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.
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.
This is straying from the point of the example, which was to demonstrate that a so-called “centre”, by virtue of the fact that it can not only compromise but can also even run counter to one’s values, is not by definition a winning strategy.
People on the left don’t owe a capitalist centrist party their vote simply because there’s no other major party advancing a socialist platform. Because socialism is opposed to capitalism on principle. Does that make sense?