Party Profiles: The Liberals

By Jeff Wheeldon

In the past few weeks I’ve profiled the Conservatives and NDP to show that conservation, sustainability, and environment are all essential to their values. Now, with the by-election only a few weeks away, I’ll profile the Liberal Party.

With the selection of Justin Trudeau as party leader, the Liberals are riding a wave of popularity at the moment — a welcome relief for them, after their worst-ever showing in the last election. For people across the political spectrum, the resurgence of Canada’s most centrist party is good news: a centrist party can get things done by appealing to both ends of the spectrum in order to pass policies and projects. That appears to be precisely what Justin Trudeau is aiming to do.

On the Liberal Party website, “a clean environment” is one of the main headings under “What We Stand For”. When I profiled the NDP I pointed out that the Conservatives and NDP each approach our environment as instrumental, or a means to an end: the Conservatives see it as resources to be spent to boost our economy, while the NDP sees it as a necessary condition for human health and quality of life. What’s unclear from the Liberal site is why they want to protect the environment at all. A more cynical person might quip that it’s because environmentalism is popular. But perhaps this is good news: if protecting the environment is so popular that Canada’s oldest political party names it as a core value without bothering to explain why, then perhaps sustainability and a clean environment really are Canadian values. After all, the Liberals pride themselves on representing Canadian values rather than values specific to one end of the political spectrum or another, so perhaps we can now say that sustainability is truly mainstream!

Trudeau has taken flak for supporting the Alberta oilsands, a project that has polarized Canadians. In his October 30th speech to the Calgary Petroleum Club he underscored the middle-ground stance that’s so clear from the values declared on his website: environment and energy projects are the same, inseparable issue. “If we had stronger environmental policy in this country: stronger oversight, tougher penalties, and yes, some sort of means to price carbon pollution, then I believe the Keystone XL pipeline would have been approved already.” In rhetoric, the Liberals don’t see the environment in an instrumental light, to be managed for the sake of energy projects; they merely insist that it can and must be carefully managed while pursuing energy projects. But Trudeau’s repeated statement in his speech, that a “fundamental role of the Government of Canada” is to “open up markets abroad for Canadian resources”, places the emphasis on economy.

While it’s clear that this is all in response to the hot issues of today, it would be nice to see a more comprehensive discussion of the environment from the Liberals. Even so, a balanced approach to energy and environment is welcome. Liberals, hold him to it!