Last weekend's Liberal policy convention in Halifax was touted as the unofficial kickoff for the 2019 election for the party, and there was certainly a lot of attention being paid toward the policy resolutions that had been brought forward and were being prioritized and voted on.  But scratching the surface of what was happening, the whole exercise felt a bit superficial, and there didn't appear to be any actual debate or attempt to convince delegates about the policy positions as they were being voted on, which seems very strange.

It's important to remember that this is the first convention under the Liberals' new party constitution, which "streamlined" and "modernized" their policy development process to be more "nimble," but really worked to centralize much of the process within the leader's office.  This is a natural outgrowth of the way in which we've turned political parties into the personality cults of their leaders over successive years, so much so that we have seen leadership contests be the generator of party policy and direction rather than that coming from the grassroots, where it's supposed to come from if the system were operating as it should be.  When leaders are chosen with the "democratic mandate" of the thousands of votes they get (rather than from caucus, as the system is supposed to work), it means that they feel they have the mandate to create policy and election platforms instead of that process coming from the grassroots after all, it was those grassroots members who voted for them with knowledge of their policy positions, so it reinforces the leader's centralized position, but also their lack of accountability to anyone for those policy positions.

The Liberals' new policy development process sounds impressive on the surface, with requirements that resolutions get consultation from recognized experts as well as grassroots engagement, whether that's in the form of town halls, policy forums, panel discussions, or policy socials.  They are subject to an online voting process in advance of the convention to narrow down 96 platform proposals to 48 on-line resolutions, which then get voted down to the thirty they brought forward to the convention, where fifteen were prioritized and then voted on, all over a three-month process from launch to convention.  But given that the party's central office has a lot more sway over this process, is it as representative of the grassroots as it could or should be?  And does the focus on online engagement leave out the older segments of the party who have spent a lifetime doing the grassroots work the old-fashioned way in person?

I ask this in particular because they kept saying over and over during the convention that it was the youngest convention they had seen, with a much younger cohort than one normally finds at these events, which is great in theory, but when you couple this with the complaints we hear about the party alienating older members, you have to wonder about how the party is engaging all of its members.  Oh, wait we can't even call them members, because they eliminated paid memberships with that new constitution, and they're now "Registered Liberals," which further weakens the stake that they have in the process.

The resolutions themselves that they brought forward to the convention were also of a particular leftward bent, in many cases being resolutions that were identical to NDP positions on a number of fronts.  While this echoes the tactic of trying to outflank the NDP in order to keep them weak, which bolsters Liberal votes against the Conservatives, you also have to remember that the Liberals are supposed to be a big tent party, and part of that tent includes the "blue Liberals" who are more fiscally prudent, while also reaching out to disaffected Red Tories who are unimpressed with the social conservatism of the modern Conservative Party.  But if all of the resolutions are toward the party's left flank, where does that leave these "blue Liberals" in the direction that the party hopes to take?  Do they start to migrate back to the Conservatives because the thought of too much profligate spending and endless deficits is too much for them to bear?  Remember that even though the Liberals had reason enough to go deeper into deficit than they originally planned (there was a hole equivalent to $70 billion in GDP in the budget when they took over), they have never properly articulated this fact, relying instead on platitudes about investing in Canadian families, so they can't even communicate to elements of their own base about why they haven't kept up the promises they made.  That would seem to me to be another problem that they should get to tackling.

And in the wake of these left-wing proposals being adopted, we're already seeing ministers prevaricating on them, whether it's with universal pharmacare (the plan in the budget was national pharmacare, which is different), decriminalizing all drugs to adopt Portugal's harm reduction model (the health minister insists that what works in Portugal can't work in Canada), or decriminalizing all sex work (the minister of justice promised to address this file years ago and hasn't made any progress, giving one an indication about how important she sees the issue as being), so one has to wonder if this exercise has really all been for naught.

I am left to wonder how much longer the Liberal grassroots will put up with having their power stripped away before they start to fight back.  In the wake of Trudeau's win during the last election, he was given a lot of leeway to reform the party and in the process, he stripped away most of the mechanisms that would challenge him internally or push back against him within the party apparatus.  That the party's grassroots has been further devalued to being "registered Liberals" with no actual skin in the game, or actual loyalty to the party and its cause, leaving it to increasingly be a hollow shell that has formed around the leader and worse yet, other parties are flirting with this model as a way of trying to broaden their "outreach."  This leaves the party increasingly in the hands of the leader and his small band of advisors, cementing a top-down structure where our system is supposed to be one of bottom-up input into the democratic process.  This convention is but a taste of what is happening in our system, and we should all be concerned for where it leads.

Photo Credit: Chronicle Herald