The Battle of Ideas

Monte Solberg does a pretty good job of beating the Liberals over the head on the issue of their current 'big idea' problems.  I don't see anything particularly wrong with anything he says in this article.  The Liberals aren't going to get anywhere through endlessly barking about how 'centrist' they are.

If anything is true, it is that the Tories are winning the 'battle of ideas'.  At first glance it seems ridiculous that Don Cherry is becoming a focal figure in a redefinition of Canadian nationalism, but conservatives have been working steadily to change Canadians' perceptions of themselves; in particular regarding the military and Canada's role in the world.  This new 'combative' form of Canadian nationalism doesn't bode well, especially given how prone it may turn out to be towards misogynous perceptions of women and 'nativistic' sensibilities regarding multi-ethnic immigration from abroad.

Also, remember those days when Canadians were willing to finance significant expansions of the Universities, to send our youth to far away lands on the public dime to learn about the world and spread Canadian values?  Trudeau certainly believed that these were worthy of the government's attention.  He also believed in reducing the economic influence of the United States in Canada.  Nowadays we see Liberals endlessly talking about how awesome they were at hacking apart services in order to solve our national calamity, the dreaded budget deficit.  And running on the continued generic expansion of free trade reinforces all of the Conservative narratives.  After all, it's so much easier as a conservative to tear apart the welfare state when you can get progressives to do it for you.

The Liberals increasingly no longer have the ability to agitate for progressive ideals, especially economic ones, with any kind of authority or credibility.  Their entire history since Chretien won a majority in 1993 has been to adhere to all of the long-term structural decisions made to the economy by the Conservatives.  All of the Liberal ideals of resisting free trade and American domination; Canadian nationalism based around the protection of social services.  Canadians are only willing to accept deficit spending grudgingly, a considerable achievement in working public opinion over the past decades on the part of the political right.  Now the Conservatives can use that advantage to advocate spending cuts over any form of upward flexibility in tax rates, putting progressives in a continual bind.

To respond to this long-term process I think the replacement of the Liberals with the NDP is a beneficial thing.  It's difficult to agitate for progressive social democratic ideals when the primary left-wing party at the federal level is full of people like John Manley, Paul Martin and other 'blue liberals' who have been at the forefront of bashing away at the institutions critical to the long-term well being of Canadians.  It'll be a difficult slog, but re-vitalization of the movement with the inclusion of organized labour from the ground up as well as the potential re-introduction of Quebec's significant progressive movement into the national sphere are promising signs.