In the blog he shares in the Globe and Mail with Tory Tim Powers, prominent Liberal Rob Silver talks about his reactions to Fearful Symmetry. Like Lawrence Martin, he is another Liberal who recognises that the ideas in the book are not about this party or that, and can provide inspiration and insight to all parties that want to respond to the new Canada that is emerging. He writes:
I finally found time to read Fearful Symmetry over the weekend (you can’t keep your Canadian pundit card this fall unless you’ve consumed it whole). As others have written, it is a striking, important, profound book about Canada, our history and our future. It also provides a potentially exciting answer for how the Liberals could redefine itself to once again be relevant to a larger swath of the country. I will discuss the book and its potential implications for the Liberal Party in much greater detail in a future post.
For now, let me just assure you that my arguments on why the party should consider the policy prescriptions in Fearful Symmetry will have nothing to do with House of Commons tactics, nothing to do with which date the election will be called or today’s polls and frankly, have nothing to do with who our leader happens to be or all the dreamy alternatives that could one day replace him.
Weird thought: a strategy for a political party not based on short term tactics or leader-centric considerations? One that may take a number of years to fully execute on. I know, post-Thanksgiving hangover crazy talk.
Hallelujah! As I point out repeatedly in FS, the founding values of Canada that I focus on aren’t “right of centre values” at all, however much some people might want to use that label as a cheap way of dismissing the argument. These were the bedrock values on which Canada was founded and they were values on which there was a broad consensus within Canadian society and across the political parties. I document that Tommy Douglas endorsed many of them just as much as Louis St-Laurent, Wilfrid Laurier, Charlotte Whitton, Angus L. Macdonald and others did. There were specific reasons why the last 50 years dragged us away from those values and equally specific reasons why they will be back in fashion within a few short years. Read the book for more!
