In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was.
Is there room for two separate progressive parties in Canada?
If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he will step down after a new Liberal Party leader is selected has set off a ton of speculation about who might succeed him, there’s been far less attention paid to the more fundamental question: should the Liberal Party exist at all?
You can argue that his press conference provided one answer. Trudeau’s appeal to “progressive across the country” rather than the Liberal Party itself suggests that he sees himself as much the leader of a left-wing movement as a big-tent political party.
There are no doubt other Liberals who would give a different answer. They see themselves as institutionalists—as the inheritors of the party of Laurier, King, and St. Laurent. Their political identity is as Liberals, not progressives.
This in fact may be the right way to think about the future of the Liberal Party: a contest between institutionalists and progressives.
My instinct is that the charisma and energy rests with the progressives. They’re young, idealistic and wonky. They’ve been mobilized and multiplied during the Trudeau era. They’ve held roles in cabinet and among the key staff. And they now occupy positions in civil society—including as university professors, non-profit leaders, and social justice advocates—that privilege their participation in politics.
These progressive Liberals increasingly define the ideas and vocabulary that dominate the party. Yet they themselves don’t have deep attachments to it. Yes, they can extoll the party’s history in contributing to aspects of Canada’s social welfare state or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But they’re just as likely to recoil at its role in the country’s racist, misogynistic, and even genocidal past. Their relationship to the Liberal Party is, in other words, instrumental at best and highly conflicted at worst.
As they continue to polarize the Liberal Party and in turn withdraw it from the centre of political spectrum, the case for its ongoing existence ostensibly weakens. If their overriding motivation is to advance progressive goals, the case for two separate progressive parties seems rather weak. What’s gained from separate finances, candidate selection, policy ideation, and ultimately election ballots for the Liberals and New Democrats? The upside seems to mostly accrue to the Conservatives. Especially since a majority of those who voted for the Liberals in the 2021 election now tell pollsters that they support a merger between the two parties.
If Pierre Poilievre wins the next election, it probably won’t be because the Liberals and the NDP split the left-wing vote. But it certainly won’t help and it’s hurt in the past. The Conservative Party has won the popular vote in six of the past seven elections and in each case, the combined Liberal-NDP vote was bigger.
These trends suggest that something is likely to eventually give in the form of a progressive merger. It may not be after the next election or even the one after that. The Liberal institutionalists may be declining in power but by virtue of their age and standing, they can still exert some influence over the party. Yet one gets the sense that as they retire from politics and are replaced by younger and more committed progressives, the Liberal Party itself may cease to exist.
Scott Brison arrives for a press conference in Ottawa on Monday, April 30, 2018. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
Scott Brison, Blue Liberal champion?
In my 2025 Hub predictions, I predicted that the Liberal leadership would ultimately reaffirm the party’s drift towards progressivism. That’s still my best bet.
But let’s take seriously the notion that the so-called “Blue Liberals” can organize themselves such that they could recapture the party from its progressive lurch over the past decade or so. None of the candidates currently on offer would fulfill such a political realignment.
Chrystia Freeland is the fiscal architect of Justin Trudeau’s free-spending agenda. Mark Carney is likely to run to the Left if for no other reason than to try to inoculate himself from the predictable criticism that he’s just a greenwashed Goldman Sachs banker. François-Philippe Champagne has been at the centre of the Trudeau government’s unprecedented orgy of corporate welfare spending. And Lord knows where Christy Clark stands on anything.
If the Blue Liberals are going to have any ongoing influence over the party, they need a candidate who will unequivocally shift it back to the centre on economic and fiscal policy.
What about Scott Brison? He personifies the fiscal conservative/social progressive ethos of the Blue Liberals.
Brison has had a consistent record of mainstream views on economic and fiscal matters and even reportedly left the Trudeau government in part because he became isolated around the cabinet table on government spending and the growing role of the state in the economy. Yet he’s also been strongly identified with gay rights and other progressive causes.
If the Blue Liberals believe that their party’s renewal lies in restoring its support among centrist and even centre-right voters on economic issues, one could make a good case that Brison could be uniquely positioned to reach these voters.
After all, as a leadership candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party in 2003, he ran to the Right of most of the other candidates on economic and fiscal policy, health care, and other key issues, and ultimately secured 18 percent of the total vote.
But in a world in which today’s core Liberal voters are more motivated by cultural and social issues than economic ones, Brison is highly fluent in the language and ideas that animate them. As long as he’s reliable on LGBT issues and other forms of identity politics, one gets the sense that a lot of Liberals wouldn’t mind if he supported lowering spending or cutting corporate taxes. Those aren’t the issues that define them anyway.
In any case, a Brison candidacy would be valuable if for no other reason than it would help to answer a bigger question looming over our politics. The Blue Liberal theory of politics is that there is a critical mass of Canadians who don’t like the Trudeau government’s dirigisme but who are also uncomfortable with the modern Conservative Party’s cultural conservatism and populist streak. They are politically homeless as the Canadian Future Party—a vanity project of former New Brunswick politician Dominic Cardy—would have us believe. Brison’s leadership would test that theory.
Abacus Data founder and CEO David Coletto is doubtful. He recently produced analysis that suggests that only about 6 percent of Canadians fit in the category of “economic conservative and cultural progressive.” The reality may be that this group seems far bigger than it actually is because it’s overrepresented in elite circles—including business, media, and so on.
There’s one way to find out: draft Scott Brison for Liberal Party leader.
Latest employment numbers are a sign of Canada’s phoney economy
This week Statistics Canada estimated that the economy created 91,000 new jobs in the month of December. It’s a pretty impressive number—except for one catch: 40,000 of them (or 44 percent) were government jobs.
This is broadly consistent with the jobs picture for the entire year. The public sector was responsible for about 38 percent of all net new job creation in 2024. To put this in perspective: it’s nearly double the public sector’s share of overall employment.
Just as the Trudeau government has disproportionately relied on immigration and deficit spending to artificially stimulate economic output, it has depended on the government itself to hold up employment growth.
It makes one realize that a lot of what we’re seeing in the economy is a bit phoney. The economy’s fundamentals are weaker than they seem. Unsustainable immigration levels, Ottawa’s worsening deficit, and the public sector’s hiring binge are obscuring its structural weakness. Government stimulus, broadly defined, is compensating for low business investment, slow consumer spending, and sluggish private sector job creation.
It helps to explain the seeming disconnect between some of the optimistic topline numbers and Canadians’ more pessimistic sentiments. The source of the problem isn’t vibes as Chrystia Freeland put it. At some level, Canadians instinctively understand that the numbers aren’t real—or at least don’t reflect the true state of the economy absent the government’s extraordinary policies.
It puts into clear focus the challenge facing a prospective Poilievre-led government. As it rightly withdraws the Trudeau government’s unsustainable stimulus policies, Canadians will be fully exposed to how weak the economy is. If we’re not in a recession now, there’s a strong chance that we’ll be in one later this year—particularly in the face of the Trump administration’s pending tariffs.
The only solution is to replace artificial growth with real growth. Canada needs an ambitious, pro-growth agenda to rebalance the roles of the public and private sectors with respect to investment and employment and come to rely far more on intensive rather than extensive growth.
It won’t be easy. But it’s necessary. Canadians aren’t dumb. They know a phoney economy when they see one.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well as a think-tank scholar and columnist. He previously served as a senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper....
