essay for liberal party

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

US government and civics

Course: us government and civics   >   unit 5.

• Ideologies of political parties in the United States

Ideologies of political parties: lesson overview

• Ideologies of political parties

Dominant US ideologies and political parties

Other ideologies and parties, review questions, want to join the conversation.

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Are Liberals to Blame for Our Crisis of Faith in Government?

By Louis Menand

Do you trust the federal government? When voters were asked that question in December, 1958, by pollsters from a center now called the American National Election Studies, at the University of Michigan, seventy-three per cent said yes, they had confidence in the government to do the right thing either almost all the time or most of the time. Six years later, they were asked basically the same question, and seventy-seven per cent said yes.

Pollsters ask the question regularly. In a Pew survey from April, 2021, only twenty-four per cent of respondents said yes. And that represented an uptick. During Obama’s and Trump’s Presidencies, the figure was sometimes as low as seventeen per cent. Sixty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they had faith in the government. Today, an overwhelming majority say they don’t. Who is to blame?

One answer might be that no one is to blame; it’s just that circumstances have changed. In 1958, the United States was in the middle of an economic boom and was not engaged in foreign wars; for many Americans, there was domestic tranquillity. Then came the growing intensity of the civil-rights movement, the war in Vietnam, urban unrest, the women’s-liberation movement, the gay-liberation movement, Watergate, the oil embargo, runaway inflation, the hostage crisis in Iran. Americans might reasonably have felt that things had spun out of control. By March, 1980, trust in government was down to twenty-seven per cent.

Eight months later, Ronald Reagan, a man who opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare, which he called an attempt to impose socialism, and who wanted to make Social Security voluntary—a man who essentially ran against the New Deal and the Great Society, a.k.a. “the welfare state”—was elected President. He defeated the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by almost ten percentage points in the popular vote. “In this present crisis,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Meanwhile, government swung into action. Inflation was checked; the economy recovered. Watergate and Vietnam receded in the rearview mirror. Popular programs like Medicare and Social Security remained intact. For all his talk about reducing the size and the role of government, Reagan did not eliminate a single major program in his eight years in office.

Yet, during those eight years, the trust index never rose above forty-five per cent. And since Reagan left office, aside from intermittent spikes, including one after September 11th, it has declined steadily. In the past fourteen years, in good times and bad, the index has never exceeded thirty per cent.

The questionnaire used in the A.N.E.S. survey is designed to correct for partisanship. A typical preamble to the trust question reads, “People have different ideas about the government in Washington. These ideas don’t refer to Democrats or Republicans in particular, but just to the government in general.” Still, when there is a Democratic President Republicans tend to have less faith in “government in general,” and Democrats tend to have more. But partisanship accounts only for changes in the distribution of responses. It doesn’t explain why over all, no matter the President, the public’s level of trust in government has been dropping.

So maybe someone is to blame. It is a convenience to reviewers, although not an aid to clarity, that two recent books devoted to the subject assign responsibility to completely different perpetrators. In “ At War with Government ” (Columbia), the political scientists Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris blame the Republican Party. They say that “the intentional cultivation and weaponization of distrust represent the fundamental strategy of conservative Republican politics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump.” The principal actors in their account are Reagan and Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House during Bill Clinton’s second term as President.

In “ Public Citizens ” (Norton), the historian Paul Sabin suggests that much of the blame lies with liberal reformers. “Blaming conservatives for the end of the New Deal era is far too simplistic,” he says, explaining that the attack on the New Deal state was also driven by “an ascendant liberal public interest movement.” His principal actor is Ralph Nader . It’s a sign of how divergent these books are that Gingrich’s name does not appear anywhere in Sabin’s book, and Nader’s name does not appear in Fried and Harris’s.

Nader became a public figure in 1965, when he published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a book about automobile safety, a subject that had interested him since he was a law student at Harvard, in the nineteen-fifties. The book got a lot of attention when it was revealed that General Motors had tapped Nader’s phone and hired a detective to follow him. He sued, and won a settlement, which he used to establish the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which empowered the federal government to set safety standards for automobiles, a matter heretofore left largely to the states. Operating with a steady stream of ambitious students from élite law schools, known as Nader’s Raiders, he then took on, among other causes, meat inspection; air and water pollution; and coal-mining, radiation, and natural-gas-pipeline regulation. Sabin credits these efforts with helping to pass the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act (1968), the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), which created osha .

The key to all these successes, Sabin thinks, is that a new player arose in government policymaking: the public. People like Nader argued that government officials and regulatory agencies weren’t an effective check on malign business interests, because they were in bed with the industries they were supposed to regulate. There was no seat at the table for the consumer, or for the people obliged to live with air and water pollution. The solution was the nonprofit public-interest law firm, an organization independent of the government but sufficiently well funded to sue corporations and government agencies on behalf of the public. The power of groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club grew. By the nineteen-seventies, the environmental movement had acquired political clout. It helped that courts were willing to grant these groups legal standing.

You would think that congressional acts addressing workplace safety and pollution would have raised the level of trust in the federal government. The government was taking over from the states and looking out for people’s health and welfare. And here is where Sabin’s argument gets tricky. He says that liberal reformers assailed not only the industries responsible for pollution, unsafe working conditions, and so on but also the government agencies assigned to oversee them. The reformers essentially accused groups like the Federal Trade Commission of corruption. It was not enough for them to mobilize public opinion on behalf of laws that a Democratic Congress was more than willing to pass. They sought to expose and condemn the compromises that government agencies were making with industry.

The reformers had the effrontery of the righteous. One of the leading environmentalists in the Senate was Edmund Muskie. This wasn’t an easy position. Muskie was from Maine, a state that was dependent on the paper-mill industry. But Nader and his allies attacked Muskie for giving out “a ‘business-as-usual’ license to pollute.” At a 1970 press conference to launch a book on pollution, “Vanishing Air,” a Nader ally said that Muskie did “not deserve the credit he has been given.” Sabin thinks that rhetoric like this made the public suspicious of “government in general.”

It is certainly true that distrust has been promoted from the left as well as from the right. Although distrust is higher among Republicans than among Democrats, the antiwar and the Black Power movements, in the nineteen-sixties, were “don’t trust the government” movements. So are the “defund the police” movements of today.

But those were not the political causes of public-interest groups. Sabin, who plainly is sympathetic to these causes, thinks that the new breed of liberal reformers, with their hatred for compromise, made government look, at best, like a sclerotic and indifferent bureaucracy, and, at worst, like an enabler of irresponsible corporate practices at the expense of public health and welfare. The liberal reformers cast the federal government as an impediment to the public interest, Sabin concludes, and “the political right ran with their critique, even if that was never their desire or intention.”

That last hurdle is a little hard to clear. After all, the public-interest advocates wanted more government, not less. They wanted Congress to pass laws telling businesses what they could and could not do. They wanted national standards for clean air and clean water. Those are not things that Ronald Reagan wanted. Reagan set out to roll back liberal reforms. One of his first acts in office was to strip OSHA of much of its authority, and he appointed to federal agencies lawyers and lobbyists who had represented the industries those agencies were supposed to regulate. The most notorious of these appointees was probably Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a former president of an anti-environmentalist law firm called the Mountain States Legal Foundation. (An unstoppable fountain of gaffes, Watt was finally forced out after a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which he said that an Interior Department panel conformed to affirmative-action requirements because “I have a Black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple. And we have talent.” After resigning, he became a lobbyist.)

Link copied

Why did Republican politicians settle on distrust of the federal government as a political platform? Fried and Harris do not believe that it was primarily the result of ideological conviction—the belief, for example, that markets are more efficient than planning is, or that people are better judges of their interests than the state is. They think it was strategic, and their research suggests three reasons. The first (in order of respectability) is that the Republicans were mostly the opposition party from 1933 to 1981. And since those were years in which the federal government enacted major social programs and regulatory policies, Republicans faced a choice between being a “me too” party and a party for people who dislike social programs and government regulation.

Such people do not all share the same ideology, however, and this is the second reason that Republicans adopted anti-government rhetoric. “The anti-government message was the glue,” Fried and Harris write. It created a coalition of business owners, fiscal conservatives, anti-Communists, social conservatives, evangelicals, and libertarians, all of whom had their own reasons for distrusting “big government.” In their view, it imposed costs on industry and interfered with the operations of the market; it blew up the deficit with tax-and-spend policies; it was socialistic; it usurped moral authority from local communities, banished religion from schools and public spaces, and trod on individual liberties. Republicans, in promising to reduce the government’s interference in people’s lives, could hope to win the votes of all these groups.

But “don’t trust the government” is not exactly a galvanizing campaign slogan. Fried and Harris think that what made it speak to many voters, especially after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was the implicit suggestion that social programs effectively transfer money from whites to Blacks and other minorities. Reagan’s repeated invocations of the “welfare queen” showed how successful those appeals could be—“welfare queen” was immediately understood to mean “Black.” Fried and Harris point out that Reagan held a rally for his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil-rights workers had been murdered by authorities sixteen years before. That twice as many whites as Blacks live in poverty and more than half again as many whites as Blacks receive food stamps does not seem to have dented the conviction that the welfare state is taxpayer support for nonwhites—especially, in the Trumpian incarnation of this view, for nonwhite immigrants.

Much in the conservative attack on government is hypocrisy. Republicans are happy to have the state interfere in people’s lives in ways they approve of. The classic example is restricting abortion. But they also support aggressive “law and order” policies, a strong national-security state, and (often) curbs on expression and the right to protest.

And, as Fried and Harris have no trouble documenting, Republican leaders “apply their anti-government principles inconsistently depending on whether they are in power and which of the institutions of national government they control.” Republicans and the conservative media like to label Democratic acts and policies that they disapprove of “unconstitutional.” But, as the history of Supreme Court decisions and judicial ingenuity shows, the Constitution is a highly flexible instrument. When Congress is in Democratic hands, Republicans attack it as a left-wing cabal that runs roughshod over the Constitution, but when Congress is in Republican hands, as it was when Obama was President, Republicans proclaim that it must act as a check on the unconstitutional excesses of the President.

Today, the chief anti-government claim, denied by only a tiny number of Republican politicians, is that the President is illegitimate, because his party stole the election. “At War with Government” shows us that this claim is the product of a sixty-year war waged by one political party against the integrity of America’s political institutions. The stolen-election claim, after all, is only an amplified version of the birther claim against Obama, also designed to render the President illegitimate. It excuses Republicans from debating policy proposals or offering alternatives. They can be purely oppositional. Today, this is virtually the only platform the Party has left to stand on.

“Public Citizens” and “At War with Government” are scholarly books, carefully researched and patiently argued. Still, they both feel a little narrowly focussed. For one thing, they tend to underplay the extent to which the American political system was designed by people who were distrustful of government. Fried and Harris mention the anti-Federalists, the politicians who opposed ratification of the new constitution on the ground that it made the federal government so strong that it would usurp states’ rights. But a good deal of the Federalist Papers is devoted to assuring voters that the new constitution was designed to limit the powers of the national government.

Suspicion of the central government may be the norm in American political life. The relatively few periods when the federal government expanded its power and enacted sweeping legislation are all marked by unusual circumstances: the Civil War, in the eighteen-sixties; the Depression and the Second World War, in the nineteen-thirties and forties.

When Republicans (and Democrats like Bill Clinton) talk about “big government,” they are mostly alluding to another of these exceptional periods, the Lyndon Johnson Administration, of the mid-nineteen-sixties. G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot pointed out, in “ The Liberal Hour ” (2008), that Johnson came to power in a time of almost fantastic economic growth. In the nineteen-fifties, disposable personal income increased by thirty-three per cent. In the nineteen-sixties, it increased by fifty per cent. It is a lot easier to enact popular programs and redistribute the wealth when the pie keeps growing.

In the 1964 election, Johnson won more than sixty per cent of the popular vote, running against Barry Goldwater, who warned that “a government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” Voters chose not to heed that warning. Democrats gained thirty-seven seats in the House and added two in the Senate, giving the Party two-thirds majorities in both chambers, the largest it had enjoyed since the Roosevelt Administration. In a survey conducted after the election, less than twelve per cent of voters gave ideology—liberalism or conservativism—as a reason for their vote.

That Congress, the eighty-ninth, was one of the most productive in American history. It passed the Voting Rights Act, the legislative capstone of the civil-rights movement. It created Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. It increased the federal minimum wage. It passed the Higher Education Act and provided federal aid to elementary and secondary education. It passed the Water Quality Act, the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, the Highway Beautification Act, the Highway and Motor Vehicle Safety Acts, the Demonstration Cities Act, the Clean Waters Restoration Act, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, and a major amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Does anyone seriously think that the country is not better off for what that Congress accomplished?

Social scientists often lament the diminishment of trust, both political and social—that is, our trust in other people, which has also declined. And it is probably true that high levels of trust enable governments to get more done. But, as Fried and Harris acknowledge, lack of trust does not correlate with apathy. The contrary may be the case. If you trust government to do the right thing most of the time, you may feel that you can check out. Often, lack of trust in the government is an incentive to act. The antiwar protesters in the Vietnam period were politically energized. So were the insurrectionists of January 6th. Both manifested high levels of distrust.

Neither “Public Citizens” nor “At War with Government” is explicit about what voters actually mean when they are asked about trust. For example, how would the authors answer the trust question themselves? Highly educated people count skepticism a virtue. They typically would not report that they trust government, or any social institution, “most of the time.” What seems to make educated people uncomfortable, though, is the idea that the mass public shares this skepticism.

But mass publics, too, are trained to be skeptical. Consumer economies make them that way. Commercials sell products by encouraging consumers to be skeptical of the claims of competing products. Many incorporate a wink of knowingness—“You get it that we are just trying to sell something here.” Unquestioned trust seems unthinking, naïve. Does anyone trust Facebook? You’re not supposed to trust corporate entities. So people say they don’t.

Finally, as with many histories of the postwar period, these books are distinctly U.S.-centric. American historians tend to explain social and political changes by telling a story about American events. Civil rights, Vietnam, the Warren Court, Watergate: these are endowed with great explanatory power. Yet faith in government has been declining not only in America but also in the other advanced industrial democracies since the mid-nineteen-sixties. No doubt each country has its own explanation of what went wrong. But Nader and Gingrich may simply be the local faces of changes in social attitudes that are, in fact, global. It seems, as a character in Joyce’s “Ulysses” puts it, that history is to blame. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

• The day the dinosaurs died .
• What if you could do it all over ?
• A suspense novelist leaves a trail of deceptions .
• The art of dying .
• Can reading make you happier ?
• A simple guide to tote-bag etiquette .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Rivka Galchen

By David Remnick

By Christopher Fiorello

By Amanda Petrusich

Getting the Insight Out

Opinion: Why I’m Voting for the Liberal Party

This opinion piece is part of a broader week-long MJPS Online series on voting intentions. Check  here  for other components of the series. The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not reflect the position of the editor, the McGill Journal of Political Studies, or the Political Science Students’ Association.

On October 21, Canadians will vote in the 43rd general election. This election is not a referendum on a prime minister, but a choice. Our options are re-electing a Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau or electing a Conservative government led by Andrew Scheer. I believe the choice could not be clearer.

Over the last four years, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has stood up for students and made real progress on the issues important to many of us. The government’s decision to double funding to the Canada Summer Jobs Program, once cut by the Conservatives, has allowed thousands of Canadian students to find meaningful summer work that gives important real-world experience. 

This government lowered interest rates on student loans, making it easier to obtain a quality education. Just last week, Justin Trudeau promised to increase Canada Student Grants by 40 per cent and institute a two-year grace period for student loan repayments, a positive sign for students at a time when the Conservatives across the country are making major cuts to education. Landmark investments in postsecondary institutions like McGill will allow future generations of students to attend more sustainable, better-resourced, and cleaner campuses.

Students like me also understand the real and pressing threat of climate change. While Conservative MPs debate whether climate change is real, the Trudeau government became the first in Canadian history to put a price on pollution across Canada and give the revenues back to Canadians. Leading economists and scientists agree : carbon pricing is the best way to lower our emissions. While Conservatives would roll back our progress and do nothing to fight climate change, the Liberal plan increases the price on pollution every year to continue lowering national emissions.

A strong economy over the past four years has also benefited students. Our unemployment rate is at a record low , and the government has opened new markets for Canadian small businesses to start up, scale up, and export their products. Under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Canada became the only G7 country to have free trade agreements with all other G7 countries. And of course, the government’s hard work building ties in the United States allowed it to stand up to Donald Trump and get a good NAFTA deal .

While Andrew Scheer would scale back our role in the world, over the past four years, Canada returned to its proud tradition of multilateralism. By running for a seat on the UN Security Council, Canada can contribute to global peace, rather than turning away from international institutions as Andrew Scheer would have us do. At a moment when Canada needs to do much more in foreign aid, Andrew Scheer would cut it by 25 per cent.

At this troubling time in world politics, Canada cannot be the next country to fall to right-wing populism. While the threat of populism once seemed confined to other countries, that is simply no longer the case. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s fearmongering and misinformation on migration , intolerance towards LGBTQ2+ people, opposition to women’s rights, and dog-whistles to the worst elements of our society are real and concerning. Indeed, Scheer’s own campaign manager was a founding director of The Rebel, a far-right website that routinely publishes Islamophobic and anti-Semitic slurs.

In contrast, Justin Trudeau became the first sitting prime minister to march in a Pride parade, showing the LGBTQ2+ community that Liberals will always stand up for them. And the Liberals have taken real action. New legislation introduced and passed by the Liberals protects against discrimination based on gender identity. Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives vocally opposed and voted against this law. Alarmingly, it’s 2019, and Mr. Scheer continues to boycott all Pride events. That’s because he still believes that same-sex couples lack the “essential element” of marriage. That’s not a view we can go back to.

There remains much more to do. In particular, we must press forward on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. I and many others would like to see the full and complete implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the lifting of all drinking water advisories as quickly as possible. 

Trudeau’s Liberals have promised to do both. The Liberals will implement UNDRIP in the first year of a new mandate and are on-track to eliminate drinking water advisories on reserves by 2021. And the Liberals have made real progress already, with new legislation to protect Indigenous languages and reduce the number of Indigenous children in foster care. 

Over the past four years, the Liberals’ action on these matters led the Assembly of First Nations’ National Chief Perry Bellegarde to declare that Trudeau’s Liberal government “has done more for First Nations people than any government in history.” On this issue, the choice Canadians face is perhaps the starkest. While the Liberals would do even more, the Conservatives would do nothing. In fact, Andrew Scheer’s entire Arctic policy did not once mention the word “Inuit.”

Over the past four years, the Liberal government has made real progress. Expanded social programs like the Canada Child Benefit have lifted 900,000 Canadians out of poverty , including 300,000 children . Ottawa has made record investments in Montreal’s transit network, including a recently-announced $1.3 billion investment into the blue Metro line extension. Cannabis is legal, the economy is booming, and Canada is making meaningful headway on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Now more than ever, we cannot afford to turn back the clock.

In a world where populism, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism are on the uptick, Canada cannot afford a government that would flirt with the far-right, fail to take action on climate change, and make callous cuts just like Doug Ford has.

On October 21, please do what so many around the world dream of. Find your polling station, make a plan to vote, and cast your ballot. I’m choosing to stop Andrew Scheer, Doug Ford, and Jason Kenney from taking us backwards. I’m voting to re-elect a progressive Liberal government that will continue to take us forward.

Edited by Evelyne Goulet. 

This opinion piece is part of a broader week-long MJPS Online series on voting intentions. Check  here  for other components of the series. For general information on how to vote in this month’s federal election, see  this resource  from Elections Canada. If you’re a university student, you can vote on campus. Find out how  here .  

The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author and do not reflect the position of the editor, the McGill Journal of Political Studies, or the Political Science Students’ Association. Questions regarding this series can be directed to  [email protected] .

Canada’s Liberals are an empire in decline with a leader in trouble

Under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals have lost many of the values and stabilizing influences that kept his predecessors connected to Canadians

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Jeffrey Simpson is the author of eight books and the former national affairs columnist for The Globe and Mail. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at St. Francis Xavier University on Oct. 20.

Here’s a conundrum or a contradiction: Canada’s Liberal Party has won three elections in a row, yet it has been in long-term decline for some decades.

For much of the 20th century, the Liberals were the world’s most successful democratic party, winning more elections and staying in power longer than any other. They were “Canada’s natural governing party.” And yet, the Liberals retained power in the last election with the smallest share of the popular vote for a “winning” party in Canadian history . Polls taken since the last election, for what they are worth, show little movement in the Liberals’ favour despite tens of billions of dollars spent during the pandemic and a subsequent summer showering the country with announcements of fresh spending.

Under Canada’s first-past-the-post system, seats rather than share of the popular vote dictate which party forms the government. The Conservatives pile up huge majorities of the popular vote on the Prairies, and in rural British Columbia and Ontario. These majorities, however, provide fewer seats than the ones captured by the Liberals in and around Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa and especially Toronto. In two consecutive elections, the Liberals won fewer votes than the Conservatives but enough seats to form minority governments.

In the last election, the Liberals won 32 per cent of the vote . In 2019, they took 33 per cent , a six-point slide from 2015 when they attracted 39.5 per cent . These totals compare unfavourably with popular-vote shares amassed by Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin in winning the elections of 1993, 1997, 2000 and 2004: 41 per cent , 38.5 per cent , 41 per cent and 37 per cent . Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, led the party in five elections from 1968 to 1980, during which the party’s share of the popular vote was 45.5 per cent , 38.5 per cent , 43 per cent , 40 per cent and 44 per cent .

Put another way, Liberal victories under Justin Trudeau were won with an average share of the popular vote of 35 per cent, compared with 39 per cent under Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Martin, and 42 per cent under Pierre Trudeau. In a late-September poll this year by Leger, the Liberals stood at 28 per cent, six points behind the Conservatives. An Angus Reid Institute survey , taken at the same time, showed the Liberals with 30 per cent, seven points behind the Conservatives. A new Nanos poll, released this week, puts the Liberals at 30 per cent, six points behind the Conservatives.

At the provincial level, the Liberals are in desperate shape. They govern only one province in Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador. Conservatives are in power in the other Atlantic Canada provinces. The once-mighty Liberal Party of Quebec is now a rump largely confined to non-francophone ridings. In Ontario, the party finished third in the last two provincial elections. The Liberals’ standing on the Prairies is so weak that one might paraphrase what prime minister John Diefenbaker once said of his Progressive Conservatives in that region: The only laws protecting Liberals are the game laws. In British Columbia, although there is a “Liberal Party” as the Official Opposition, that party is an unwieldy coalition of people who dislike the New Democrats more than they like each other.

Federal-provincial political fidelity, it should be noted, does not always bring harmony. Fierce rows have sometimes defined relations between Liberal premiers and Liberal prime ministers. There has also been a pattern for either party in power in Ottawa to lose ground provincially. Strong provincial partners, however, bring volunteers and money at federal election time.

Provincial Liberal governments can also provide a proving ground for candidates and political staff who land later in Ottawa. At no time was that more evident than when so large a raft of staffers from the former Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty swarmed into Justin Trudeau’s government that Ottawa might jocularly have been called Toronto-on-the Rideau.

Nor is there much left of a national Liberal Party organization. Today, anybody can join the party, no money or long-term commitment required. Just show up and be counted, then disappear. Long gone, too, are regional ministers with clout and power in cabinet and among the rank-and-file. These posts, a hallmark of many former Liberal cabinets, were scrapped by Justin Trudeau, one example of power centres collapsing in the face of governing by the Prime Minister and his entourage.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sits between his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, and the Governor-General, Mary Simon, at the cabinet swearing-in on Oct. 26, 2021. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press

A party leader in the Canadian system has always been primus inter pares . When cabinets were smaller (today’s Liberal cabinet is a bloated 39 members ), some ministers were serious heavyweights in their regions. They had to at least be noticed by the prime minister, if not always followed. They were stabilizing cogs in the Liberal Party, but they are now gone, replaced by Prime Minister-as-Sun King surrounded by his circle of advisers and, when called upon, pollsters.

This kind of political leadership can work to build and maintain support on one condition: that the prime minister remains reasonably popular in the country. Alas for the Liberals, Mr. Trudeau’s popularity has been sliding, a fate not unknown to prime ministers after a while in office. In the last two elections, he fortunately faced lacklustre, even incompetent, Conservative Party leaders. Time will tell whether Pierre Poilievre performs better, and whether he recognizes there are more available votes toward the middle of the country’s political spectrum, shrunken as it has become, than on the right-wing fringe.

The Liberal vote is due partly to the fracturing of the party system. The separatist Bloc Québécois now seems a fixture in federal politics. The Trudeau Liberals, rather than defending individual rights in Quebec in contrast to the collectivist politics of Premier François Legault, decided not to confront the popular Premier. Abandoning traditional Liberal principles did them no good politically, as they fell well short of their objective of more Quebec seats in the last election.

The Greens, although a flop in the last election (and in internal chaos ever since), retain a small coterie of voters. The People’s Party of Canada grabbed a few votes, but its members seem to be gravitating to the Poilievre Conservatives. So, yes, fracturing has meant some bleeding from two big national parties. But fracturing alone cannot explain the Liberals’ decline, since the Liberal Party at its zenith accommodated and absorbed protest parties.

Many Canadian voters remain somewhere in the broad, fiscally prudent/socially progressive/proud-of-country Canadian mainstream, which is where the Liberals used to be anchored. These are the voters that the great Liberal strategist of the Pierre Trudeau era, Keith Davey, used to call “garden-variety Canadians.”

There are many reasons tied to the day-to-day decisions and crises that chip away at a party’s support, and all parties evolve. They shift positions according to expediency, the challenges of the time, the priorities of the leader. No party in 2022 would run on the same platform as 50 years ago. That today’s Liberal Party is not the same as it was under Pierre Trudeau, let alone his predecessors, is not surprising. But there are traditions and outlooks that go beyond the turmoil of the day that cause swaths of the electorate to see themselves and their interests and regions reflected in a particular party, and so tend to support it election after election.

Mr. Trudeau joins Grade 2 students in Surrey, B.C., on Oct. 20 to make lights for Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas, Hindu and Sikh holidays, respectively. Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters

Justin Trudeau, quite apart from this or that decision, has decoupled the Liberal Party from some of its historical moorings, and is paying the political consequences. These moorings – patriotism and respect for Canada’s past; a balance of fiscal prudence and social priorities; defence of a strong central government; a bridge between English and French speakers – defined the Liberals in a positive way for millions of Canadians.

Liberals always had their critics on the right and the left (and among Quebec nationalists), as is the case today. But the party, more than the others most of the time, anchored its appeal in a strong sense of Canadian pride, spending where appropriate but not excessively, defending Ottawa against provincial demands for more autonomy, and reflecting the country’s linguistic duality.

Those moorings are now rusted or gone, and with their departure has vanished some of the Liberal Party’s historical support, which has not been replaced by new sources. Defenders of today’s Liberals would object to this observation and insist, correctly, that the party has gained female supporters. And why not? A gender-balanced cabinet. Budgets defined by “gender.” A “gender-based” foreign policy. A Prime Minister self-described as a “feminist.” More appointments of women to very senior positions than ever before. Spending programs for female entrepreneurs. A new multibillion-dollar child-care plan . And so on.

Any political analyst knows men and women vote for various reasons, of which gender is only one. Nonetheless, the Justin Trudeau Liberals purposefully set about cultivating female voters, and it would appear they succeeded in driving up their support among women.

Simple arithmetic rather than sophisticated political analysis, however, shows that something else happened. If the Liberals’ share of the female vote is going up while the party’s overall share of the national vote is declining, it must mean the vote among men has fallen faster.

The Angus Reid poll cited above illustrates the point. Forty-six per cent of women over 55 prefer the Liberals, compared with 31 per cent of men in that age category. Only 24 per cent of men 35 to 54 years of age prefer the Liberals; just 15 per cent of men 18 to 34 prefer them.

The Liberals have a huge problem with male voters, and they have no idea how to fix it. And that is because whereas there is a feminist vocabulary that the Liberals use incessantly, along with female-based policies, there is nothing equivalent for men. At least not overtly. This targeted Liberal approach is part of a “progressive” thinking in which politics (outside Quebec, with its different political culture) goes beyond gender to appeals based on the identity of race, Indigeneity and sexual orientation. The Liberals under Justin Trudeau have been in the vanguard of this narrative, reflecting and abetting trends in the English-Canadian intelligentsia, cultural and educational institutions, museums and galleries, publishing houses and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (but not Radio-Canada).

Sophisticates cringed when Mr. Chrétien used to declare in speeches that “Canada is number one!” The line was so corny, even jingoistic, they said. Audiences did not cringe. That corny cry conveyed two messages: pride and unity. Pride in Canada’s past and confidence in its future. The other, more subliminal meaning of being No. 1 was that for all the country’s differences and diversities, Canadians could be One.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has turned Mr. Chrétien’s meanings inside out. Mr. Trudeau has apologized more often than any prime minister for more past wrongs while almost never speaking about past accomplishments.

It is entirely appropriate to revisit history and uncover matters once pushed under the rug. It is a salutary exercise for a country to hold up a mirror to its past weaknesses. History is propaganda when it only extols the positive. But history is also propaganda when the mirror of past errors ignores a country’s achievements. When that happens, as it is today, we are no longer talking about a rounded view but about today’s political agendas.

Under today’s Liberals, and for most of the English-Canadian cultural class and institutions, Canada’s past is a sad litany of sins unleavened by triumphs of the human spirit or generosity. Polls – for example, those taken by Angus Reid – show that pride of country has declined among those under 30 years of age, although it remains high among the garden-variety Canadians who do not see that pride in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. The majority of those Canadians are prepared to acknowledge and atone for past sins such as residential schools, but they are not prepared to have their country defined by their Prime Minister and his party as an unbridled legacy of wrongdoing, genocide and racism.

Mr. Trudeau wipes tears at Sept. 30's National Day of Truth and Reconciliation in Ottawa. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Forgotten by the Trudeau Liberals and the English-Canadian cultural elite, it would seem, is that Canada was formed quite improbably. It brought together in the 1860s French Catholics and English Protestants whose ancestors had been fighting in Europe and North America for a long time. Given that history, Canada unexpectedly became the world’s oldest federation born in peace and unscarred by civil war. The resulting country provided a better life for millions of subsequent arrivals while treating Indigenous peoples poorly.

For decades, the Liberals were the party of Canadian patriotism. From the time of Wilfrid Laurier to Mr. Chrétien, the Liberals wanted to place some distance between Canada and Britain and create Canadian institutions, including a Canadian flag, that were opposed by the Progressive Conservatives of the day. Conservatives clung longer and more tightly to the British connection. The Liberals’ appeal to patriotism didn’t always work, as during the party’s fight against free trade with the United States. More often than not it was the party’s high card. Under Justin Trudeau and the identity politics he plays, it has almost entirely disappeared.

There are two kinds of identity politics, as the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama explains in his recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents . He writes: “One version sees the drive for identity as the completion of liberal politics. … The goal of this form of identity politics is to win acceptance and equal treatment for marginalized groups as individuals, under the liberal presumption of a shared underlying humanity. … The other version of identity politics sees the lived experience of different groups as fundamentally incommensurate; it denies the possibility of universally valid modes of cognition; and it elevates the value of group experience over what diverse individuals have in common.” Mr. Trudeau has chosen the second definition, and in so doing unmoored his party from its classic position as exponent of broad-tent Canadian patriotism.

Mr. Trudeau has also unmoored his party from its traditions in another important way. Every Liberal cabinet as far back as Mackenzie King’s – and throughout Pierre Trudeau’s and Mr. Chrétien’s time – was like a plane with two wings. One wing was composed of what might be loosely called “spending Liberals,” the other “business Liberals.” These are admittedly imprecise definitions for they suggest that the “spenders” were oblivious to the economy, tax and fiscal policy, and the business climate; and that the “business” Liberals lacked a social conscience. But ministers tended to lean in one direction or another, owing in part to what they did before entering politics.

Pierre Trudeau, second from left, walks to a cabinet swearing-in on July 6, 1968. With him, from left, are James Richardson, D.C. Jamieson, John Turner, Jean Marchand and Gerard Pelletier. Doug Ball/The Canadian Press

Thinking back to Pierre Trudeau’s cabinets recalls ministers now likely forgotten but important in their day. There were the “spenders” such as Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, Louis Duclos, Allan J. MacEachen, Bryce Mackasey, John Munro, Monique Bégin and Lloyd Axworthy. And there were the “business” Liberals who had been in the private sector or practised law before entering politics, including Don Jamieson, Edgar Benson, Donald S. Macdonald, Ed Lumley, John Turner, Bud Drury, Bob Winters, Mitchell Sharp and Bob Andras.

Pierre Trudeau, as prime minister, weaved between the factions, especially during the “stagflation” decade of the 1970s, which featured high interest rates, high unemployment and slow growth.

Mr. Chrétien’s cabinet featured the same balance, with spenders offset by business Liberals such as Paul Martin, John Manley, Doug Young, Anne McLellan and Roy MacLaren. Mr. Chrétien himself had a large social conscience but liked to remind listeners that as Treasury Board president earlier in his career he was known as “Dr. No” for turning down spending proposals. His government launched a “program review” that was the most successful postwar effort to cut spending.

Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is quite different. Only two of its 39 ministers worked in largish business companies before entering politics: Innovation Minister François-Phillippe Champagne and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.

The other ministers, starting with the Prime Minister himself, are teachers, journalists, lawyers, academics, social workers, public servants, engineers, health care workers, police officers, consultants and career politicians. It could be argued that not one has ever met a payroll, and few have experience in private enterprises.

This tilt reflects the political judgment of the Prime Minister and his advisers, and what kind of Liberal Party they believe will be successful. They deem fiscal prudence, often but not always a hallmark of previous Liberal governments, of limited importance. Prudence was ditched even before the first Trudeau cabinet was sworn into office, when a 2015 campaign commitment to balance the budget within four years disappeared. It was replaced by a new target: debt-to-GDP ratio, a much harder idea for the public to grasp than a budget deficit number. “Guardrails,” a loosey-goosey phrase designed to obscure rather than clarify, became the Liberals’ byword for fiscal management.

Ms. Freeland speaks in the media lockup ahead of April's budget release in Ottawa. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press

No one could blame the Liberals for ramping up spending during the pandemic. Perhaps some money was wasted, but the COVID-19 situation was unprecedented. Decisions had to be made on the fly in the face of medical uncertainty. After the surge in pandemic-related costs, however, the government announced another $30-billion for a new child-care program and then, as part of a deal with the NDP, a new limited drug-coverage plan and dental care for children. Political survival in the form of the Liberal-NDP deal buried any possibility of spending restraint – even in the face of soaring inflation. The announcement that Treasury Board president Mona Fortier would lead a group of civil servants to find $6-billion in “savings” over five years on government operations bordered on a joke. Even if such “savings” were found they would already have been subsumed by new spending.

The Trudeau Liberals no longer offer a balance between social spending and fiscal prudence. The business Liberals are increasingly extinct and the few that remain are big spenders themselves. Today’s party has decided that the path to political success lies in poaching votes from the NDP. This is surely how they will deal with Mr. Poilievre before and during the next campaign. They will portray him as a dangerous ideologue even further from the Canadian middle ground than the Liberals themselves. Liberals have scared moderate New Democrats into voting for them before, and they will try to do so again. And if Mr. Poilievre, a career politician, is as convinced of his own political genius as he seems to be, buoyed by his huge victory in the party leadership race, he might just provide the Liberals with the kind of target they need.

The Poilievre victory combined with the Liberals’ abandonment of their historic moorings leaves Canadian politics more polarized than it has ever been. Keith Davey’s garden-variety Canadians – socially progressive, fiscally cautious and patriotically proud – have been abandoned by both major parties. Maybe, just maybe, the parties reckon that this kind of Canadian voter has so shrunk in number that today’s politics is less about attracting them than polarizing voters around identity and ideology. In which case it would be naive to believe that Canada might not be witnessing the beginning – in some form – of the sharpened political divisions recently seen in parts of Europe and the United States.

Illustration by Brian Gable

Whither the Liberals? More from The Globe and Mail

John Ibbitson: Trudeau’s aggressive federalism may leave Ottawa weaker than before

Konrad Yakabuski: The Liberals should be worried if Trudeau stays

Campbell Clark: Chrystia Freeland issues a clarion call from Canada’s foreign-policy void

Andrew Coyne: There’s a case for centrism when voters are presented with two wholly unappetizing options

Follow related authors and topics

• Justin Trudeau Follow You must be logged in to follow. Log In Create free account
• Liberal Party Follow You must be logged in to follow. Log In Create free account

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following .

Interact with The Globe

Real estate wealth has devalued the status of being a millionaire in canada, prime minister’s office received 34 briefings on foreign interference since 2018, csis says, your cpp questions answered: how do zero-income years affect your retirement pension, trucking firm pride group given two months to restructure $1.6-billion of debt – and it won’t be easy, total solar eclipse stuns sky-gazers with momentary plunge into darkness, bce’s dividend yield is close to 9 per cent: buy, hold or run for the hills, deportation hearing set for truck driver in deadly humboldt broncos bus crash, a denser city in the annex, neighbours say no.

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Government

Essay Samples on Liberalism

Resistance to freedom: comparing h. bergeron and a&p.

Resistance is liberal, leaping over all restraints to challenge the authority around people and to rebel against the established society. In John Updike’s short story A&P and Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction of story Harrison Bergeron, the authors, through the distinctive color of liberalism, create the protagonist's...

• Harrison Bergeron

Moral Foundation for Liberal Egalitarian Politics

Left-libertarianism is a promising englobement of the values that define liberal egalitarian politics. In this essay I will argue that left-libertarianism does in fact provide a compelling moral foundation for liberal egalitarian politics. Furthermore, throughout the essay I will bring in discussion certain elements that...

True Essence Of Liberalism And How It Improves The Lives Of Countless People

A survey is going around town asking individuals from families how happy they are and to measure how much freedom they feel they have in their household. The families fall under four different categories: Conservative, Anarchist, Liberal and Libertarian. The Conservative household chose to be...

• Social Inequality

Analytical Philosophy amid Orthodoxy: Liberalism and Conservatism

A liberal attitude toward anything means more tolerance for change. There are many meanings for liberal, but they mostly have to do with freedom and openness to change. Liberalism involves belief in personal freedom. Liberalism comes in many forms. Basis of liberalism is toleration of...

• Conservatism

Challenges Faced by The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is Japan’s largest and longest existing party which has held power nearly consecutively from its inception in 1955. It was formed immediately after the end of the United States Forces Occupation in 1955 by merging the two political parties (Reed, 2018)....

• Democratic Party

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

• 100% unique papers
• 3 hrs deadline option

Classical Liberalism in the Philosophies of Locke and Brucke

What is classical liberalism? This is an ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates for civil liberties under the rule of law with emphasis on economic freedom. John Locke was an English philosopher, who first unified these ideas as a distinct ideology. This inherently...

The Concept of Liberty and Being Liberal According to John Mill

The term "Liberal" finds its origins in the Latin dictionary, signifying "free." It holds a deep historical and philosophical significance, tracing back to ancient Roman times. In the context of modern governance, the United States' Constitution and the Bill of Rights encompass the nation's first...

• John Stuart Mill

Liberalism as a Way to Resolve France's Relations with Chad

Today, France is one of the seven most powerful nations in the world. France is a free country with an overall score of ninety from The Freedom House. France is a democratic republic with free and fair elections. Before the French Revolution, France’s form of...

• World History

Liberalism and Modernism Influences in Pakistan

What is Liberalism Liberalism is a political and good way of thinking dependent on the freedom, assent of the administered, and balance under the watchful eye of the law. Nonconformists embrace a wide cluster of perspectives relying upon their comprehension of these standards, yet they...

The Historical Context and Background of the Liberalism Movement

Liberalism is a political and economic belief that highlights separate independence, equivalent chances, and the security of personprivileges in the state. Liberalism is a political idea and philosophy that emphases on the defense of entity’s rights and securing the liberty by warning the government’s control....

• American Government

Analysis Of The Relevance And Impact Of A Multicultural Approach

Globally, the discourse about Multiculturalism has surfaced and can no longer be ignored in our Arab world. Nations worldwide are trying to come to terms with this growing diversity, trying to find workable solutions that would help gain a sense of control over their borders,...

• Multiculturalism

A Quick Look Into The Ideologies of The Libertarian Party

With a very limited knowledge of the Libertarian Party, I decided to take this opportunity to learn more about this interesting organization. In a largely Republican and Democrat dominated government, it’s important to have these other parties in order to add another point of view...

• Political Party

The Liberal Philosophy Of War According To Michael Howard

If it is true, as Michael Howard claims, that nowadays almost all Anglo-Saxon political thinkers are liberals, then his argument, first published in 1978, promises to be and remain highly relevant. In the new foreword to this third edition, Howard expressly makes the claim that...

• Role of Government

Best topics on Liberalism

1. Resistance to Freedom: Comparing H. Bergeron and A&P

2. Moral Foundation for Liberal Egalitarian Politics

3. True Essence Of Liberalism And How It Improves The Lives Of Countless People

4. Analytical Philosophy amid Orthodoxy: Liberalism and Conservatism

5. Challenges Faced by The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan

6. Classical Liberalism in the Philosophies of Locke and Brucke

7. The Concept of Liberty and Being Liberal According to John Mill

8. Liberalism as a Way to Resolve France’s Relations with Chad

9. Liberalism and Modernism Influences in Pakistan

10. The Historical Context and Background of the Liberalism Movement

11. Analysis Of The Relevance And Impact Of A Multicultural Approach

12. A Quick Look Into The Ideologies of The Libertarian Party

13. The Liberal Philosophy Of War According To Michael Howard

• Police Brutality
• Gun Control
• Community Policing
• Conspiracy Theory
• Department of Education
• Bureaucracy
• Alien and Sedition Acts

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain

Cahiers du MIMMOC

Home Issues 7 The new Liberal Party from dawn t...

The new Liberal Party from dawn to downfall 1906 - 1924

Index terms, mots-clés : , keywords: , geographical areas: , periods: , themes: , editor's notes.

This is a transcription from Lord Morgan's public lecture by Lauranne Fougère.

From 1906 to 1914

1 The Liberal Party and Liberal government, particularly from 1906, is a very important period of British history, often compared with the Labour government after 1945, another great phase of reform. But there is of course one big difference: the Liberal government of 1906 was pre-war, the Attlee government post-war. The Labour government in 1945 set the tone for post-war British development, politically and socially, down, perhaps, to the regime of Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. By contrast, the Liberals I am talking about this morning were destroyed by the First World War. They almost disintegrated as a party. The Liberals that I am talking about were a casualty of total war.

2 They won a great landslide victory in 1906, over 400 Liberal MPs, plus 29 Labour, plus 83 Irish Nationalists. So it was a great victory for the British Left, a great disaster for the Conservative Party, an enormous swing and many people, then and later, asked: “How was it was the Liberals won such an overwhelming majority?”

3 At the time, much attention focused on religion, particularly in connection with the 1902 Education Act. It was the greatest victory for non-conformists, for Protestants in Britain since the time of Oliver Cromwell, when the King got his head cut off and people wondered what could happen this time. In fact, the impact of religion on British political life was relatively short-term. The non-conformists were to be disappointed clients of the great Liberal landslide.

4 More important than religion, I think, was the rise of Labour . 1906 saw the first decisive impact of the working class on British politics. There was great concern with the rise of strikes, the growth of the Trade Unions, the rise of social questions. A major reason, in fact, for the Liberals' winning this enormous majority in 1906, was that they had a secret pact with the small Labour Party, or what came to be called the Labour Party, by which the Labour Party was given a free uncontested election in about 30 constituencies. Soon after the general election, the Labour Party, proper, was formed with Keir Hardie as its chairman, gaining 29 Members of Parliament. A new force had arisen, a spectre was haunting British politics, as Karl Marx would have said, and that takes you very much to the core of what was happening in Britain in the year 1906.

5 If you think of Edwardian Britain, very commonly it is thought to be a time of great national self-confidence, and those, I think, terrible tunes by Elgar in Pomp and Circumstance , full of imperial glory. There were great imperial buildings going up in London, great imperial buildings going up in India, in New Delhi at the same time. But in fact, in my view, it was not a period of great national confidence. It was a period of anxiety . That is the background of the Liberal victory: anxiety about Empire after the war in South Africa and the death of so many thousands of women and children as a result of the atrocities committed by the British in concentration camps in South Africa; anxiety about the economy, fear that Britain's industrial supremacy was being overtaken by Germany and the United States; fear about national security, Britain being isolated in the world. Hence the “Entente Cordiale" , as it was called, with France in 1904. Within Britain itself, great anxiety about the problems of the city, about poverty, about unemployment and as an aspect of these problems, as they affected women. The issue of women was not only a question of the vote but a matter of women's standard of living and quality of life. So all these factors were making it, I believe, a time of great concern, undermining self-confidence in Britain and all of them impinged on the Conservative Party.

6 The Conservative Party in the 1990s was torn apart over Europe. The Conservative Party in the 1900s was torn apart about Empire. And thus it was that the Liberals won their great majority against the background of these accumulative anxieties, this tension about Empire and in particular defending the great Liberal cause, the one Holy Grail for which Liberals stood, free trade, free trade between the nations. All the Liberal values were embodied in free trade: cheap food for the working man, cheap raw materials for industrial producers, full employment, economic growth, a grand vision of prosperity and peace. This was what the Liberals were defending and this was what they claimed the Conservatives were threatening to destroy.

7 The Liberal government down to 1914 was dominated by two men and one issue. Two men: of course Asquith, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George. Very different men, very different in background: Asquith an elitist, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, perhaps the most famous college in Oxford. Lloyd George, a man who never went to university, brought up in a shoe-maker's home, Welsh-speaking, a Baptist in religion. Asquith the English insider. Lloyd George the Welsh outsider. They married, I may say, very different wives. There is Lloyd George with a very quiet lady from rural Wales. Asquith's wife was a rather glamorous gossip from high society. It was said of the two that Asquith told everything to his wife and Lloyd George told everything to other people's wives. So that tells you something about them. They came from very different backgrounds: Lloyd George, anti-imperialist, hostile to the Boer War, Asquith, a Liberal imperialist. So, very different men but they got on, they formed a very powerful partnership. They had politically a much more effective partnership than in recent years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain. It probably helped that neither Asquith nor Lloyd George wrote a proper autobiography which has added somehow to the ill-will between the Blair and the Brown camp. They worked closely together on issue after issue. The real test of their partnership came in 1912 when Lloyd George was accused of corruption during the Marconi case. It was said he had made money out of contracts for telegraphy entered into by the British government. He could have gone. Asquith could have pushed him out but not a bit of it. Asquith fought tooth and nail to retain Lloyd George in the government. Asquith liked being Prime Minister. He thought the Liberals were the new party to be in government and he knew that Lloyd George was the Liberals' greatest asset. So Asquith fought to win. He defended his Chancellor successfully in the way that I do not believe would have happened between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

8 The main issue was, as I have indicated, the social question. In 1906, they fought, I think, a largely negative campaign, attacking the Conservatives, particularly over free trade. But it became clear that what contemporaries called the “New Liberalism”, the Liberalism of social reform, was increasingly dominating the Liberal mind. The evidence of poverty, of urban deprivation, of the hard conditions of children and old people and working women gripped the Liberal mind at this period and very famous writers drew attention to these matters. I will mention two of them: Hobhouse and Hobson. L. T. Hobhouse was a pioneer of sociology. J. A. Hobson was a very interesting economist who had some impact on Lenin later on, indicating as I said, the range of social concerns that lay beneath the banner of prosperity and Pomp and Circumstance in Edwardian Britain. And increasingly and particularly after Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, the New Liberalism of social reform dominated the public agenda, beginning in 1908 with the passage of Old Age Pensions, introduced by Asquith and carried through by Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

9 As Chancellor, Lloyd George became the main political instrument of the New Liberalism. For him, it was not only a matter of social concern, of trying to remedy social evils. It was a financial matter. How would these reforms be paid for? Pensions meant twelve million pounds coming from the public purse. How was that to be financed? And very importantly it was a matter of political necessity. The Liberals had lost ground since 1906. They needed to recapture the initiative to stay in office and Lloyd George, particularly aware of this, and very interestingly, and I think this is the difference between the Liberals in 1908 and the Labour government in our country in recent years, the longer they went on, the more they became committed to a radical approach. If you like, they moved to the left, which is always a good place to move to in my opinion. There were two very important factors in Lloyd George's mind: the need for a Liberal free trade answer to social reform. How do you pay for it? The Conservatives said the foreigner will pay through tariffs. Lloyd George and the Liberals answered the rich would pay and capitalists would be subjected to progressive redistributive graduated taxation. From within the resources of the country, social reform would be paid for. And there is another factor too: fear of Labour. Lloyd George had very much in mind what he believed was happening in France and what was happening in Italy and had happened in Germany already, that Liberals would be overtaken by the Labour Party, with the nameless terror of socialism within the Labour Party and that it was important that the Liberals therefore had a political answer to the challenge of Labour.

• 1 Editor's note: Speaker’s Lectures : Centenary of the Parliament Act, Lord Morgan, David Lloyd Georg (...)

10 Hence Lloyd George's People's Budget of 1909 which introduced a great range of new taxes. These were direct taxes carefully worked out not to annoy Liberal voters: taxes on estates, higher income tax, duties on drink, duties on tobacco, a new road fund and petrol duty. It was the beginning of the motor car in Britain and this was a fruitful source for new taxation. What particularly horrified people at the time was what seemed to them the class war aspect of Lloyd George's Budget, the attack on land, a whole range of duties on land, of which the most important was what was called the tax on the unearned increment, by which was meant the increased value that land acquired through the growth of industries, through the development of cities while landowners sat there and saw the value go up. Should they not be taxed on the enhanced value of that land? These measures infuriated the Conservative Party, they infuriated particularly the House of Lords. The House of Lords today on many issues tends to be on the left of the House of Commons but in 1909, it certainly was not and very foolishly and unconstitutionally they threw out Lloyd George's budget. This resulted in a big fight between the government and the Lords. The Liberals won two general elections and in the end, the Parliament Act of 1911, which we are celebrating this year, which the Speaker of the House of Commons is celebrating with a series of lectures to mark that event, which I have launched 1 . So this was a major triumph: the People's Budget, in financial terms and in major political and constitutional terms, the Parliament Act of 1911, that meant the budget had to go through and the House of Lords could in future only delay government measures, including Irish Home Rule, for two years. So Irish Home Rule would therefore also come about.

11 Lloyd George intended clearly the budget to be the launch pad of social reform. He was a different kind of Chancellor. He did not just add up the books like a kind of super accountant. He saw treasury policy as the motor that would drive social change forward and thus it was that he followed it up in 1911, again the centenary of it this year, with a very remarkable act, the National Insurance Act, a state-wide system of support for health, if workers fell ill, and in part for unemployment, if you were thrown out of work. It was based on a contributory principle and therefore people accepted it, as people were used to contributing to their own private insurance policies. Here, one can see the birth of the British Welfare State. In my opinion the most notable contribution of the history of the world that Britain made in the 20 th century was the idea of the Welfare State, of a comprehensive system which embodied, not just political citizenship, but social citizenship, that within the framework of social welfare, all would participate and in a sense, all would be equal. From that time onward, right through the Beveridge report in the Second World War, I think that you can fairly argue that Lloyd George's National Insurance Act has been the framework of the Welfare State.

12 In some ways, that was the high noon of the Liberals before the war, followed by a very difficult period, one of Labour disputes, the threat of a general strike, much violence including notably in South Wales, the militancy of the suffragettes, women demanding the vote and the threat of possible civil war in Ireland between the Catholic South and the Protestant North. Some people have argued that the Liberal government was really falling apart over these issues. I think the only one that was really insuperable was actually Ireland, and that you can argue quite strongly that the government in some ways was rather relieved when the First World War came about because it got them off the hook as far as Ireland was concerned.

13 But in general, in my opinion, the Liberal government was still powerful in 1914. The economy was doing well. 1913 was the best ever year for British exports,exports of coal, exports of cotton, exports of manufactured goods. The government could claim to be guardians of peace and prosperity. They had not invaded other countries, there were no Iraqs during the period of the Liberal government before 1914. They still had Lloyd George, the most charismatic politician in the land, still working on behalf of more progressive social policies. In 1914, Lloyd George and one or two colleagues close to him were working on a number of different themes: education, housing, very interestingly the possibility of making the health centres under the National Insurance Act the basis for a kind of proto National Health Service. And so there were many new ideas and the government was still powerful. In my opinion, on the eve of war in 1914, the Liberal government while facing challenges from a reviving Conservative Party, was at its most creative, still active, still with the zest to govern.

From 1914 to 1918

14 Then came the war. From the beginning, the war was a time of great anxiety for the Liberals. Deeply divided in mind, crucially, Lloyd George decided to remain in government and soon became the most forceful spokesman for a “fight to the finish”. Most Liberals reluctantly supported the war. They were persuaded that it was a war for Liberal values, for defending gallant little Serbia, gallant little Belgium, according to Lloyd George, gallant little Wales. All these small nationalities were being upheld. But there were very important Liberals who were, from the start, anti-war. And there is a very interesting body: the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), which was anti-war, committed to a democratic foreign policy, who said the war had come about because of secret treaties, anxious that civil liberties should be preserved in war time. Many of these people joined the Labour Party after 1918.

15 So there were divisions from the outset and the divisions got worse after May 1915. A coalition formed. The government was no longer a purely Liberal government. There was great uncertainty about what would happen. The Liberals retained the key offices, Asquith remained Prime Minister, but the whole balance of the government was changed, with the Conservatives now in Cabinet and one or two Labour people also changing the balance, the tone of the government. And most worrying of all, in the view of some people, Lloyd George was moving, it seemed, away from his roots, away from his anti-war radical past, working increasingly with the Conservatives in the pursuit of total war. The great highlight of this war time argument was military conscription.

16 This foreshadowed the great split. There was a big argument over conscription in the winter of 1915-1916. Here was a fundamental issue for Liberals. How wholeheartedly were they committed to fighting the war? The Home Secretary, a Liberal, John Simon, resigned. Asquith seemed dilatory, unable to make up his mind. Lloyd George was working with the Conservatives. In the end, military conscription was introduced for all males between 18 and 45 years of age but it was a hugely divisive factor within the Liberal Party. It embodied the key principle between, if you like, total war on the one hand and civil liberties on the other hand, rather the kind of argument we have had in Britain latterly which exercised us in the House of Lords about counter terrorism legislation. How do you strike the balance between security and freedom? And during this period, a group of Liberals drew up a list of perhaps a hundred backbencher Liberals who said if there was a crisis, a showdown, they would support Lloyd George as Prime Minister and not Asquith.

17 The divisions went on as Lloyd George's position became more and more unique and anomalous. He became Secretary of State for War in July 1916 and then in November and December it was known that Lloyd George was engaged in private talks with the Conservative leader, Bonar Law and the Irish Unionist leader Carson. What they were proposing was something quite fundamental, that the British government be remodeled, that a war council be created to run the war, of which Asquith would not be a member. This caused great tension between Lloyd George and Asquith. Asquith seemed to accept the proposal at one time, 4 th December, 1916 but decided that perhaps it was too much of a sacrifice for him. It is not clear why but he broke off negotiations with Lloyd George and the Conservatives and, in a series of backstairs manoeuvres, Lloyd George got the support of the Conservative or Unionist Party, as they were called, and by one vote, quite importantly, the Labour Party. Over a hundred Liberal backbenchers, again, emerged to confirm their support for Lloyd George and Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister, as the head of a mainly Conservative government. So if you are looking for the downfall of the Liberal Party, it’s right here, in the first week of December 1916, when the crucial developments happened.

18 After that Lloyd George was rather detached from his party. There was a great similarity in many ways to Clemenceau in France, also acting very much as an individual, acting apart from the radical party. Lloyd George seeming perhaps less like a Prime Minister, more like an American President. He claimed he was still a Liberal, he strengthened the Liberal representation in his government, particularly with the introduction of Winston Churchill, who was still very much a Liberal at that time in 1917. There were major reforms introduced: a big Education Act, the Reform Act of 1918, by which women over the age of 30 were given the vote. So reforms were introduced but, increasingly, the government was dominated by the Conservatives, and increasingly so when the Labour Party left the government.

19 The future for the Liberal Party was quite unpredictable after this. A very important debate in Parliament took place in May 1918, the Maurice Debate. Very serious allegations were made that the British government had deliberately run down the numbers of troops on the Western front in France and that Lloyd George and other ministers had lied to the House of Commons about it. In the key vote in the Commons 98 Liberals voted against the government, 70 Liberals voted for it. In a very rough and ready way, this became the basis for future Liberal division. Lloyd George was now working with his own supporters and with the Conservatives to make arrangements for the next general election. It was assumed there could be a war-time election in which the Liberals and the Conservatives would run joint candidates. And Lloyd George's Liberals did quite well. They got about 150 seats for guaranteed supporters of the Prime Minister. The war now rapidly came to an end. The election happened just after the Armistice and there was an enormous victory, a landslide, for Lloyd George's coalition government with 520 Members of Parliament, as against only 29 Independent Liberals. Amongst those defeated was the former Prime Minister, Mr Asquith. It was a fatal divide for the Liberal Party. It institutionalized the gulf between supporters of Lloyd George's coalition and opponents of that coalition. “Here is a great split”, observed Winston Churchill. It led rapidly to the fragmentation of the Liberal Party. The real winners of this election interestingly, I think, were the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 listened to the advice, the only, I think, effective political advice he ever gave, of the famous dramatist George Bernard Shaw. Shaw said to the Labour Party Conference: “Go back to Lloyd George and say: “Nothing doing”. And Labour kept out of the coalition and it soon emerged, in my opinion, that they were the real winners, the clear voice of the British Left from that time onwards.

From 1918 to 1924

20 After the war, the Liberals therefore were divided into two. Coalition Liberals aligned with the Conservatives in support of the government and Independent Liberals, Lloyd George and Asquith, the two great allies, now ranged against each other. They had separate organisations, separate newspapers. Lloyd George had his own private funds, interestingly, to pursue his own political objectives. How did he get this money? By selling titles for people to go sit in the House of Lords. There was a kind of Dutch auction conducted in London clubs in cluding the Reform Club. Lloyd George built up his funds and nothing could be more divisive than a private treasury of money held by one erratic individual. Lloyd George said “I am still a Liberal. Look at what I am doing: we are promoting housing, promoting health policies, we have got money extending unemployment insurance”.

21 But in fact, more and more Liberals , including many Liberals who supported the government, were now deeply uneasy at the course of government policy. They saw a government presided over by the most famous Liberal in the land, Lloyd George, a government that was making inroads into free trade. It was pursuing a terrible policy in Ireland, a policy of reprisals with auxiliary forces known popularly as the “Black and Tans”, waging war against Irish Republicans. Liberals were very worried too, as were liberal people very much in France and other countries, about the government's foreign policy. The vindictive aspect as they saw it of the Treaty of Versailles, a policy of reparations imposed on Germany, the treatment of nationalities in areas like the Sudetenland in the western areas of Czechoslovakia. Many Liberals were deeply influenced by the famous book by the economist J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace which depicted the peace as fundamentally unjust and the product of post-war chauvinism.

22 So, Liberals who claimed to support the government felt morally, as well as politically, on the defensive. They were very much now sitting targets for Labour. Many of Lloyd George's Liberals represented industrial seats in mining areas, for example, they were sitting targets for the Labour Party and they became weaker and weaker and lost constituencies in by-elections. There is another thing which is very commonly forgotten by people who write about these matters: look at local government, don't just look at Westminster, look at local councils and in the localities and the regions, there is a growing tendency for Liberal Councillors to lose their autonomy and to be acting with the Conservatives particularly in what were called Rate-payers organisations, signs that the Liberals were now lining up with their fellow capitalists the Conservatives, in an anti-Labour front.

23 What was the future for the Liberal Party with Lloyd George still Prime Minister? Lloyd George's answer at one time was that they might merge with the Conservatives. One or two Liberals have suggested that in the present coalition in Britain but I think what happened in 1920 was a warning against it. Talks of the Conservatives about a merger or fusion broke down because Lloyd George's Liberals, even Churchill felt that they were Liberals on free trade, perhaps on social reform, They wanted to keep open the possibility of Liberal reunion with their Asquithian colleagues. And so, the Liberals seemed to have no obvious purpose now. They were not going to ally with Conservatives. They were divided amongst themselves, no one knew what could happen at the next general election. So, attempts to remould the party system had failed. Key Liberal ministers, Christopher Addison the social reformer, Edward Montagu, Secretary of India, left the government. Many people wondered whether Winston Churchill, with his obsession about Bolshevik Russia, could be classified as a Liberal any more. And what was worse too, the Conservatives were also objecting to the Lloyd George government. If the Liberals thought the government was too Conservative, Conservatives thought that the government was too radical. In the end peace was made in Ireland, which the Conservatives did not favour, like the recognition of the Bolshevik government in Russia. In the end, the Conservatives objected not so much to the content of policy, as to the form of policy under Lloyd George, Lloyd George's contempt for the constitutional system, his presidential manner. The British do not like Julius Caesar or, if you like, the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, in their domestic history. They prefer a collective non-presidential system. Lloyd George was getting over-mighty. In the end, the Conservatives rebelled against the government and it collapsed in October 1922. In the next election, the Liberals were hopelessly divided: 62 Asquithian Independent Liberals, 53 Lloyd George Liberals. The future of the Liberal Party was now in doubt.

24 For the next couple of years the issue was the contest between the Liberal Party and Labour. The Liberals came to realize they simply could not remain divided. If they were still to be a credible party, they had to set aside their disputes over Lloyd George and his fund. They did come together in defending free trade in 1923 when rather surprisingly, they actually won 157 seats, which is easily the best showing that they have made since the First World War. But the Labour Party won more seats and formed the first minority government in 1924. It became apparent that in Britain's version of the class war, that the Liberal Party was being squeezed in the polarization between capital and labour, between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. The first Labour government was not a particularly happy period for the Labour Party but it was a disastrous period for the Liberals. In 1906, if you recall, they had won 401 seats. In 1924, they won 40. They were clearly now the third force of British politics. After that, they rallied a bit under Lloyd George and gained 59 seats in 1929. But then in 1931, they did even worse than in 1918. In 1918, they divided into 2. In 1931, they divided into 3. In 1918, they were discredited as a party of government. In 1931, they were discredited as a party of opposition. The Liberal Party was now, I think, probably most effective not in Parliament, but in pressure groups, for example, in the League of Nations Union calling, in vain, for a system of the rule of law in international affairs. Key figures were moving to other parties: Churchill, most famously, joining the Conservatives, people like the son of Isaac Foot, Michael Foot, and the son of Wedgwood Benn, Tony Benn, moving to the Labour Party, with the Liberal Party seemingly by-passed by the course of events.

25 In conclusion, the Liberals had not just declined at this period. They fragmented disastrously. Why was that? Well, it would be apparent, I think, that the war was a crucial episode for them, arguments over particularly the issue of military conscription and the whole debate about the conduct of the war. But I also think that there were long-term issues: social issues were changing, the land question was losing its supremacy in a world dominated by industrial matters and the conflict between capital and labour. The British economy was different. The great exporting industries like coal and cotton were in decline and free trade therefore became a less central theme. Religious issues were disappearing, the chapels were in decline, many of them closing down. In Scotland and in Wales, the force of nationalism in those countries was a waning force, where a kind of Unionism, seeing Britain as a whole, dominated, rather than the quasi-national appeal championed by the Liberals before 1914. So, if you like, there are long-term reasons for the decline of the Liberal Party. But it would not be right to end on that note.

26 The note to end on is rather to emphasize the enduring impact of the Liberal government between 1906 and 1914, of enormous long term resonance. They created the beginnings of our Welfare State. They established the power of democracy and the rule of law in a new way and reinforcing the primacy of the elected House of Commons over the House of Lords. They began, if you like, the vision of a pluralistic United Kingdom. If you want to see the roots of devolution in Scotland and in Wales you should look to the Liberal regime before 1914, when Scotland and Wales developed their identity. Even after 1924, great intellectual Liberals like the economist Keynes, the social writer William Beveridge, remained influential forces. The Liberals are again in coalition now with the Conservatives. I think the connection between the Liberals then and the Liberal Democrats now is almost zero; almost every aspect of Lloyd George's People Budget, redistributive taxation, measures for reducing unemployment, social measures like allowances for children, are being scrapped. There is no obvious ideological connection between the great party then and the rather shambling minority party in Britain at the present time but what it did was to create a great historical landmark. It provided an enduring thrust, making Great Britain the country that it is today.

1 Editor's note: Speaker’s Lectures : Centenary of the Parliament Act, Lord Morgan, David Lloyd George lecture, 11 January 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9487000/9487828.stm .

Electronic reference

Kenneth O. Morgan , “The new Liberal Party from dawn to downfall 1906 - 1924” ,  Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain [Online], 7 | 2011, Online since 01 September 2011 , connection on 09 April 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/671; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/mimmoc.671

About the author

Kenneth o. morgan.

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

• Geographical areas

Full text issues

• 30 | 2023 États et sociétés des Amériques face aux blessures de l’histoire. Des politiques nationales aux réponses locales
• 29 | 2023 Politiques éducatives et projets de société : mots d'ordre officiels et expériences alternatives (Europe, Amériques, Afrique et Asie ─ XXe-XXIe siècles)
• 28 | 2022 Femmes et emploi : regards, images et perception
• 27 | 2022 Censorship and blind spots: the BBC’s silences
• 26 | 2021 La prothèse qui fait peur
• 25 | 2021 Regards croisés France-Asie centrale : l’enseignement des langues étrangères à l’université
• 24 | 2021 Figures de femmes dans les cultures européennes
• 23 | 2020 Revitalisation linguistique : pour qui? pour quoi?
• 22 | 2020 La recherche interculturelle appliquée aux récits impossibles en contexte migratoire.
• 21 | 2020 Circulations migratoires féminines dans l'espace hispanique et lusophone contemporain: vers une émancipation
• 20 | 2019 The Festival of Britain 1951: the cultural politics of display
• 19 | 2018 Servitudes et libertés dans les Amériques avant l’abolition de l’esclavage
• 18 | 2017 Discours médiatiques en situation post-conflictuelle
• 17 | 2016 La politique étrangère de la RFA (1974-1990)
• 16 | 2016 Le 11 septembre dans le monde : politiques, cultures, identités
• 15 | 2015 Amérindianités et savoirs
• 14 | 2015 Who Governs in the Americas and in Europe?
• 13 | 2015 Minorités en Europe
• 12 | 2015 The 1846-1851 Famine in Ireland: Echoes and Repercussions
• 11 | 2014 Qui gouverne aux États-Unis et au Canada ?
• 10 | 2013 Colonial and postcolonial culture and decolonisation
• 9 | 2013 Poetising history and politics
• 8 | 2012 German Unification
• 7 | 2011 The Liberal Party in the United Kingdom, past and present, on the periphery or central?
• 6 | 2010 Place, music, identity
• 5 | 2009 The Wall as a contemporary global paradigm: evolution and perspectives 1989-2009
• 4 | 2007 Diversity and the Refusal of Hybridity
• 3 | 2007 Identity and Territory 2
• 2 | 2006 Identity and Territory 1
• 1 | 2006 Figures of Exclusion and Exile

The periodical

• Editorial policy
• Comité éditorial
• Editorial board
• Instructions for authors
• Authorisation for online publication

Informations

• Crédits et mentions légales
• Publishing policies

Rubriques électroniques

• Reports & Reviews

Newsletters

• OpenEdition Newsletter

In collaboration with

Electronic ISSN 1951-6789

Read detailed presentation  

Site map  – Syndication

Privacy Policy  – About Cookies  – Report a problem

OpenEdition Journals member  – Published with Lodel  – Administration only

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search

ESSAY SAUCE

FOR STUDENTS : ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF A GOOD ESSAY

Essay: SWOT analysis of the Liberal Party (Canada)

Essay details and download:.

• Subject area(s): Politics essays
• Reading time: 6 minutes
• Price: Free download
• Published: 24 January 2022*
• File format: Text
• Words: 1,508 (approx)
• Number of pages: 7 (approx)

Text preview of this essay:

This page of the essay has 1,508 words. Download the full version above.

Keeping the goal of the liberal party in mind, it is important to construct a critical analysis of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the upcoming election. This means taking an unbiased look at the parties leadership , the current political climate, key campaign issues, the prior 2015 election results, fundraising, candidates, and target ridings. The leadership as of now is one of the greatest weaknesses of the party. Despite Mr. Trudeau reaching out to young audiences like never before, he has also come with an ever low approval rating. Just how low? “Mr. Trudeau’s own approval rating is lower than U.S. President Donald Trump’s.” (Margaret Wente, 2019) Recent polls show only 35% of Canadians approve of the Trudeau government. (Margaret Wente, 2019) This is relatively equal to the percentage who approved of Harper’s government back in 2014. (Margaret Wente, 2019) Many Canadians feel the real issues are not being addressed, and the money is being wasted on pointless bills and objectives. For example, Bill C-69, which states project components now have to take into account “the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors.” (Margaret Wente, 2019) This of course has nothing related to pumping oil and is wasting resources focussing on problems that won’t help Canadians. (Margaret Wente, 2019) The liberal party finds itself in the middle of the political spectrum, which can have its advantages and disadvantages. The liberal party wants to help stop climate change, however have implemented a carbon tax that’s too low to influence Canadians behaviour, but high enough to irritate people. (Margaret Wente, 2019) There has been few controversies and scandals during prime minister trudeau’s leadership. However, the current and most significant of the few being the current on going SNC-Lavalin Construction Inc investigation. The scandal is ongoing as of March 2019 and is going to hurt the Liberals in the upcoming election. The company SNC-Lavalin Construction Inc had been charged with fraud and corruption. (Staff, N. P, 2019) If convicted the company may be banned from working on government contracts for 10 years. (Staff, N. P, 2019) In 2016, shortly after the election, the company began have meetings with the Minister of Public Services and Procurement, Carla Qualtrough, as well as officials in the Prime Minister’s Office to attempt to change legislation quickly to avoid the penalties facing the company. (Staff, N. P, 2019) The Prime Minister’s Office then inappropriately pressured the Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in ongoing criminal legal proceedings against SNC-Lavalin and abandon prosecution. (Staff, N. P, 2019) Prime Minister Trudeau came out with a statement saying this never happened and then Jody Wilson-Raybould suspiciously resigned from her duty as Attorney General. (Harris, K, 2019) The case has not come to a conclusion yet, however regardless it looks very bad on the Liberal Party but more importantly Justin Trudeau as a leader. Today’s political climate is without a question leaning more and more left. Countries like Sweden are becoming more and more popular by having more socialist governments. There is far more movies, television, podcasts, social media in general, and online magazines leaning left then there are ones leaning right. With that being said this current political climate is the perfect time for the liberals to take advantage as they are a center-left political party. A strength the liberal party has is their campaign issues. They cover a wide variety of topics that would apply to a very wide audience. The liberal party wants to invest in our future by building stronger, greener communities and put a larger effort toward climate change. (Liberal Party, 2019) Helping middle class citizens, families and young Canadians with tax cuts and better services are also on their list of campaign issues. (Liberal Party, 2019) Maintaining an open and honest government is always something they strive for as well the continued support for LGBT and immigrant rights. (Liberal Party, 2019) They also want support our military and put more money toward public services to ensure a greater quality service. (Liberal Party, 2019) Agriculture is very important for Canada, as it takes up a large majority of our land, and the liberals are going to invest more into that as well. Poverty is always a big campaign issue for the liberal party, and they intend to help mitigate the poverty levels in Canada in the upcoming election. (Liberal Party, 2019) The continued support and regulation of legalized weed in Canada is a crucial part of their upcoming campaign as well. (Liberal Party, 2019) Finally, supporting business and the Canadian economy is one of the most important issues they face, but at the same time keeping climate change in mind. (Liberal Party, 2019) In the 2015 election, the Liberal Party was able to use one of its greatest strengths, the ability of getting young people involved and voting. The Liberal Party of Canada under the leadership of Justin Trudeau rebounded from third place in the House of Commons with 36/338 seats to a strong majority government with 184/338 seats in the House of Commons. (Clark, Campbell, 2016) Thats biggest numerical increase for a Canadian party since Confederation. There was an increase of 1.2 million voters among those under the age of 35 in the 2015 election and turnout between the ages 18 to 24 rose to 57.1%. (Clark, Campbell, 2016) This would be enough to swing the results of any election. The strength of this untapped market of potential voters was never seen until this election, and this will be very important for them in the upcoming election. Young voters could be the potential game changer for them once again. In 2015, not only did the party climb from third to first, it was far less funded then there Conservative competitors. (Pammett, J. H., & Dornan, C, 2016, pg. 62) This has always been a problem for the liberals and will be a threat heading into the next election. The party has been slow to master direct mail lists and obtaining group donors. (Pammett, J. H., & Dornan, C, 2016, pg. 62) In 2004, Jean Chretien implemented legislation that eliminated corporate and union donations, which hurt the NDP and Liberals fundraising abilities. (Pammett, J. H., & Dornan, C, 2016, pg. 62) For example, in 2011, in the last quarter the conservatives raised 4.1 million whereas the liberals had raised 2.8 million. (Pammett, J. H., & Dornan, C, 2016, pg. 62) The liberals have gotten better in recent year far out fundraising the NDP, however the Conservatives still remain a threat. Time and time again the conservatives constantly out fundraise the liberals. Another example in 2015 in the first quarter, the conservatives raised 6.3 million to the liberals 3.8 million. (Pammett, J. H., & Dornan, C, 2016, pg. 63) Conservatives, and their ability to fundraise better than the Liberals, is the greatest threat the Liberal party faces. Another strength for the Liberals is their impressive list of candidates as well the diversity of gender and ethnicity within that list. As stated before, in the last election, the liberal party set a new standard of inclusivity with 10 indigenous MPs and six LGBT MPs, they have been the most inclusive party yet. (Schwartz, D, 2015) A total of 21 candidates identified as LGBTQ. (Schwartz, D, 2015) The diversity in candidates can help reach a wider audience of voters and make sure that everyone feels they are being represented in government. One of the major weaknesses in the Liberals ridings are the West. The Liberals have always done considerable better in the East and Central Canada. Canada’s two greatest provinces in terms of population and voters are Ontario and Quebec. With a background based out of Quebec, the party has always done best here. However, the West has always felt out of the loop and thrown to the side with the Liberal party. There concerns are not heard as well as those in Central Canada. There is a sense of alienation from the federal government with significantly less representation in government. ” (David Rayside, 2018) They are going to want to target this weakness in the West as well maintain the strength they have in Quebec and Ontario. (David Rayside, 2018)

Recommendations

To conclude the analysis of the Liberal party, here are a list of recommendations for the party to succeed in the upcoming election. The party needs to focus a great deal on their fundraising techniques and find a way to raise a relatively closer amount to their rival party the Conservatives. Their real focus should be beating the conservatives, as the NDP and the other parties are not a real threat. Besides, the NDP often support the Liberals once the Liberals win office. The party should have their leader touring in the West and should target the West greater in the upcoming election as they have started to lose faith in government listening to their concerns. As well, reaching out to younger audiences like they did in 2015 could be another game changer for them in the upcoming election. Liberal policies like universal healthcare, Canadian student loans, and the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana have helped define Canada as one of the most free, welcoming and greatest places to live on the planet. The Liberals need to continue to make great policies like these, ones that make the lives of all Canadian citizens better. 2019-3-21-1553177015

...(download the rest of the essay above)

About this essay:

If you use part of this page in your own work, you need to provide a citation, as follows:

Essay Sauce, SWOT analysis of the Liberal Party (Canada) . Available from:<https://www.essaysauce.com/politics-essays/swot-analysis-of-the-liberal-party-canada/> [Accessed 09-04-24].

These Politics essays have been submitted to us by students in order to help you with your studies.

* This essay may have been previously published on Essay.uk.com at an earlier date.

Essay Categories:

• Accounting essays
• Architecture essays
• Business essays
• Computer science essays
• Criminology essays
• Economics essays
• Education essays
• Engineering essays
• English language essays
• Environmental studies essays
• Essay examples
• Finance essays
• Geography essays
• Health essays
• History essays
• Hospitality and tourism essays
• Human rights essays
• Information technology essays
• International relations
• Leadership essays
• Linguistics essays
• Literature essays
• Management essays
• Marketing essays
• Mathematics essays
• Media essays
• Medicine essays
• Military essays
• Miscellaneous essays
• Music Essays
• Nursing essays
• Philosophy essays
• Photography and arts essays
• Politics essays
• Project management essays
• Psychology essays
• Religious studies and theology essays
• Sample essays
• Science essays
• Social work essays
• Sociology essays
• Sports essays
• Types of essay
• Zoology essays

Liberal Party in Canadian Government Essay (Critical Writing)

The canadian government and marijuana (mutti, p.12), hypothetical syllogism, works cited.

Marijuana is a harmful substance that can corrupt children.

Children are the future generation.

Therefore, marijuana can corrupt an entire generation.

Kittens need to be trained

Higher animals can be taught.

Kittens are higher animals.

Therefore, kittens can be taught.

Is it possible for two glass beads to be identical (Rudinow & Barry, p.7)

For two glass beads to be identical they would have to contain the same silica molecules, atoms, quarks, neutrinos, and in the same place and at the same time.

There are no two glass beads that contain the same silica molecules, atoms, quarks, neutrinos, and in the same place and at the same time.

Therefore, there are no identical glass beads.

A person can only vote if he/she is a registered voter. If you are eligible to vote then you are a registered voter.

A person can only be elected if he/she is a member of a political party. If you are qualified to run then you are a member of a political party.

Categorical syllogism

All patriots are registered, voters.

Patriots love their country.

Therefore, all registered voters are patriots.

All taxpayers are registered, voters.

All registered voters can read.

Therefore, all taxpayers can read.

Argument by elimination

It is possible that Obama voted in the latest provincial election.

Only Canadian citizens can vote in a provincial election.

Obama is not a Canadian citizen, therefore he did not vote.

John Kuizomi may be a member of a Canadian political party.

Only Canadian citizens can become a member of a political party.

John Kuizomi is not a Canadian citizen therefore he is not a member of a Canadian political party.

Argument based on mathematics

Only elected officials in the 2011 provincial elections can serve until 2015. Therefore, elected officials in the 2007 provincial elections cannot serve until 2015.

Elected officials in the 2003 provincial elections can serve only up to 2007.

Therefore, elected officials in the 2003 provincials elections cannot serve beyond the 2007 period.

Argument from the definition

The liberal party supports a socially compassionate government.

Bob Rae is a supporter of socially compassionate governments.

Therefore, Bob Rae is liberal.

A member of the Canadian parliament secured its position by winning in the polls.

Lowell Murray is a Senator.

Therefore, Lowell Murray secured his position by winning in the polls.

Inductive generalization

Fifty percent of the 100 randomly selected registered voters would choose someone from the liberal party.

It is probable, therefore, that approximately fifty percent of registered voters would choose someone from the liberal party.

Sixty percent of the 100 randomly selected registered voters were happy with the results of the election.

It is probable, therefore, that approximately sixty percent of registered voters were happy with the results of the election.

Predictive argument

Most of the time, Canadians will choose a leader from the liberal party. Therefore, the next leader would come from the liberal party.

Most of the time voters will choose someone with a good reputation.

Therefore, the next leader is someone with a good reputation.

Argument from authority

According to poll experts, the liberal party will win a landslide victory.

Therefore, the liberal party will win a landslide victory.

According to Information Technology experts, it is extremely difficult to tamper with election results. Therefore, the results of the elections can be considered valid.

Causal argument

The significant number of people recorded to have used their cameras last week is correlated to the high number of journalists that covered the provincial elections.

The significant number of people recorded to have used their cameras last week is not the cause of the provincial elections.

There is no third event that caused both the increase in the number of people who have used their cameras and the high number of journalists that covered the provincial elections.

Therefore, the provincial election is the cause of the significant increase in the use of cameras.

The significant number of people recorded to have used their laptops last week is correlated to the high number of journalists that covered the provincial election.

The significant number of people that used their laptops is not the cause of the provincial election.

There is no third party that caused the increased usage of the laptop.

Therefore, the provincial election is the cause of the significant increase in the use of laptops.

Statistical argument

Seventy percent of the people surveyed in Ontario believed in the integrity of their government. Therefore, a majority of the people living in Ontario believed that they have an honest government.

Thirty percent of the people surveyed in Ontario would like to elect an honest man to office. Therefore, only a small percentage of the general population would like to elect an honest official.

Argument from analogy

A childish person cannot make up his mind.

Some registered voters cannot make up their minds.

Therefore, some registered voters are childish.

A candidate is a very busy man come election time.

Lee is not busy during election time.

Therefore, Lee is not a candidate.

Mutti, Robert. Making up Your Mind. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.

Rudinow, Joel & Vincent Barry. Invitation to Critical Thinking . CA: Thomson Higher Education, 2007.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 11). Liberal Party in Canadian Government. https://ivypanda.com/essays/liberal-party-in-canadian-government/

"Liberal Party in Canadian Government." IvyPanda , 11 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/liberal-party-in-canadian-government/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Liberal Party in Canadian Government'. 11 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Liberal Party in Canadian Government." February 11, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/liberal-party-in-canadian-government/.

1. IvyPanda . "Liberal Party in Canadian Government." February 11, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/liberal-party-in-canadian-government/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Liberal Party in Canadian Government." February 11, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/liberal-party-in-canadian-government/.

• Categorical Syllogism and Modus Ponens
• Syllogism on the Animal Behavior Topic
• Acts of Kindness in Society
• Syllogism and Enthymeme in Aristotle's Rhetoric
• Analysis of the production processes of beads production at Beads R Us
• Bead Bar Web Site's E-Business Model and Technologies
• "A Defence of Abortion" by Thomson
• Logic and Philosophy Questions
• Information Systems Management. Bead Bar Network
• Bead Bar Systems Development Project
• Voter Mobilization and Participation in America
• Canadian Elections: Stephen Harper vs. David Emerson
• Canadian Elections in 2012 and Need for Changes
• Why Citizens Must Vote?
• Campaigns Process and Elections

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Government

Essay On The Liberal Party

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Government , House , Home , Ireland , Democracy , Politics , Law , War

Words: 1400

Published: 01/27/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

We are focused on the Liberal Party of the UK in this write-up. The direction of our lens will be on the challenges faced by the party during the years 1910 to 1914.

The Liberal Party of the UK was created by the merger of the Old Whigs Party and the Radicals group. The new Liberal Party was very interested in crushing absolute monarchism where the parliament and constitution draws power from the Crown; it would rather want the reverse as the case (Greenleaf). This pitched it in the opposition for a very long time and was only able to taste power for the first time in 1830; an avenue it had to formulate policies in line with its ideologies. It was no surprise that the Liberal Party introduced several reforms to the political system of the UK at that time. The very first was the First Reform Act passed into law in 1832 which extended voting rights to more men, then came the Second Reform Act that passed the House of Common that then had a good majority of Liberals but got rejected at the House of Lords which faced fierce public protests for the non-passage of the bill(Petter). So, when the Third Reform Act was sent to it from the House of Commons, the Lords had little choice, amidst the Crown’s mandate, than allow it to pass and forestall fresh protest. The Third Reform Act took away parliamentary seats from rotten boroughs, which helped the anti-reform politicians win elections, and gave the same voting rights to countryside residents just as their city resident counterparts. William Gladstone was one of the greatest Liberals that ruled as Prime Minister and the party’s leader, coming to power in 1868 (Conservapedia.com). During his tenure, Gladstone pursed financial policies centred on a balanced budget, laissez faire and low taxes to improve the lot of the middle class. Gladstone’s welfare policies were enjoyed by various groups including; children who benefitted from his Elementary Education Act of 1870 and peasant Catholics in Ireland who were given the right to vote like any city dweller through the Third Reform Act, a move that eventually brought about the demand for Irish Home Rule after the Irish Parliamentary Party was set-up.

Highlights of Liberal Party between 1910 and 1914

The coming back to power of the Liberal Party in 1906 enabled it to push for more liberal policies. Some of the new policies are the National Insurance Law, regulation of working hours, and other workers’ welfare regulation (Clarke). Another milestone move of the Asquith-led government of Liberals is the People’s Budget produced in 1909 which became a subject of political bickering and caused the Liberal Party’s popularity to dwindle. The Liberal Party was quick to recognize this and sought to hold on to power by; promoting workers’ welfare in order to gain the support of Labour which already has a growing movement, and champion the cause of a fairly independent Ireland with its Irish Home Rule bill to gain Irish support and remain in power.

The People’s Budget

The budget of 1909 proposed by the liberal government of Asquith was promoted to change the tax system of the UK in order to ‘eliminate’ poverty by increasing taxes so that the liberal government will have more money to fund its welfare programmes. This was met by a stiff opposition from the Conservatives which were the majority in the House of Lords and were land owners who believed that the budget would devalue their assets. A division was then created in the polity and a political battle ensued. The strong political battle that resulted led to the Act of Parliament that checkmated the powers of the Lords in blocking legislation. Also, the rising cost of running government resulting from the welfare programs of the Liberals compelled the Crown to require the government to call two general elections in 1910 so that its position will be validated and its popularity tested. This was a real test of Liberal Party’s popularity because it then discovered that it has lost a lot of followers, it then associated with Labour movements. Some of the highlights of these years are briefly explained below.

An Overwhelming Electoral Win

After losing a hold on power at the expiration of Gladstone’s tenure in the late 1890s, the Liberal Party was again elected into power in 1906 with a landslide victory.

National Insurance Act and Labour Movement

This Act was passed in 1911 to improve the lot of employees in the event of illness, job loss and in retirement. The necessary contribution was made both by the employee and his employer. Labour movement arose to wrestle the government on some points of the welfare program that they believed was taking their wages away from them by the 7s 6d wages covered under the new law.

Irish Home Rule

Prime Minister Asquith needed support in some way after realising his Liberal Party had lost many loyalists in the general elections of 1910, so he turned to get support from the Irish and labour. The Irish Home Rule Law, an Act of parliament, came into force in 1914 after getting parliamentary consent, though not at first instance. It is on record that the first bill supported by William Gladstone was rejected at the House of Common while the second scaled through the Commons but was crushed by the Conservative-filled House of Lords. This third presentation of the bill was able to scale through the hurdles because of the reduced power of the House of Lords that was achieved in 1911, the Parliament Act. Irish Home Rule gave the right of home government to Ireland but was never implemented because of the outbreak of World War I. A new law was passed in 1920 called, The Government of Ireland Act.

Women Suffrage

Good to note here, in brief, are the activities of the Asquith-led Liberal Party government which was opposed to women suffrage, though against his Party’s majority wishes. The various women groups that have risen up since the Reform Act of 1832 reduced the voting rights of women continued but recorded limited victory. Thus Asquith suffered attacks from these groups and their supporters.

The Decline

The break out of World War I in 1914 is accorded by some historians as what tore the Liberal Party apart completely, having to face a war that was not prepared for and combining it with the growing home front resentments. Though partially true, the Liberal Party had suffered many internal party strives before the war (Dangerfield). The Defence of the Realm Act6 passed into law in the early weeks of the onset of World War I was seen as illiberal by many Liberal faithfuls, the laissez faire Liberals as well and the party was further drawn to the opposite sides by factions (Laybourn). The coalition government formed by Asquith in the war times could be regarded as well as one of the contributors to the implosion of the Liberal Party which lost power to the Conservatives-backed Lloyd George in 1916.

References:

- Greenleaf, W.H. The British Political Tradition. Volume II: The Ideological Heritage. London: Methuen. 1983. - Petter, Martin. History, The Progressive Alliance. The Journal of the Historical Association - "The British Liberal Party". Conservapedia.com. - Clarke, P.F. "The electoral position of the Liberal Parties, 1910-1914". The English Historical Review - Dangerfield, George. The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 2011. - Laybourn, Keith. "The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate" Wiley.com.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 145

This paper is created by writer with

ID 256342974

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Ice research papers, pressurization essays, quicksand essays, daimler essays, hansom essays, banjo essays, clef essays, airman essays, grados essays, composing essays, the french revolution essays, peruse essays, ordinary men essays, prater essays, cree essays, confrontation essays, adversaries essays, tomahawk essays, mastering essays, progressive party essays, new freedom essays, new nationalism essays, whitening essays, pigment essays, chlorophyll essays, medical facilities essays, peaks essays, haute couture essays, example of social marketing essay, choice of the letter formats course work, example of google analytics 20 essay, results report examples, free article review on determination of eligibility special education, the no child left behind act has increased academic standards in school research paper, example of essay on algebra projects, breaking the da vinci code essay sample, cloning research paper sample, free evaluation of visual material essay example, good example of the super anti hero representing the zeitgeist of western culture thesis proposal, sample creative writing on understanding terrorism, good literature review about media and the national development, free top reasons for companies going international essay example, an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of using case study comparative and historical approaches as research methods case study example.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Senior bureaucrats briefed Liberal Party on foreign interference in 2019 Don Valley North contest

5-member panel decided not to warn public about potential interference during the campaign.

Social Sharing

Top bureaucrats on a panel tasked with reviewing possible threats to the 2019 federal election warned the Liberal Party of concerns about the riding nomination contest in Don Valley North, the Foreign Interference Commission heard Monday.

Nathalie Drouin, who was deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general during the 2019 federal election, told a commission hearing Monday that those concerns involved international students  being bused to the riding to vote in the nomination contest, and financial allegations that were referred to the Commissioner of Canada Elections.

"Being able to brief a party, here it was a Liberal Party, was contributing in terms of reducing the risk and the potential impacts," Drouin said Monday.

Drouin said that informing the commissioner was a way to mitigate possible threats. She said that the allegations and intelligence the panel received about the nomination contest did not meet the panel's threshold for issuing a public warning.

The panel is tasked with monitoring threats during elections and issuing public warnings if they feel the electoral process is under threat from foreign interference. The Don Valley North riding race normally would have fallen outside the panel's remit, but in this case it overlapped with the 2019 federal election.

• India calls allegations of foreign interference in Canada's elections 'baseless'
• Analysis Failure to communicate: What Week 2 of the foreign interference inquiry revealed
• Ottawa asked Facebook to remove false article about Trudeau during 2019 election, inquiry hears

The panel of five is made up of the clerk of the Privy Council, the national security and intelligence adviser to the prime minister, the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general, the deputy minister of foreign affairs and the deputy minister of public safety.

The five senior bureaucrats representing those offices on the panel in 2019 were briefed on intelligence suggesting several interference incidents during the campaign, according to testimony and documents presented before the commission Friday.

Panel members during the 2019 and 2021 elections are being questioned in front of Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue.

Former Liberal MP denies knowledge of Chinese interference in campaign

Drouin, who is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's current national security and intelligence adviser, testified Monday morning about her role during the 2019 election. She said that aside from informing the Liberal Party and the elections commissioner, the panel also asked the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to continue to feed the panel information about Don Valley North.

"One information that was more corroborated was the existence of buses with students. That was more corroborated. All the other elements were not corroborated," Drouin said, adding that while she could not explain what those other elements were, they had a financial element.

After reviewing all the intelligence to which they had access, Drouin said, the panel concluded that the allegations in Don Valley North did not meet the threshold required for a public warning because the threat did not compromise Canada's ability to hold free and fair elections.

Last week, Han Dong, the now  Independent MP  for Don Valley North, said that while he visited a student residence in his riding in the summer of 2019 to campaign for the support of students at NOIC Academy — formerly New Oriental International College — his campaign did not provide the bus. He said he understood it was arranged and paid for by the school.

O'Toole says public should have been warned earlier of foreign election interference

Last week, former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole told the commission that Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking campaign workers in B.C. noticed that social media platforms and chat groups in China were spreading disinformation about his party and candidates in 2021.

O'Toole said the party reported their concerns to the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, which sends daily reports to the panel of five.

The most worrisome social media messages, O'Toole said, involved Kenny Chiu, then the Conservative MP for the B.C. riding of Steveston—Richmond East.

"The level and volume and tone of misinformation towards Mr. Chiu was horrendous," O'Toole said. "He was fearful for his own well being and that of his family and it was a personal attack of a racially motivated nature, suggesting he was a race traitor."

'I thought I would be protected by my country,' former MP tells foreign interference inquiry

Chiu told the commission last week that he might not have run for office if he'd known he was going to be targeted by disinformation campaigns coming out of China. 

"We wanted a caution, a public notice to voters to be wary of information that they were obtaining from social media, particularly foreign controlled, foreign language media," O'Toole said.

On Monday, Martha Morgan, the deputy minister of foreign affairs who sat on both the 2019 and 2021 panels, said one of the factors the panel takes into consideration when deciding to issue a public warning is whether "other players in the election ecosystem were addressing issues as they arose."

She said if other players, such as the media or candidates and campaigns, were addressing misinformation or disinformation, they would be effectively counteracting efforts to influence election integrity in Canada and so the panel of five might not have to issue a warning.

"We did see Mr. Chiu directly address the issue, which we took as a positive sign that this issue was being addressed by him and that information was then being provided publicly from a credible person about his actual intent," Morgan said Monday.

No threats to elections in 2019, 2021 says panel

Drouin said Monday that during the 2019 federal election, all the intelligence the panel got about possible threats to the electoral process were focused on an individual riding, rather than any overall threat to the federal election.

"We did not observe, in 2019, any incident that we believe even met the threshold at the riding level," Drouin said, adding that because there was no significant threat at the riding level, they did not have to widen their scope to consider how possible foreign interference affected the election as a whole.

Janice Charette, former clerk of Privy Council, who sat on the 2021 panel of five, later told the commission that the panel did not receive intelligence about incidents during the 44th federal election that reached the threshold required to issue a public warning at the riding level or national level. 

Despite the fact that the panel concluded that the 2019 or 2021 elections were not compromised, last week the commission heard of a number of reports of interference efforts.

Foreign interference inquiry focuses on India, Pakistan

An unclassified witness summary disclosed Friday said that on Aug. 17, only days into the 2021 campaign, the task force was made aware that a member of Parliament had reported "cultivation and elicitation attempts by an official of a foreign state." The country wasn't specified, but the document said that, in deciding what information to send the panel, the task force "erred on the side of providing more intelligence than less."

On Aug. 23, a report from the task force discussed how a foreign official was "liasing with a member of a political campaign to discuss potentially sharing confidential information about the campaign and possibly arranging an introduction with the electoral candidate."

• Security briefings for political parties not meant to reveal specific intelligence, inquiry hears
• CSIS report on Liberal nomination race recalled after meeting with PM's top security adviser

A week later, on Aug. 30, the task force briefed the panel, but the document shows its CSIS representative was not aware of any response by the panel.

Separately, testimony released Friday showed that, during and after the campaign, the task force was briefing the panel of five on what was characterized as "very textbook" foreign interference activity involving the People's Republic of China supporting a particular candidate. Neither the candidate nor the party was disclosed.

This information was presented separately from numerous references to security officials detecting Chinese-language media and social media critical of the Conservative Party, and in some cases circulating false information. On Aug. 31, for example, officials detected Chinese-language WeChat accounts posting a false story about how then-leader Erin O'Toole would ban WeChat if a Conservative government was elected.

On Sept. 10, officials also noted false narratives circulating about Conservative MP (and 2021 candidate) Kenny Chiu's private member's bill to create a foreign agent registry, but the officials noted that the Rapid Response Mechanism team at Global Affairs was not able to assess if this was a PRC-backed campaign or "organic activity."

On Sept. 12, CSIS debriefed officials from the Liberal Party of Canada on a specific foreign interference issue. While security officials were regularly briefing representatives from all parties throughout the campaign on general interference risks, documents and briefing records released so far suggest no other parties received the briefing the Liberals received on this specific issue.

The briefing said the spy agency officials "regret having to inform" the Liberal Party of this issue and said they understood the "difficulties associated with the limitations of what [they could] do with it." The briefing was provided for "awareness and action based on [their] judgment," the note said.

• RCMP still probing alleged meddling in federal elections but offering few details

On Monday, panel members appearing before the commission inquiry were cross-examined about reports of election interference by India.

In late August, SITE reports prepared for the panel, and cited at the inquiry, referred to the detection of an "individual who was assessed to be a foreign interference proxy." In a post-election report, officials were briefing on a "Government of India proxy agent who may have attempted to interfere in democratic processes."

But on Monday, members of the panel said that, in fact, they were not made aware of reports of interference from India during the writ period.

"Indian [foreign interference] may have occurred in a covert manner," said a summary of testimony from members of the task force, released Friday. The summary added that intelligence corroborated claims that the government of India intended to "influence the outcome of the Canadian elections."

The summary also said the intelligence "appeared to reveal what could be considered a potential Criminal Code offence." A task force member sought direction on how to proceed with sharing the intelligence with the RCMP, but testified that she was unaware if there was an active investigation based on this intelligence.

Last week, the RCMP disclosed at the inquiry that it is still investigating an undisclosed number of issues related to the 2021 campaign.

The commission of inquiry has heard that a deliberately high threshold was set by the panel for alerting the public, because not only could such a warning affect voter choices and affect the election results further, it could also severely affect Canada's relations with a foreign country to condemn it for election meddling in the heat of a campaign.

Last week at the inquiry, CSIS Director David Vigneault said he was "comfortable" with the decision the panel made not to alert the public. Former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, however, testified that he felt this process failed to disclose attempts to interfere in specific ridings that, while not serious enough to impact the overall national result, nevertheless are significant for the candidates and voters involved.

O'Toole said ridings in B.C.'s Lower Mainland or the Greater Toronto Area should not be treated as "rounding errors" when decisions are being made as to what constitutes significant interference.

Hogue also will hear separate testimony from a panel of former national security advisers who served the prime minister during the 2019 and 2021 elections, as well the period between the two campaigns: Greta Bossenmaier, Vince Rigby and David Morrison.

At the request of Hogue's inquiry, Canada's intelligence agencies have taken the extraordinary step of selectively summarizing or redacting previously classified intelligence information so the public can better understand what happened. 

Officials have repeatedly cautioned journalists and lawyers at the inquiry that interpreting intelligence reports can be subjective. These reports may not contain complete information and may not always have been verified by multiple sources, so cannot be assumed to be definitive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior writer

Peter Zimonjic is a senior writer for CBC News. He has worked as a reporter and columnist in London, England, for the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph and in Canada for Sun Media and the Ottawa Citizen. He is the author of Into The Darkness: An Account of 7/7, published by Random House.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

There Is a Way Out of MAGA Domination

By Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner

Mr. Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

A few weeks ago, Mike Pence did what no other vice president in the modern era has done: He refused to endorse the re-election of the president under whom he served. When it comes to alumni of Donald Trump’s administration, Mr. Pence is hardly alone; the list of high-ranking officials who worked for Mr. Trump and have implied or outright stated that they can’t support their former boss under any circumstances has grown to an astonishing length .

The list of prominent Republican figures who did not serve under Mr. Trump and who regard him as unacceptable is equally impressive. It includes the 2012 Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, the former speaker of the House Paul Ryan, as well as Liz Cheney, who served in the House Republican leadership, and her father, the former vice president Dick Cheney, who summarized the situation bluntly : “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s almost effortless sweep of the Republican nomination contest, there remain deep pockets of resistance to him in the ranks. More than a fifth of voters in the Republican primaries supported Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina; among many of them, there is intense opposition to Mr. Trump’s presidential run. And as The Washington Post points out , nearly one in five Republican primary voters across four contests on April 2 voted for an option other than Mr. Trump — even though he was the only Republican still campaigning at that point.

So two things are happening at once: The Republican Party is thoroughly MAGA and will be for the foreseeable future, and there is a small but influential number of Republicans who are deeply opposed to what their party has become but not prepared to shed their political identity and join the Democrats.

For this group, one viable course remains: create a Republican Party in exile, a counterestablishment dedicated to recapturing the party from the outside.

In world history, exiles, expatriates and their movements have played important roles in fighting unjust regimes. They bring detailed knowledge of their country and its politics to bear on efforts to change the government. They assemble agendas and personnel for its eventual replacement. They provide a rallying point and inspiration for regime opponents who otherwise might succumb to fatalism and fatigue. They connect and coordinate disparate exile factions.

Not least important, they show the world that they are committed to the fight and will not accept the legitimacy or inevitability of the current regime. To get a sense of the inspiration they can provide, think of Charles de Gaulle and Free France, the government in exile that was established in London after France fell during World War II.

There are, of course, profound differences between the task faced by de Gaulle in 1940 and the problem of reconquering the Republican Party today. But they share this position: Psychologically, an exile movement must recognize that it does not have a place in the system and must work from outside it.

That is a conceptual bridge that many anti-MAGA Republicans have been unready to cross. Yes, they have acknowledged the dominance of MAGA in the party. Yet they have hoped to act effectively as a faction within it.

Until now, Republicans who opposed Mr. Trump could point to state and local politics, where non-MAGA Republicans — and, much more rarely, anti-MAGA Republicans — have won elections, sustaining a Republican rump faction that holds MAGA at arm’s length. Non-MAGA Republicans believed that the party would feel stung by MAGA’s record of regularly losing elections that Republicans ought to have won, including the loss of the presidency by an incumbent, control of the Senate in the 2020 election cycle and the fizzle in the 2022 midterms, when voters in race after race surgically excised extreme MAGA candidates.

Non-MAGA Republicans expected that the multiple indictments of Mr. Trump would discredit him in the eyes of G.O.P. primary voters or at least lead them to abandon him as a likely loser. They imagined that Mr. Trump’s increasingly unhinged and self-absorbed behavior would alienate his supporters. They supposed that Mr. Trump might lose the nomination if forced into a one-on-one race with a single strong contender. And they thought, if all else failed, that the Republican base might simply grow bored with the stale, repetitive and witless Trump show.

Those suppositions turned out to be wrong, and Ms. Haley’s loss to Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries has extinguished all of them. Mr. Trump will be crowned in July. He commands cultlike loyalty among his MAGA base. He has taken over the machinery of the Republican Party. His election to the White House in November would further consolidate his control of the party, but even if he is defeated, MAGA will not believe it lost fairly and therefore will not willingly relinquish its grip.

Which brings us back to the non-MAGA faction. With its paths blocked inside the party, it can still bring formidable people, resources and ideas to the task of defeating MAGA from the outside, as an exiled party.

What would this mean in practice? A G.O.P. in exile — the Free Republicans, as it were — can be a loose network of organizations, think tanks, politicians, consultants, donors and activists; it can have a more formal structure, with its own national committee, state chairs and staff. It might hold conventions, develop chapters and auxiliaries and approve a platform, or it might rely on a more decentralized strategy that supports and coordinates assorted efforts to build a bench of anti-MAGA talent and ideas. Regardless of how those tactical choices are made, four strategic principles should define the project.

First, the Free G.O.P. should fully accept its exile status. No daydreaming about being welcomed back into the MAGA party any time soon. The project must look beyond the next month, the next year and the next election. It cannot be impatient or easily discouraged.

Second, even as the Free G.O.P. accepts its outsider status — even as it acknowledges MAGA’s control of the Republican Party — it should identify unwaveringly as the true Republican Party and reject the moral legitimacy of the Trump regime. The Free G.O.P. would insist that it, not MAGA, lays claim to the heritage of the party of Lincoln.

Third, the Free G.O.P. should develop an agenda — or, more realistically, a set of agendas — for a post-MAGA future. According to The Hill, Mr. Pence’s political advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, “plans to invest $20 million this year to shape the conservative agenda, an effort to directly counter what Pence had previously described as populism ‘unmoored to conservative principles.’”

The former vice president is putting his name on the line to oppose the Trumpian populism that controls the Republican Party. He and his partners have the right idea: Free Republicans must develop ideas and conversations about what 21st-century conservatism should look like. Looking backward to a pre-Trump G.O.P. won’t succeed.

Fourth and most essential, Free Republicans must set their sights on overthrowing MAGA, not influencing it, partnering with it, bargaining with it, coexisting with it or waiting it out. They must name and explain what Trumpism represents: lawlessness, moral anarchy, conspiratorial thinking and an assault on the Constitution. They must challenge MAGA Republicans in primaries, focusing in particular on state races for governor, attorneys general, state legislators and others. They must be prepared to withstand the hostile machinations of the MAGA Republican Party and the attacks of the Trump movement, which will be relentless. If they do not consistently oppose MAGA, they will be dragged under it.

A party in exile would establish a gathering point for emerging leaders and fresh thinkers. It would be a clearinghouse for resources and strategies with which to assail the MAGA establishment. It would train candidates, build political networks, gather donors and supporters and show the public a brighter future.

And the Free Republican Party would keep the fires of conservatism burning. In its travels from Lincoln to Reagan and the Bushes, the Republican Party has metamorphosed many times, as adaptable parties must. But it has stayed true to certain conservative fundamentals: the rule of law, the value of institutions, the necessity of virtue and (as George Will has said) the belief that the vision of the founders is what American conservatism conserves. Free Republicans can rightly claim title to the party’s ideological crown jewels, which MAGA’s nihilistic flimflam has tossed in the dumpster.

Recent history is replete with examples of seemingly marginal political movements that moved with surprising speed to overthrow exhausted establishments, including Goldwater-Reagan conservatism in the 1960s, supply-side economics in the 1970s, the New Democrats in the 1980s and the Gingrich revolution in the 1990s. If anti-MAGA Republicans unite, they can experience similar success.

Even if MAGA’s grip on the party were irresistible, organizing in opposition would still be worth it, because some things are worth fighting for. But it is also true that the MAGA movement, built on lies and antagonistic to America’s founding principles, is unsustainable. Its unpopularity and indecency will generate openings for challenge and change. The job of the Republican Party in exile is to identify, create and exploit such openings — and above all, to be ready when they appear.

Jonathan Rauch ( @jon_rauch ) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “ The Constitution of Knowledge : A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner ( @Peter_Wehner ) is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He is the author of “ The Death of Politics : How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Mark Wales wins Liberal preselection for federal WA seat of Tangney, despite concerns about Chinese invasion novel

A winner of reality TV show Survivor who has written a book depicting a Chinese invasion of Australia has won the right to represent the Liberal Party in the contest for a federal WA seat.

Mark Wales has gained Liberal preselection for the Perth seat of Tangney, where more than 16 per cent of residents identify as ethnic Chinese.

However, his authorship of an upcoming novel is courting controversy, as it depicts a civil war in Australia following an invasion by Chinese forces.

Speaking after his preselection, the former SAS soldier said his book Outrider would come out later this year, and he did not think it would be controversial.

"Oh yeah, I'll go ahead with it," he said.

"I spent a lot of a time with the editor going through the book in advance and we had this concern in mind, so I'm totally confident with it."

He said the Chinese invasion wasn't the main point of the novel.

"It's a minor plot point, it's in the background — the bigger story's about a father and a son," he said.

"I'm totally confident that it's a minor part of the story and it'll be totally fine once it's released."

Mr Wales said he would be focusing his campaign on issues discussed at the preselection meeting in suburban Bentley.

"Everything from cost of living, energy security, economic security, defence," he said.

"[There's] a lot of concern out there, and I think there's a lot we can do as a party to turn around."

Asked if the preselection process was tougher than Survivor, which he won in 2022, Mr Wales replied: "Way tougher, yeah, yeah, way tougher!"

"A much bigger audience than what I was used to," he said.

"They're all genuine people with real concerns and once I was chatting with them, I got a real understanding of the depth of what they are considering when they look for a candidate."

The president of WA's Chung Wah Association, Ting Chen, was less confident the book would be met with a positive reception

He said how Chinese people might be depicted in the novel was likely to concern voters in Tangney.

"The preselection of Mr Mark Wales shows the ignorance and the arrogance of the decision-makers of the Liberal Party," he said.

"Ignorant of how the voters of Tangney think about a candidate who fantasised a war with our largest trading partner.

"Our community wants peace, more trade, not war."

The current member for Tangney is Labor's Sam Lim, a former police officer and a surprise winner over Ben Morton in 2022, seizing a seat once considered blue-ribbon Liberal territory .

Mr Lim was born in Malaysia, and his knowledge of 10 languages held significant appeal in the culturally diverse seat.

Mr Chen said while people of Chinese descent didn't vote as a bloc, Mr Wales' novel could play negatively for him during the campaign.

"During COVID we faced discrimination in WA and therefore we are fighting for a better, harmonious society in our state," he said.

"I hope the election will be a contest of who can be a better representative for Tangney."

Mr Chen added he was prepared to meet Mr Wales to discuss the novel.

"I am open to discuss, and to express our concern about his book," he said.

About 250 people attended the Liberal preselection meeting, with 175 of them voting.

Mr Wales won a clear majority, with no requirement for preferences to be considered.

Two of the candidates who had been considered frontrunners for the Liberal nomination, Sean Ayres and Howard Ong, said they would support Mr Wales in the federal election.

• X (formerly Twitter)

Related Stories

How a dolphin trainer from malaysia snatched the prize liberal seat of tangney from scott morrison's confidant.

Liberals's preselected candidate for Morrison's former seat vows to move into area within days

Liberals endorse Andrew Constance to run again in marginal federal seat

Liberal Party chooses Tim Wilson to contest his former Melbourne seat of Goldstein

• Community and Society
• Foreign Affairs
• Government Policy
• Government and Politics
• Liberal Party of Australia
• State and Territory Government