Canada PoliticsIs this Justin Trudeau’s Kim Campbell moment?
During her one and only election as Tory leader, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell said that an election campaign was a bad time to discuss policy.
She was wrong.
Justin Trudeau, however, is right not to lay out his detailed policies prior to winning the Liberal leadership next month.
On Wednesday, the Canadian Press reported that Trudeau was sticking to his guns.
[Trudeau] says a leadership campaign is not a time to put forward a platform that the party would try to sell for the next two years.
He says it’s about gathering ideas to help develop that platform in time for the next federal vote.
Leadership races are about displaying one's leadership qualities. They're about showing party members that their candidate can engage and excite the Canadian electorate. They're about putting forward a macro-vision of the country. Trudeau has done all that — very effectively.
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With regard to detailed policies, those need to be developed by grassroots party members.
As recently explained by Parliamentary reporter Dale Smith, that's the way the system is supposed to work.
"[The electorate] sign up [for a party], pay their membership fee, and then they get to have input into the system – they help to nominate the candidate for the next election, and they have policy discussions, which they vote on and send to the party’s next policy convention, where the rest of the delegates get to vote on their adoption," Smith wrote on his website.
"Policies that get adopted form the basis of party platforms. This is how democracy works at a grassroots level in a Westminster system.
"If we go along with the notion that leadership candidates should be the place for policy pronouncements to be born, then what role is there for the grassroots membership anymore?"
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Certainly, Canadians want to know how a Justin Trudeau-led Liberal party would govern this country.
Unlike Campbell, however, Trudeau says that we'll have a chance to 'discuss' the Liberal platform prior to the next election.
We'll just have to wait a little while longer.
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