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It’s quite possible that, a year from now, Justin Trudeau will be the prime minister of Canada. So it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable for us to ask: What, precisely, are his plans for the job?

Oh, sure. There have been tiny hints and whispered rumours of what might be going through Trudeau’s mind.

We recently learned that the Liberals circulated a document to their candidates called “What We Stand For”. It is stamped “confidential” and the party has warned candidates to keep it in a safe place — presumably out of concern that an unsuspecting voter might read it.

The Liberals’ plans for Canada are, as Winston Churchill once remarked when speaking of the Kremlin, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

Just as tantalizing, we now have a glimpse of Trudeau’s process for developing economic policy. The estimable John Geddes has a story in Maclean’s this week in which he describes an economic talk-shop Trudeau has assembled. The Liberals have never had trouble attracting talent and Trudeau’s panel is filled with top-notch people. But they range from Miles Corak — one of North America’s leading experts on income inequality — to Frank McKenna, deputy chair of the TD bank. So no clues there.

We are told that whenever the economic eggheads veer into politics, Trudeau steers them away — which suggests that they, like the rest of us, have no notion of where the Liberal party is headed.

It is important to understand that this opacity on policy distinguishes the Liberals from both their opponents.

Recently the Liberals used the opening offered by the steep plunge in the price of oil to attack Stephen Harper’s Conservatives for sticking with their announced intention to balance the budget in 2015 and introduce income-splitting for families with children — both promises they made in the 2011 election.

For its part, the NDP has promised to roll back the income-splitting scheme, introduce a national system of childcare and drop the age of qualification for Old Age Security back to 65.

It’s fair enough for the Liberals and others to ask how the Conservatives and NDP plan to adjust their plans, if at all, to the tumbling price of oil. That’s a democratic debate. But we can only have it because those parties have told us with some precision where they would like to lead the country.

The lesson the Liberals took from the 2008 debacle (besides that they should dump Dion tout de suite) was that they should never, ever give the Conservatives something to shoot at.

Amazingly, on Monday, Chrystia Freeland — one of the sharpest economic minds in the Liberal caucus — told the CBC’s Evan Solomon that the plunging price of oil shows just how prudent the Liberals have been in holding back the details of their program.

But that merely confuses the interests of the Liberal party with those of Canadians. If the Liberals laid out what they would do if they were installed in power today, and then adjusted as circumstances changed, that would give us clues as to how they might govern. We would be better informed.

Over its long history, the Liberal party has been chameleon-like on everything from provincial rights to free trade to whether Quebec is a distinct society. But that doesn’t mean it has been a study in vagueness in every electoral cycle.

In 1993, Jean Chrétien campaigned on the Red Book, co-authored by Paul Martin — the most detailed platform document ever published by a Canadian political party, surpassing even the “manifestos” that British parties routinely produce at election time. It was released during the election campaign but for the most part it elaborated, codified and costed Liberal policies that had been proclaimed previously.

Massive as it was, the Red Book was not a perfect guide to the Liberals’ actions in government — including on some major issues such as NAFTA and the GST. But it was an effective instrument of accountability. As a reporter on Parliament Hill in the 1990s, I remember invoking it frequently when evaluating the government’s performance.

Martin was even heard to complain in private about how rigidly some bureaucrats clung to the Red Book as their bible and guide — which is to say that the Liberal platform had burrowed deep into the collective consciousness of government.

The Liberals followed this pattern of detailed platforms in the elections of 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008. But in the last of these elections, they felt they got burned when Harper managed — partly through caricature — to take apart Stéphane Dion’s complex and detailed environmental plan, dubbed the Green Shift.

The lesson the Liberals took from that debacle (besides that they should dump Dion tout de suite) was that they should never, ever give the Conservatives something to shoot at.

Michael Ignatieff quickly dispensed with the lofty intellectual’s inclination to pronounce deeply and with precision on policy. The strategic theory, openly proclaimed by some of his advisors, was that governments defeat themselves — and that when Harper’s government did so, the Liberals would be there to reap the benefits. Just get out of the way and let it happen.

It didn’t work out.

Justin Trudeau is a much more capable politician than Ignatieff ever was. But speaking at a caucus meeting in London on Tuesday, he made it clear that those waiting for the details of his policies can keep waiting — until the election campaign at least. To this point his strategy seems closer to Ignatieff’s than to the tradition of Chrétien, Martin and Dion.

My point isn’t to debate what would be tactically best for the Trudeau Liberals. You can find examples in Liberal history of the party both winning and losing with platforms that were either specific or vague.

For me, the question is what would be best for us as Canadians, as voters. We need a much clearer idea of what’s in the party’s briefing books — and in Trudeau’s head.

Paul Adams is associate professor of journalism at Carleton and has taught political science at the University of Manitoba. He is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

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