Anita Anand and Chrystia Freeland recently drew public attention to their contrasting personas and political positioning. Anand, now President of the Treasury Board, was ousted as Minister of National Defence, supposedly for advocating too strenuously to fund the cash-strapped military and for excessive self-promotion. Clearly undeterred, she was quick out of the gate of her new gig with a letter to cabinet colleagues ordering them to come up with $15.4 billion in expenditure cuts over the next five years. For her part, Freeland used a commencement address at Northeastern University in Boston to ask rhetorically whether capitalist democracy is still effective.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Joe Oliver: Shh! Was that the Liberal leadership race getting underway? Back to video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

Were those the two opening salvos in the campaign for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada? Caution is advised in such matters. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” (Yevgeny Prigozhin should have read his Emerson.) But launching a leadership campaign must be very tempting for would-be Liberal prime ministers. According to the latest Abacus poll, only 27 per cent of Canadians think he should run again, while the Liberals trail the Conservatives by 12 per cent.

As for the salvoes themselves, let’s start with the nothing-burger: spending cuts. You have to hand it to the Liberals for brazen theatrics: the show goes on without a hint of embarrassment over hostile crowds and periodic booing. For almost eight years now, both the PM and PMO have demonstrated clear and strong aversion to fiscal prudence. But they embrace the ineffable whenever it resonates politically, as it does now, since the public understands that profligacy causes inflation, people’s biggest current concern. Making life even more unaffordable, last year the average Canadian family spent over 45 per cent of its income on taxes, compared to just 36 per cent on basic necessities, according to the Fraser Institute. Canadians have heard this government’s restraint ditty before and they know it ends in betrayal.

The government would have us believe it proposes real savings, rather than minor reductions in massive spending hikes. The “slashing” starts with a risible $500 million, which is just 1.2 per cent of this year’s forecast deficit of $41.3 billion. Over five years it totals barely 2.5 per cent of the $617 billion in operating expenses the government currently budgets — though that number assumes spending does not escalate, which it obviously will.

It is a poor hand Minister Anand has been dealt but she seems determined to play it to the hilt and spotlight her brand from the obscurity of a low-profile portfolio. Her tough performance may appeal to dispirited centrist Liberals desperately seeking someone, anyone, showing a modicum of fiscal responsibility.

Chrystia Freeland’s questioning of the free-market system reinforces her brand as the party’s progressive intellectual and member of the Davos super-elite, a dubious bragging right she shares with her boss. That may explain her hauteur and generally didactic tone, the antithesis of a common-touch retail politician. We were also treated to the hypocrisy of a climate-change alarmist who smugly boasts about not owning a car, first being chauffeured around Toronto in a limo and then caught by police in Alberta driving a rental car 32 km/h over the speed limit.

Hypocrisy aside, Freeland’s more serious problem is substantive. Her ideas and financial track record derive from a left-wing mindset all too comfortable with colossal deficits.

Several recent books address the problems of democratic capitalism, the system that integrates free markets with social needs in a democratic context. Most analyses would agree with a recent Foreign Affairs article that “Any solution must begin with a focus on restoring public trust in democracy.” I would add: “as well as on its ability to deliver for its citizens.” If so, the government in which Freeland is Deputy Prime Minister must shoulder blame for making the problem worse, rather than trying to solve it. Trudeau’s divisive rhetoric and wedge policies that pit racial, socio-economic and geographic groups against each other and denigrate alternative opinions are partly to blame for the decline in public trust. Unethical behaviour, evident incompetence and failed policies that undermine individual prosperity, as measured by insipid growth in GDP per capita, have also played their part.

The internal succession drama may be moot, however, if the prime minister decides to hang on or, whoever leads them, the Liberals are voted out by a frustrated electorate that demands change and sees hope in Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. In the meantime: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” as Trudeau family favourite Mao Zedong proclaimed, before executing his critics. A cautionary tale for the outspoken, but if the party is heading for defeat, what is there to lose?

Joe Oliver was minister of natural resources, then minister of finance in the Harper government.