The news from the operating room on Parliament Hill – that surgeons had succeeded in stitching the Liberal and New Democratic parties together, hip to hip – caused a stir in political circles last week.
“God Help Us,” tweeted interim opposition leader Candice Bergen, although she did not say if she was seeking divine intervention to rescue her bifurcated Conservative party from its mortal enemy – that would be itself – or to save 38 million Canadians from a fate worse than death: three more years of Justin Trudeau.
Meanwhile, other veterans on the Hill wondered what the fuss was about. Hadn’t the two parties been joined at the hip since forever? I had different questions. Why did the surgeons stop at the hip? Why didn’t they perform a full Monty and graft the two entities into a single centre-left party?
It could be called the Liberal Democratic or Democratic Liberal party. But I’d say be bold, be daring. Go for the New Vermilion Party of Canada (vermilion being, as I’ve been warned, the “distinctive” color produced when Liberal red is mixed with NDP orange).
Together is the direction the two parties are headed anyway. Aggrieved Conservatives argue that the electoral system is skewed to favour the Liberals. While the Conservatives won the popular vote in the last two elections, the system gave the Liberals more seats and the right to govern. The Conservatives might have a case if there were only two parties in Parliament; however, there aren’t.
In the 2021 election, the Conservatives won 5,747,410 votes (33.7 per cent of those cast) to the Liberals’ 5,556,629 (32.6 per cent). But if the surgeons had fast-tracked a full Monty, and the 3,303,348 votes that went to the NDP were added to the Liberal tally, the New Vermilion Party of Canada would have elected a majority government with 50.4 per cent of the popular vote – making it the first time a party had taken more than half of the votes since Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives did it with 50.03 per cent in 1984.
Of course, not every 2021 NDP or Liberal voter could be expected to rally to the new party come 2025, when the next election is to be held, as stipulated in the “supply-and-confidence” agreement signed last week. There would be defections. But there would also be new supporters, people attracted to a unified party from the centre and left of the spectrum. It’s where Canadians are increasingly doing their voting.
The days of small government – low taxes, shrunken funding for public services, responsibility for the care of citizens unable to care for themselves abandoned to the mercies of for-profit enterprise – are gone. COVID demanded huge investments in health and income supports, forcing the congenitally centrist Liberals to shift toward the NDP on their left. They won’t be moving back any time soon. The commitments they made last week to the NDP on dental care, pharmacare and housing, will keep them to the left of centre.
The two parties have been fishing in the same policy pond since the days of Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson. The NDP would find the fish, and the Liberals, being the magpies of politics, would steal them, claim ownership, and serve them to the country when they got around to it.
More is expected of government today. The pace of politics is accelerating. Dawdling over commitments no longer serves as cover for failures to act.
There is much more to be unpacked in the supply-and-confidence bundle. I’ll leave it for now with a few quick thoughts: the public is more than ready for a Parliament that rises above petty partisanship and vindictive personal attacks; it expects more and better from its government; it will respond to a centre-left party that is alert to the concerns of Canadians, creative enough to design programs to meet changing needs, and strong enough to push its agenda through to implementation.
That would be the New Vermilion Party of Canada. You read it here first.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is a former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com