Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  The NEP and its aftermath teaches us many lessons—none of them for the first time—but three are most salient for me. First and most obviously, resource development and the policies we create to manage it continue to be among the handful of big issues that define our success as a country. This is arguably even truer now than it was in my father’s day. It’s certainly the case from an economic and environmental perspective. But it’s also a unity issue, a basic issue of regional fairness. Nature did not see fit to disperse valuable commodities evenly across this land. As a consequence, there are, have been, and always will be very difficult debates about resource development in Canada. These are good problems to have, if a country must have problems. There are few that wouldn’t trade theirs for ours. That said, it gets to the heart of an unchanging truth about Canada: our regional diversity has always required us to keep competing demands in fair balance. When the federal government tips the scales too heavily in favour of one region over another on a big issue, the reverberations can last a lifetime.

  Second, the NEP and its fall-out is a reminder that the representative nature of politics borders on tribal at a certain level. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense at all. In a diverse country where national attachments complement strong and diverse local identities, getting the balance right is vital. You can spend weeks in coffee shops in Ponoka and Wynyard and Neepawa arguing until you’re blue in the face that this or that policy is good for western Canada, but if you don’t have the right people willing to make the case under your banner, you won’t get far. You’re also, of course, less likely to develop that good policy in the first place. That’s why we placed such heavy emphasis during the leadership campaign on recruiting top-quality, authentically local leaders to join the team as senior organizers and advisors, and afterwards to run for Parliament under the Liberal banner. As advanced as our communications and research capabilities have become in politics, there is still no substitute for good people who are intimately connected to their communities.

  Finally, the NEP taught us a more specific and positive lesson about western Canada. The response, in the rallying cry that Preston Manning would make famous, was “The West Wants In.” It says something profoundly optimistic about westerners and encouraging about Canada that the slogan wasn’t “The West Wants Out.” In the entrepreneurial fashion that has come to rightly typify the West, the local response to a political movement that excluded them was to create one that couldn’t live without them, and to build that movement until it governed the whole country. When you take a step back and think about it, it was an awesome achievement, maybe unparalleled in our political history.

  I know this will be a controversial claim, but I think the Harper Conservatives have forgotten this basic element of the Conservative Party’s success.

  Most of the 2012–13 leadership campaign took place over the course of a long, characteristically cold Canadian winter. I spent a lot of that season in western Canada. Among many memorable events, none is more deeply impressed in my memory than a particularly frigid evening I spent in Kamloops. It was one of those days when the sun seemed to set not long after it had risen. We were far from anywhere that could even be charitably described as Liberal territory. After a long day in the Okanagan, we drove with campaign volunteers in a minivan from Osoyoos and Kelowna northbound up the Coquihalla. We had booked a small room at Thompson Rivers University, expecting a modest but hearty crowd of local Liberals to show up. Just before we arrived at the event, Gerry Butts, who was travelling with me on this leg of the tour, received a phone call from our key organizer on the ground. There was a problem, of the best possible kind. More than five hundred people had shown up. We were going to need a bigger room.

  Many of the people in that crowd came out because of equal parts curiosity and disappointment. Curiosity about a party that they didn’t know very well, with much of what they did know not being great. I made light of this during the open question-and-answer session that was a regular feature of my public events during the campaign. A student asked me what I had learned from my father about how to practise politics. I said, “When in Salmon Arm, wave with all five fingers.” On a few occasions my somewhat dry sense of humour has landed me in a spot of trouble, but this time I got an unqualified laugh.

  More seriously, people had shown up because they were disappointed that the party they had chosen to represent their views in Ottawa had stopped focusing on doing exactly that. The Conservative Party owes its success to the ardent devotion of its grassroots, but Mr. Harper has turned it into a vehicle for the perpetuation of his prime ministership. It is true that no government in the past few decades has done a very good job of empowering MPs or, more generally, of figuring out how to bring our parliamentary democracy into the modern era. That said, the current government has reached new depths of message control and party discipline. I know that people who remember well its Reform Party roots find that particularly galling. I’d heard that over and over during the leadership campaign, and since, but in Kamloops that night, something clicked. Off the cuff, I said something that I would say many more times over the next couple of years in western Canada: “You elected good people to be your community’s voice in Ottawa. But instead, you got Stephen Harper’s voice in your community.”

  I have never seen so many heads nod in agreement.

  Canadians want to know that their votes matter. “How Parliament works” is not a topic that will keep many Canadians up at night. What is important is whether their views are taken seriously by someone who, once elected, can do something about them. Whether that person will take the time and make the effort required to stay in touch with their views after they are elected means even more.

  People feel the effects of democratic decline over time. They know when their MP is speaking from conviction rather than merely carrying a line from her leader. Mr. Harper’s extreme rigidity on this front does a disservice both to his caucus and to the Canadians who have entrusted his party with their votes. I think it’s the wrong approach to leadership, and that’s why I have made very specific commitments to fix the problem.

  There’s a balance to be struck here, of course. People need to know that when they vote for a Liberal MP, he or she will support the party’s platform and values. However, party discipline ought to be confined to a small number of votes: items that contradict the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and budget and platform items.

  Getting the balance right means being consistent, thoughtful, and passionate over time on the really big issues, the ones that matter most. Willingness to compromise is often a virtue in life, and in politics your ability to compromise without betraying your core values will go a long way to determining whether you’ll be successful. I argued throughout the leadership campaign that too many Canadians don’t know what the Liberal Party stands for. The only way to solve that problem was to make our values explicit and to live by them, even when they lead to positions that might be controversial or prove unpopular in some quarters.

  I made it clear in my campaign that the Liberal Party needs to be a liberal party. By that I meant that the core values of liberalism—equality of economic opportunity and diversity of thought and belief, which I see as the building blocks of individual freedom, fairness, and social justice—ought to be the cornerstones of the Liberal Party and its policies. I said that we needed to be a party that stood up for people’s right to have a real and fair chance at success, regardless whether they were born rich or poor, where they came from, or what, if any, faith they professed.

  It’s one thing to say these things in the abstract; it’s quite another to put them into practice. For example, I think most Canadians, however they vote, agree that our diversity is one of Canada’s great success stories. Personally, I think it’s our greatest. As I’ve said before, we might be the only country in the history of the world that is strong because of its diversity, not in spite of it. We have managed, through hard work and gener
osity of spirit, to build a prosperous and harmonious society out of the most multicultural country on earth. It has been core to who we are since before our founding. It’s baked into our DNA. Our instinct to look past our differences, to seek out common ground and find common cause, kept forefathers like Samuel de Champlain alive through their first winters as surely as it has helped our modern major cities become success stories that multicultural societies the world over seek to emulate today.

  You can believe all these things and still not see that this value is under great stress and strain in today’s Canada. Just before Christmas 2012, something happened that impressed upon me deeply how Canada’s diversity needs as much support and affirmation as it ever has. I delivered a major address on the issue (included, with other select speeches, in the appendix to this book) while under ferocious attacks from the right for daring to do so. The occasion was the Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention in Toronto, an extraordinary gathering of more than twenty thousand young Muslim Canadians. They came together to talk with one another about how they could be full participants in a pluralistic, multicultural society like Canada without losing what was remarkable and unique about their religious beliefs and cultural life.

  My message was straightforward. I could think of no more fundamentally Canadian discussion than that one. How to become genuine citizens of Canada without turning our backs on our communities of origin is a struggle that most Canadians have faced throughout our history. I drew on a famous example to illustrate my point. In the late nineteenth century, Catholicism and liberalism were widely considered irreconcilable systems of belief. Freedom of conscience and religious pluralism were seen as direct challenges to the authority of the church, nowhere more so than in my home province. As is the case today, the most persuasive argument that advocates of diversity had at their disposal were the facts on the ground. It came down to: Abstract ideals are fine, but in the end we have to live together, and we all don’t believe the same things. We can go down the path our ancestral countries and cultures have walked (rancour, conflict, and violence) or we can try to figure out a new, more productive and generous way to live together.

  The most articulate spokesperson for this point of view was a young Quebecer named Wilfrid Laurier. He was then a new MP from an upstart political party. He believed deeply that his people, as a linguistic and religious minority within a new country where the majority was English and Protestant, should set a positive example of openness and acceptance toward those who did not share their beliefs. Faced with persuasive philosophical arguments to the contrary, Laurier laid down his trump card: we are all here, and none of us are going anywhere. We believe different things. How are we to come together to build a country if we focus on what divides us rather than on our shared interests?

  I believe that Laurier’s logic is as powerful today as it was in his day, if not more so. The lived reality of Canadian communities, big and small, is perhaps the world’s greatest evidence against those who say harmony can’t come from diversity. As has so often been the case in our country’s history, pragmatism wins out over a misplaced sense of cultural or ideological purity every time. That was the point I made at the convention: dogmatism, rigidity, and intolerance are antithetical to who we are as Canadians. It is as true for a young Muslim in Mississauga today as it was for that young Catholic in Quebec City in 1877. We have always built prosperity by coming together, learning from each other’s distinct perspectives, but moving beyond those differences to find common ground. That is how we have worked toward a just and prosperous country.

  I would come back to these big, basic issues over and over again: growth that works for the middle class, and fair economic opportunity for everyone; respect for and promotion of freedom and diversity; and a more democratic government that represents all of Canada. These interrelated objectives were the pillars upon which we wanted to build the campaign, a renewed Liberal Party, and a program for governing this country. They still are. The policies that will bring us closer to these objectives have been taking shape, and will continue to evolve as we approach the next election. Having articulated our goals, we are in a position to build policies to help us achieve those goals. At the end of the campaign, I would say in Ottawa that Liberals have chosen in me a leader who will “begin, spend, and end every day” thinking about how to make this country better for ordinary Canadians.

  Obviously, without the people to make it happen, we wouldn’t get far. Starting with a massive volunteer recruitment campaign, we set in motion what would become perhaps the largest effort in Canadian history to engage people in politics. We took great pride in the fact that our campaign was fuelled by volunteers. Near the end of the campaign, we had more than twelve thousand people working with us all over the country, the vast majority of whom had never been involved with the Liberal Party before. We designed a flat organizational structure that allowed people to plug in easily, anywhere in Canada. Our rallying cry was that we wanted to build a movement more than a party, one that privileged results over titles. It didn’t matter to us whether you had been involved with the party for several decades or five minutes. Our approach was that if you got things done, you got more things to do. It was simple, straightforward, and universally understood within the campaign. And it worked.

  By the time I arrived on the convention floor in Toronto in April, we had signed up more than 250,000 supporters for the Liberal Party. Some 115,000 people would vote during that week, so that by the time I was announced as the winner of the contest in Ottawa, I could claim the support of more than 100,000 Canadians.

  A few people tried their best to minimize the significance of these numbers. They argued that supporters were not really attached to the party, had treated the leadership as a novelty or fad, and would disappear as soon as the race was over. Their position was that if these people weren’t even willing to spend the modest amount of money ($10) required to become a member, then how committed could they actually be? From their perspective, the leadership campaign was therefore a failure.

  You don’t need a PhD in modern political behaviour to know how wrong-headed that view is. It grates against every contemporary trend in organizations from charities to NGOs to political parties to churches. People just don’t “join” organizations the way they used to sign up for a bowling league or a glee club in the 1950s. This does not mean that people aren’t committed to serving public interest causes or aren’t interested in being engaged. Anyone who spends time with today’s Canadians, especially young Canadians, will find a spirit of public interest that rivals any other generation’s. People today are simply more demanding of the organizations they choose to affiliate with. They want more say, more involvement, and a greater number of entry points. If you were to design an organization from scratch with the sole purpose of repelling large numbers of ordinary Canadians, you could do no better than the stodgy rigidity of a traditional political party.

  In any case, the numbers speak for themselves. When I kicked off my campaign, the Liberal Party had fewer than 30,000 members. As of July 2014, we have more than 160,000, and the number is climbing rapidly. We know from the overlap between the people who first became interested during the campaign and the new members who have joined the party since that the “supporter” effort was an enormous success. Thought up, designed, and endorsed by the grassroots of the party, the supporter class went a long way toward rejuvenating their party.

  Our hard work is just beginning, of course. We came out of the leadership convention with a strong, united, and energized party. We established a clear, liberal perspective on the major issues facing the country, and we built a countrywide network of volunteers who are working every day to reconnect our party to the communities we want to serve. All of that notwithstanding, I know that Canadians retain their healthy sense of skepticism toward politics and politicians. They expect us to earn their trust, day after day. I get that.

  While it is likely still a year
away, the contours of the next federal election are already taking shape. I believe it will be a clear choice between competing perspectives about how to build this country. The Conservative Party, after ten years in power, is running very low on fresh ideas. They are at turns in denial about or exacerbating the major problems of our time. To ordinary Canadians, who worry that their incomes aren’t growing, this government says, You have never had it so good. Canadians who want to see their country take a more responsible approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change get nought but attacks and excuses, while the impacts of climate change grow more severe and the eventual necessary responses grow more costly. The inability to get strategic infrastructure started—let alone built—stands as an indictment against the Conservatives’ managerial competence. The short-sighted approach to immigration has dulled this critical nation-building tool at a time when we need it most. The reckless attacks on our public institutions, from Parliament to our Supreme Court to Elections Canada, have made this country weaker, not stronger.

  The central point, however, is that all these deficiencies spring from a common root cause: the autocratic, “my way or the highway” spirit that has taken hold inside the current Conservative Party. They seem to revel in isolating enemies and defeating them, rather than reaching out and finding a larger, shared purpose. I cannot think of a leadership style more ill suited to this strong, open-minded, and kind-hearted country. Canadians respect leaders who are unafraid to disagree with them when those disagreements are genuine and expressed respectfully. One of the Harper years’ most pernicious developments is a rabid form of partisanship, the idea that politics is warfare and political adversaries are to be treated as enemy combatants. In the end, we all have to come together as Canadians if we are to get anything done. As I said to my party during my first convention after they elected me as their leader: our political opponents aren’t our enemies, they’re our neighbours.