and it seems increasingly often, this is what it comes to. The Ontario Liberals have never been the sure bet for power that their federal cousins were, and in fact they were frozen out during 42 consecutive years of Progressive Conservative power after 1943, but they held power after six of the nine elections between 1985 and 2014. Every signatory of that Draft Schreiner letter grew up, or came of age politically, in an Ontario in which Liberals had a reasonable shot at winning elections.

And now they really don’t. One reason Liberals might not be in a mood to seek a centrist as leader is that they just tried and it didn’t work. Steven Del Duca was about as centrist as a 21st-century Liberal is likely to get. His was the immigrant Italian working-class story. His campaign ads featured lots of SUV-driving cosplay. In my unpublished final column for a once-prominent cottage-life magazine, I revelled in the Del Duca sales pitch:

Del Duca is what you might imagine if you were told the Liberals had been walloped by a Doug Ford and had gone out to get one of their own. Suburban. Stocky. Unpretentious. Not burdened with excessive hair. I asked Del Duca who his political heroes are. He named Jean Chrétien. “The best example in recent times of a moderate, pragmatic, passionate person who believes in progress.” Favourite book? David McCullough’s biography of Harry S. Truman. “Just such an unlikely story. Failed haberdasher, nothing really to write home about…”

That’s right, I just quoted myself. At length. Newslettering is fun. But my point, and I do have one, is that Liberal hegemony is its own best argument until it stops working. And then, quite often, it can become difficult for Liberal parties to make any case for themselves.

Recent illustrations of this phenomenon come from the provincial Liberals in Ontario and Quebec, though I note the always-distinctive BC Liberal Party has gone into witness protection. Liberals in Canada’s two largest provinces ran governments for more than a decade beginning in 2003. Each even enjoyed comebacks when they might have seemed worn out — Ontario’s Liberals with Kathleen Wynne’s 2014 re-election after Dalton McGuinty stepped down, Quebec’s with Philippe Couillard’s 2014 election after a brief Parti Québécois interlude.

Then both parties suffered their most crushing defeats since Confederation. Couillard lost 37 seats and 17 points of popular vote; Wynne lost 48 seats and 19 points of popular vote. Both leaders promptly resigned and were partly redeemed when their successors did worse at the next election. I’ve made a hobby in recent years of interviewing Liberals from those two doomed regimes: Kathleen Wynne at my old shop; Del Duca as a chaser with my resignation letter; Carlos Leitao, Couillard’s formidable and lately introspective finance minister, for this newsletter. Why? It’s foreshadowing, or it will be if these Liberals’ federal cousins aren’t both careful and lucky.

Liberals everywhere — more-or-less centrist brokerage parties everywhere, for this is hardly the exclusive province of Canadian Liberals — depend for much of their success on a sense of their own inevitability. Part of their pitch is that they are the sort of people who govern, so you dare not vote for the sort of people who mustn’t govern. When things are going well for Liberals, they throw in a few accessory notions — competence, interesting ideas — but when those accessories fail or aren’t available, they fall back on you-wouldn’t-dare-not.

It often works. Incumbency is a formidable asset for any party. In extremis, the Liberal firewall can seem silly or worse, as when a federal Liberal MP recently implied that a gadfly political scientist was racist for criticizing a bad appointment. (The MP apologized. How many texts did he receive from colleagues congratulating him for his great tweet did he receive before he got the one telling him it was time to climb down?)

The biggest problem with the firewall is that when it collapses and once-faithful voters scatter, it can be hard to find reasons for them to return that they find relevant. It happened to the federal Liberals after the Chrétien years: Paul Martin won one election in tough circumstances, and then the party began its worst decade since Confederation. It came back in 2015 only because it had managed to find a leader who seemed like a visitor from the past and the future in one body. These days it’s easy to find Liberals who wish Justin Trudeau well but who also think he represents an anomalous departure from the catastrophic downward trend of the 2006, 2008 and 2011 elections. He’s the Keeper of the Firewall, and whenever he leaves the job, how long will it be before Mike Schreiner starts to look pretty good? This is not a prediction. I try to avoid predicting things. But you had better believe it’s a recurring Liberal worry.

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In a busy week when it was inevitable that some things would slip between the cracks, perhaps the most undercovered story of the week was the visit of Thierry Breton to Canada. He’s a former French CEO (Thomson-RCA, France Télécom) who became Jacques Chirac’s finance minister and is now the European Commissioner for the Interior Market, which makes him the rough equivalent of a national minister of industry for the half-billion-person European market. He spent two days with François-Philippe Champagne, ice-fishing in Ste-Anne-de-la-Pérade and lavishing praise on Champagne at a Montreal Council on Foreign Relations lunch (“He’s formidable. You’re very lucky.”) He also visited Anita Anand in Ottawa and had dinner with Chrystia Freeland.

But Breton actually wasn’t in Canada to scout the prospects for Justin Trudeau’s succession. He’s the EU commissioner with a mandate to figure out what to do about the Biden administration’s massive Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is also a powerful investment-luring act. We’re talking massive subsidies to designated industries that set up shop in the US. Canadian industry, to the extent there is some, has been in a tizzy over the IRA, which seems likely to lure potential investment away from Canada. This fear was a major subtext of Freeland’s fall economic update, and of her and Deputy Finance Minister Michael Sabia’s rush to set up a $15-billion Canada Growth Fund to try and hang onto what remains. You can bet Freeland and Breton got right down to brass tacks as they align policy ahead of Freeland’s imminent budget. Preserving the great Canada-EU partnership is the theme of Monday’s joint Champagne-Breton statement, although I can’t help noticing that, for a collaboration between two champion talkers, it’s really short.

As the National Post’s John Ivison, who is often an exception when big stories aren’t getting enough attention, notes in his Tuesday column, a country Canada’s size has to pick its friends when everyone starts friendshoring. Breton took care to point out in Montreal that Canada is a source of 15 materials on the EU’s latest list of 30 critical materials, but to the extent Canada is trying to make “buy American” mean “buy North American,” it risks getting on the wrong side of Breton, who’s previously cancelled a meeting with the Americans over their IRA.

Even if it works, Freeland’s Canada Growth Fund will be tiny next to Biden’s hundreds of billions of annual subsidies to clean tech. In Montreal, Breton added to that shrinking feeling, promising 450 billion euros a year — about $650 billion — in annual matching incentives in Europe. Breton was also careful to let the Montreal crowd know his first priority is to build a European industrial base. When the chips are down, can anyone — even Breton’s ice-fishing partner — count on friends in an era of friendshoring?