Justin Trudeau: Could he be marketed to voters as a more likable version of Stephen Harper?

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Even if you leave aside the failed attempt to recruit Mark Carney, the federal Liberal leadership race so far has looked like a collective quest to find the party a home on the centre-right.

Martha Hall Findlay calls for an end to supply management.

Marc Garneau wants to open up telecommunications to foreign investment.

And most important — because he appears to be an almost prohibitive front-runner — Justin Trudeau has tried to outflank the Harper Conservatives in welcoming offshore money to the oilpatch. His website has many repetitions of his “pro-growth” mantra, but almost no mention of climate change. He has even gone to Calgary to trash his father’s National Energy Program.

“I’m proud of my father and the values he stood for but I’m here to try and challenge a whole new set of realities,” he was quoted as saying. “I had nothing to do with the National Energy Program. I was 10 years old.”

The Liberals built their 20th century dynasty by bridging the divide between left and right. The party’s left-leaning social policies took the party where the votes were, but its right wing was also key. No other party in the world was as successful at the straddle — and there were many others that tried.

There were at least three strands in the blue tinge to the Liberals’ red maple leaf.

First, the Liberals showed that moderate social reform could be a bulwark against more aggressive socialism — a real concern in the middle third of the 20th century. Social programs and progressive taxation not only starved the beast of radical reform (or even revolution), they helped create a consumer and customer class to buy the goods that industry produced. And the state also built the infrastructure that business used to make its money: C.D. Howe’s St. Lawrence Seaway, the Trans-Canada Highway and Trans-Canada Airlines.

Second, for all those good reasons it was members of the business class who bankrolled the 20th century Liberal party.

Third, the apparatchiki of the Liberal party — the political pros who staff ministers’ offices and run campaigns — mostly pursue their non-political careers in law firms, polling companies, ad agencies or as lobbyists working for big business. There are precious few Liberal insiders who earn their crust working for think tanks, universities, charities, churches or unions.

Two of these three blue strands are less important that they once were, and so should be less compelling to today’s Liberal party.

Perhaps because capital is more mobile in a globalized world, businesspeople seem less interested in social stability in any particular place, or even in government-built infrastructure. They prefer their preferments in the form of deregulation, privatization, low tax rates and generous tax concessions, which allow a quick getaway as need be. In other words, the social base of business Liberalism has shrunk.

More recently a series of changes to party financing has eliminated corporate donations and even screwed down the limits on individuals, wiping out the Liberals’ traditional fundraising strategy. Like it or not, the Liberals must now compete in the world of small donors, and it will not be easy raising money from ordinary folk if the party’s hot button issues are bringing in foreign investment and balancing the budget.

The third blue strand is still strong and clear, however. It is still the case that many of the political professionals the Liberals need to organize and run their campaigns come from the corporate client class and to some degree reflect the views of those who employ them. These apparatchiki are in a powerful position to influence the leadership campaigns — though they tend to be considerably to the right of the ordinary members of the party, and certainly of its (shrunken) following in the general public.

This may create an entry for the one certified progressive in the Liberal leadership race, Joyce Murray, but it seems very unlikely that she will be able to overcome Trudeau’s organizational advantage, not to mention his good looks, personality and pedigree.

Of course there are a couple of narrower, more tactical reasons why Trudeau in particular may be tacking to the right. In the short term, it may be a feint designed to shake people’s preconceptions of him during the leadership race and carve out a political image distinct from that of his father.

But Liberal supporters should be concerned that it is the germ of a general election strategy: to position Trudeau not as a centre-left alternative to the Conservatives, but as a more likeable, open, honest, youthful successor to Stephen Harper. A change in personalities, in other words, rather than a change in policies.

This was essentially the strategy of Michael Ignatieff, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because Ignatieff’s inexperience contrasted with Harper at a nerve-jangling time in the economy. It also didn’t work because it forced Ignatieff to tack jerkily left in the election campaign when it was apparent that the only pool of voters actually available to the Liberals were there — further muddying the already murky Liberal brand.

Inexperience is also a problem for Justin Trudeau, and to an extent the Liberals’ much-diminished front bench. Trudeau is a more personally appealing figure than Ignatieff, but he also starts from much, much further behind.

Although the Liberals’ may have built a 20th century dynasty by campaigning from the left and governing from the right, the formula doesn’t fit so well on a third place opposition party for whom a Liberal government is both an increasingly distant memory and a distant dream.

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