Debunking the fallacy of a united left
The Liberals have twice as much to gain by going for the centre
PAUL ADAMS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
November 8, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

As the Liberal Party wilted in this year's federal election, and voters abandoned it in historic numbers, many non-Conservatives turned their minds to the challenge of "uniting the left" in Canada.

The idea, at its most basic, is this: When you add up the votes cast for the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens last month, you get more than 51 per cent of the electorate - a majority easily swamping the paltry 38 per cent for the Tories. Throw in the Bloc Québécois, and you reach an impressive 61 per cent.

Rick Salutin, in his Globe and Mail column, saw these facts as evidence of a continuing "social democratic bent" among the large majority of Canadians, unshaken by the two successive victories of Stephen Harper's Conservatives. The split among the four opposition parties, in this formulation, is frustrating the incipient left-of-centre majority. And it is up to those parties to fix this.

This argument has some appeal for those who don't like the Conservatives, and want to comfort themselves that most of their compatriots don't like them either. The former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy has used it to urge a parliamentary coalition of the opposition parties, at least an informal one. That would makes sense on some economic, social, and environmental issues that sharply divide the Conservatives from all the opposition parties.

But "uniting the left" is not a very useful organizing principle for reviving the fortunes of the Liberals. It is built on a misapplied analogy with the Conservatives' success in "uniting the right," mistaken assumptions about Canadian public opinion and a misreading of where former Liberal supporters have gone.

First of all, it was an ideological crisis on the right that shattered the mighty Progressive Conservative majority forged by Brian Mulroney in the 1990s. Reformers led by Preston Manning could not stomach the Mulroney government's apostasy on deficits, subsidies, social programs and regulation, or its many concessions to Quebec nationalism. And the Reform Party, along with the Bloc Québécois, reduced the PCs to rubble.

The Liberals, however, were not humbled by an ideological crisis as they tumbled from power in their turn. In fact, it may be strange to be talking at all about the Liberals as a party of the left, rather than a party that sometimes plays one on TV.

In 1993, when the Liberals defeated the Conservatives, they ran on a platform of reducing unemployment, changing NAFTA, replacing the GST, introducing a national system of daycare, and greatly increasing immigration. To their enormous good fortune, unemployment began to fall before they had time to bring down their first budget: nothing to do with their policies, in other words. None of the rest happened.

Instead, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin embarked on a decade-long attack on deficits and debt that went far beyond the Liberal campaign commitment to reduce the deficit to 3 per cent of GDP. For years this meant drastic cuts to social programs, among other things. This may have been good public policy, as many people think. But it was also an example of something that the party's critics have long complained about: the Liberals running campaigns from the left, then governing from the right.

A more generous view might be that the Liberal Party has liberal inclinations but not a liberal ideology, and that the absence of an important ideological strain distinguishes it from parties of both left and right.

Some, including me, find the Liberals' tendency to tack this way and that, often on fundamental issues, morally unsettling. But that's different from saying it doesn't work; it often does, because the overarching promise the Liberals make to Canadians at election time is actually not about left or right but about delivering sound and pragmatic government. Competence has been the core of the Liberal brand, wherever the political winds have blown their policies.

The Liberals' humbling in the 2004 election under Paul Martin, and their subsequent defeat in 2006, were in no sense results of an ideological splintering like the one that Canadian conservatives suffered. The Liberals were brought down by the erosion of their reputation for sound governance, rooted in the sponsorship scandal, and abetted by the sluggishness that afflicts parties too long in power.

In fact, burdened by Liberal scandal but bolstered by budget surpluses his conservative policies had helped to create, Paul Martin pulled off his 2004 victory by - guess what? - campaigning from the left: on health care and abortion rights. And he probably limited the scale of the Tory victory in 2006 the same way.

So what about the ideological landscape on which the parties are playing now? Is it indeed stably social democratic or small-l liberal, or is it shifting rightward? As he began his campaign, Mr. Harper remarked that Canadians have become more conservative in recent years.

There is some evidence to support this. The pollster Frank Graves from EKOS Research (where I also participate in the polling) has pointed out that the number of Canadians ready to describe themselves as small-c conservatives has now surpassed those who call themselves small-l liberals - in a country where small-l liberals had long predominated.

This fits in with some other shifts in attitude: Canadians are more willing to put soldiers in harm's way than they were before Sept. 11, 2001, for example, and are growing less supportive of a single-payer health-care system. Among the younger generation now just beginning to assert themselves politically against the baby boomers' dominance, a surprising number are self-described "conservatives."

Younger progressives, of whom there are many as well, are much less partisan and ideological than their elders. Note that Barack Obama harnessed the power of younger voters in the U.S., not by tilting to the left, but by articulating a postpartisan and postideological vision.

As the Liberals grapple with their current dilemma, they need to understand where their votes went, as the party slumped from the 40 per cent range of the Chrétien years to the mid-20s of today.

Strikingly, in his first outing as the leader of a united Conservative party, in 2004, Mr. Harper failed to win to as many votes as the old Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties combined. Many former PCs found themselves more at home with the Martin-led Liberal Party than with the Harper-led Conservatives. But this has not been sustained. And the traffic has been in the other direction ever since.

In our election polling at EKOS this year, we asked respondents how they had voted in 2006 as well as how they intended to vote in 2008. Obviously, many people don't have a clear memory of how they voted previously; this condition grows worse as one approaches election day and people "correct" their memories to conform with their current intentions (no one wants to admit making a mistake last time).

Still, a significant number of people said they had voted Liberal in 2006 but were switching to another party this time. Where did they go? Nearly 44 per cent of them said they were moving to the Conservatives. Thus, the Liberals' largest loss in the last election was to the Conservatives - not to the NDP or the Greens.

Now, consider this: The Liberals may be in a five-way fight for votes, but they are in a two-way fight with the Conservatives for government. That means that votes shifting directly between them and the Conservatives are more valuable.

Why? It is like a hockey team playing another team in its own conference: A win also means a loss to a rival with which it is competing for a playoff spot. Similarly, if the Liberals poach a vote directly from the Conservatives, they move two votes closer to catching the Conservatives. If they pick one up from the NDP or the Greens, they move just one vote closer.

Moreover, it is a mistake to assume the Liberals would be more effective in winning votes from the New Democrats if they shifted to the left. Late in the campaign last month, a quarter of NDP voters said they would consider switching their vote if they thought the Conservatives were headed to a majority. In the end, most didn't budge. For these potential "strategic" voters, a Liberal Party that was a credible contender for power might be more attractive than a left-leaning Liberal Party that had fallen out of the race.

As for Green Party supporters, it is a mistake to categorize them as being on the left at all. Many of them were young, urban, postideological and postpartisan people. The environmental issue is powerful for them in part because it supersedes left and right.

These younger voters may be repelled by the "old politics" represented by the mainstream parties, including the Liberals. But they are growing in numbers. And their non-ideological inclinations, married to vaguely progressive values, may actually be a better fit with the Liberals than with the more ideologically rigid NDP. All the more so in a political environment where the principal challenge may be stimulating the economy without losing the fiscal credibility acquired so slowly and painfully in the 1990s.

The truth is that if the Liberals are to survive, they will likely have to straddle the centre and once again offer the promise of competence in government: the formula that has worked for them in the past. And what of those people truly on the left of the Canadian spectrum? Well, why would they expect to find a champion in the Liberal Party anyway?

Paul Adams, a former Globe and Mail parliamentary correspondent, now teaches at the Carleton School of Journalism.