Editorial

The Crisis of the Liberal Party is a Crisis of Neo-Liberalism

The firing of Finance Minister Paul Martin from the Chretien cabinet signals the beginning of open warfare within the Liberal party to determine who will be the leader going into the next election campaign. Among other things, this means that the revelations about corruption within the Chretien government will be coming thicker and faster as each faction tries to discredit the other.

One of the key promises made by Jean Chretien during the 1993 federal election campaign was to eliminate the government corruption that characterized the Mulroney regime and to restore credibility to Canadian politics. The string of revelations over the past few years of corrupt and unethical behaviour by various cabinet ministers, beginning with the prime minister himself, shows that this election promise was no more sincere than the promise to scrap NAFTA or end the GST. Far from restoring the credibility of politics and politicians, the Chretien government has brought the level of politics in Canada to new lows. The degeneration of the Liberal leadership race into little more than a bar room brawl is a reflection of this.

However, the media attention being focussed on the problems within the Liberal party is itself problematic. By reducing the issue to a matter of personalities and personal ambitions, this coverage diverts attention from the crucial problem facing Canadians, that is the problem which gives rise to corruption within the political system. That problem is the total lack of any political vision for the future of Canada coming from the Liberal party, whether from the Chretien camp or the Martin camp. Of course, this problem is not unique to the Liberals, but afflicts every political party which has hitched itself to the wagon of neo-liberalism.

Chretien travels around the country and the world making speeches about national unity and promoting Canada as "the greatest country in the world", at the same time that his government is selling out the sovereignty of the nation at a faster rate than even the Mulroney government. Meanwhile, Martin's vision extends only as far as the needs of the Bay Street investment bankers. Is it any surprise that politics based on neo-liberalism, in which the central problem is how to assist the rich to rob public treasuries, should be characterized by extremes of corruption? What used to be considered a "Third World" problem has now become commonplace in all the advanced capitalist countries, with the U.S. Enron scam representing only the tip of the iceberg.

A recent poll indicated that over two-thirds of Canadians believe that politicians tell lies all the time. Such levels of cynicism about the country's elected officials are an indication that Canadians are fed up with the politics of the mainstream parties and are looking for something new. There are different ways in which people can react to this situation. They can simply declare that electoral politics is irrelevant and abandon this field of struggle entirely. Or they can unite to establish a new political culture based on actually solving the problems facing the Canadian people, one of the most urgent of which is the defence of the sovereignty of the Canadian nation and the vesting of that sovereignty in the people.