From left to right, Federal Liberal leadership candidates Justin Trudeau, Martin Cauchon, Karen McCrimmon, Joyce Murray, Martha Hall Findlay, George Takach, Deborah Coyne, David Bertschi and Marc Garneau pose for photographs after the party’s first leadership debate in Vancouver, B.C., on Sunday January 20, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

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At their first leadership debate in Vancouver on Sunday, the federal Liberals proved — as if proof were needed — that it is very hard to watch nine candidates discuss a random assortment of issues in no particular order for more than two hours.

The format was a disaster.

If you stuck with it, though, you could discern some themes in the leadership race epitomized by the runaway frontrunner Justin Trudeau.

The federal Liberals’ big challenge is how to find a place for themselves between the Harper government, which has abandoned much of its conservative energy on social issues, and the Mulcair NDP, which continues to track towards the centre on economic issues like trade.

The formula favoured by most of the candidates (with the conspicuous exceptions of Joyce Murray and Martin Cauchon) is that championed by Joe Clark’s 1990s Progressive Conservatives, and more recently by Alison Redford’s Alberta PCs: that of being economically conservative while socially progressive.

The strategic gamble here seems to be that by 2015 Canadians will be fed up with Harper and his gang and ready for a change in personnel at the top but will want the reassurance of continuity on economic policy.

Martha Hall Findlay articulates this position most clearly. Marc Garneau also embodies it, with a little more nuance. Most importantly, so does Trudeau, albeit with the studied vagueness that befits a frontrunner.

In essence, the formula is this: The Liberals should stick with the Mulroney/Chretien/Harper economic consensus. Caricaturing only a little bit, it amounts to the strange idea that whatever is in the short-term interests of global investment markets must also be in the best long-term interests of Canadians.

Forget the market crisis of 2008 that plunged the world into economic turmoil. Forget the inequality and insecurity that is gutting the middle classes. Forget the fact that climate change, building slowly but inexorably, is on a completely different time scale from that of the executive pay and bonuses which are the embodiment of short-term economic thinking.

In Trudeau’s mouth, the buzzwords for this economic approach are “investment in trade”, “creating opportunities” and “a strong economy for middle-class Canadians”.

The balance to this essentially conservative doctrine — and the way in which Trudeau and most of the other candidates seem to be positioning themselves in comparison with the Conservatives — is the Liberals’ social liberalism. For the most part this is a “rights liberalism”, meaning that (unlike the Conservatives) Liberals are sympathetic to women’s abortion rights, for example, and perhaps a more tolerant regime for the use of marijuana.

What this economically-conservative/socially-liberal formula jettisons is the legacy of the Liberal party from William Lyon Mackenzie King through Paul Martin of providing security to ordinary Canadians using the power of the state: pensions, medicare and unemployment insurance. The Kelowna Accord, which Martin negotiated and Stephen Harper abrogated, would have extended many of these now-routine benefits of the Canadian system more fully to aboriginal people.

In Sunday’s debate, only Martin Cauchon referred to social programs with much fervour. There was concentrated discussion of only one area of social programming: housing, a field in which the federal role has always been difficult to define. Trudeau, like most of the other candidates, called for a national policy on housing, but he didn’t really say what that might be.

Although this was not so apparent in the debate, some partisan Liberals have taken lately to distinguishing themselves from the NDP by talking as if the use of government to achieve large social purposes is a characteristic of the “socialist” NDP and a tradition foreign to capital-L Liberalism.

But the willingness to use government to effect change is at the heart of the progressive tradition in Canadian politics which the Liberals and the NDP share, as do the Greens.

A Liberalism shorn of its willingness to use the apparatus of the state actually dodges two of the greatest challenges we have in Canada today: inequality and climate change, both of which will require a revival of the willingness of governments to act even in the face of contrary winds from the marketplace.

This flavour of Liberalism may constitute an electoral strategy, one that might help the Liberals survive another election by finding a niche among voters. But it is not a progressive economic or environmental plan for a future government.

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton, where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties, was published in September.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

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