For all of my adult life, I’ve been a Liberal believing in the defence of rights, the constraining of power, an equitable society, and an independent foreign policy. It’s been a narrative that many Canadians have strongly believed and supported.
Since 1982, the Charter gave us a core liberal centre that wasn’t really about party; it was about courts that could check governments, refugee protection as something we owed people, reconciliation as a shared obligation, gender equality, tackling poverty international law, building an activist role to counter Realpolitik.
These weren’t just policies. They were identity. That story is being rewritten.
The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the “rules-based order,” Canada’s role as a constructive middle power. But watch what’s actually happening, and a different picture emerges: human rights moving steadily from the centre of public policy toward its edges, increasingly; poverty and homelessness being ignored.
Comparing Carney to, like, Paul Martin isn’t dumb, but PP is the actual Conservative on offer, and is still so much further to the right.
If the NDP moved to the centre I think the Liberals would be nervous about keeping that left flank, but they’ve actually gone the other way.
I disagree. I like that Avi is moving the party further left because that’s where they were for years, and we’ve already got a centrist party (the Liberals). We need another centrist party like we need another hole in our heads.
For too long Canada has been sliding downward, forgetting our deep social democracy roots. We need to get back at least some of what we’ve lost.
I made no actual normative (“is this good”) statement there.
Neither did they.
Mulcair moved the NDP to the centre and got trounced in that election. It’s bad strategy.
Actually:
And “Canada has been sliding downward” arguably qualifies as well.
Furthermore, starting with “I disagree” implies that what was said in OP is itself an opposite normative statement. It was actually just a description of the political landscape to help explain how it is that Carney can be so far to Trudeau’s right but still a Liberal.
Fair enough, point taken, however I also provided a perfectly good explanation of why the notion that the NDP would gain by moving rightward has not borne out historically. So sure, the earlier commenter had a perspective, but it’s a perspective that is clearly shared by many potential voters.
Yup. There is a precedent for moderating not going so well. Although nobody directly after Layton passed had much of a chance.
It doesn’t guarantee anything in a counterfactual where the NDP goes another way, but it’s a fact that the Liberals aren’t worried about losing MPs and support (kind of the opposite really), even though there’s a lot of Liberals who actually liked the carbon tax - which used to be the signature policy - and aren’t sure why you’d ever put the capital gains tax down below the income tax again.
“Maybe things would be better if the left stopped being the left and everybody was right of centre”
I didn’t say any of that was good or bad, actually.
Definitionally, everybody averages around the centre.
That’s neither true in a political sense (ideologies are based in values, not metrics; this isn’t something that can be mapped to a bell curve or even quantified) nor in a mathematical sense (distributions can be anything).
They’re relative terms.
Ideologies are many-faceted, region and time-specific and contain all kinds of different ideas in fairly arbitrary combinations. For whatever reason, the popular ones in a time and place always seem to organise along a line, and since the French revolution it’s been customary to call the ends of it “left” or “right”.
What is an average if not the centre? I didn’t specify mean or median here, even. Median is probably better for this, and definitionally there’s always a half of the probability to it’s sides.
Let’s try an example, because it’s one thing to speak in the abstract, but quite another thing to look at specifics.
What is the “centre” between the statements “white people are a superior race” and “race is a social construct and racism must be opposed”?
My position is that there is no “middle ground” on this issue. One either supports racism or supports anti-racism.
That’s not just specific, though, it’s charged. You’ll get an answer, but in a moment so nobody is misunderstood.
If what you’re getting at is something like “further left is always better”, well, which left wing? Again, they’re highly specific to a time and place.
An example: The laissez faire free market was considered a left-wing policy from the appearance of liberalism, until socialism really got going. That’s over a century, and it’s the opposite today. Partisan labels are just labels; they have at most a vague correlation with morality or well-conception of the policies inside.
If what you’re getting at is that middle-of-the-road kind of policies aren’t always or even usually the best, then nobody is disagreeing.
Sure, there’s middle ground. The whole “separate but equal” thing was a lie in practice, but on paper it’s logically self-consistent. (Obviously, it’s not a centre any of us approve of)
Also, that’s the British spelling of centre, if it looks wrong to you.
exactly - so what kind of “average” is that?
True, it’s actually a far right position here and now. There’s two things going on and it was a mistake to conflate them. There’s a middle ground and the political centre, and they aren’t necessarily the same.
Why is it that in most western counties, leftists are expected to just give up their values but centrists and conservatives can keep racheting right and that’s just how it is? No, fuck that. The NDP should stay firmly left. Compromising with the right leads to fascism.
Well, the overall trajectory has been socially left, economically right. Like, would you rather be gay now, in 2000, or in 1980?
The difference between social policy and fiscal policy. They are not the same kettle.