The classical meaning of “liberal” is:
willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.
relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
It is sometimes hard to make the word “liberal” fit within the policies of the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau or the Democrat administration south of the border under Joe Biden. Rather than promoting individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise, both Trudeau and Biden often seem to promote the opposite. Trudeau’s actions have not escaped international attention. In the words of Christine Andersen, a represenative of a German populist party, speaking at the European parliament in Brussels last week: “Mr. Trudeau, you are a disgrace for any democracy. Please spare us your presence.” She was not alone. Croatian representative Mislaw Kolakusic refused to attend his visit and called Trudeau’s government a “neoMarxist tyranny” in a lengthy Facebook post.
Philosophers and politicians can enter into heated debates about what each word means, bending their ordinary meaning into whatever shape fits within their preferred ideology, but average Canadians don’t need the help of philosophers or politicians to understand the English language.
When Hilary Clinton stated: “half of Donald Trump’s supporters (about 33 million in the 2016 election) belong in a basket of “deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamaphobic” views” she seemed far from respecting opinions that differed from her own. When Justin Trudeau said the truckers in the Freedom Convoy were “probably homophobic, transphobic, misogynists and racists” he also seemed a long way from respecting Canadians who held opinions that differed from his. There is a remarkable similarity between Clinton and Trudeau’s invective, neither of which line up well with the first plank of what comprises “liberal” in the classical definition. In both cases, the attempt to label ordinary Americans and Canadians with vile epithets fails to impress.
The second plank of the classical “liberal” definition deals with individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise. Both Trudeau and Biden have taken extreme actions to limit individual rights, curtail civil liberties and bridle democracy, while enacting senseless legislation to intervene in free markets.
In dealing with the ongoing pandemic, Trudeau was willing (even eager) to issue vaccine mandates and business lockdowns. In dealing with the trucker protests he went so far as to declare the largely peaceful protests a national emergency, arrest the protesters, jail some of them and seize bank accounts and personal property. In policies spurred on by his belief in the specious theory that CO2 contributes to “climate change” Trudeau curtailed free enterprise by canceling pipelines, issuing a ban on West Coast tanker traffic, enacting a morass of environmental legislation including the cumbersome Impact Assessment Act, and imposing a draconian “carbon tax”. Never mind that these actions trampled all over Canada’s constitution and Charter of Rights. Trudeau enacted Bill 16 mandating the use of certain pronouns and proposed other legislation to stifle online dissent from his policies. You can argue about whether these actions had merit or otherwise, but you can’t argue they were “liberal”.
In Biden’s case, he was in office only hours when he signed an executive order canceling the already approved Keystone XL pipeline and shortly thereafter imposed a ban on oil drilling on certain federal lands. Like Trudeau, he supported vaccine mandates and lockdowns to combat COVID 19 despite a dearth of any evidence these measures were effective to stop the spread of that disease. Legal challenges as to whether his policies were constitutionally valid remain undecided. Biden also abandoned any pretense of defending the U.S. Southern border, permitting unchecked immigration and with it a flood of illegal drugs into America, and signed “voting rights” orders (unlikely to stand up to constitutional challenges in my opinion) to impose rules on elections constitutionally the ambit of state legislatures.
Those anecdotes point to the oxymoronic nature of today’s Liberal party calling itself “Liberals” or today’s Democrat party in the U.S. calling itself the “Democrats”. Neither Canada’s Liberal party nor America’s Democrats are “liberal” today. In the Orwellian “doublespeak” of today’s politics, there is little left of classical “liberalism” in the term “liberal” and little left of democracy in the term “Democrat”. Eric Arthur Blair (writing under the name George Orwell) saw the direction society was headed when he wrote his classic books “Animal Farm” and “1984”, and Trudeau and Biden seem bent on turning Blair’s dismal outlook into a 21st century reality.
In an odd and confusing shift over the past few decades, today’s left wing parties’ embrace of big government, high taxes and massive intervention into free markets (for the common good, of course) now occupy the political landscape that decades ago comprised the playground of “conservatives” and the only true “liberals” today are found in conservative political parties, both here in Canada and in the United States.
No wonder voters are confused.