Article published in the Canadian Conservative Review, Fall 2003, p. 11 (pdf reproduction).
In the autumn of 1985, when I was the economic advisor of the Québec Chamber of Commerce, we invited French philosopher and author Jean-François Revel to speak at a Chamber’s meeting. Although Mr. Revel had very favourably reviewed one of my books in a major French newsmagazine, he was by no means a radical libertarian. He can be described as a classical liberal – i.e., a defender of free-markets, democracy, and limited government. He has since been elected a member of the Académie Française.
Paul Martin asked to meet Jean-François Revel during his stay. So, on November 5, 1985, I brought our guest to Mr. Martin’s office at Canada Steamship Lines, on Beaver Hall Street in Montréal. My recollection of the short and friendly encounter between the two men is that Mr. Martin was trying hard to pass for a classical liberal, but was more interested in meeting a celebrity and projecting his image of a would-be statesman, a statesman without a state. As far as I can see, the main consequence of this meeting in the great scheme of things was that Martin offered his chauffeur to drive Jean-François Revel to the airport, thereby saving me the trouble of doing it myself.
When I remember events like this, I feel that we have been distressfully inefficient. By “we”, I mean the half dozen Canadian libertarians who were observing the growth of our monstrous state. We should have been able to teach something to Martin, to bring him away from the Dark Side. We should have put him in touch with Canadian classical liberals and libertarians, we should have invited him to conferences and persuaded him to read some books – say, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or The Constitution of Liberty, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. We failed to do this, and another statist is now anointed King of Canada.
I won’t review Mr. Martin’s (at best inexistent, at worst inconsistent) economic program. But it is difficult to ignore his recent praising his father for “our health care system,” which, he added, “is an incredible part of this country”. It is one thing for a man to honour his deceased father, but quite another thing to compliment him as the Lord Beveridge of Canada.
How is it that Martin talks so much about democracy while he has no platform, only an image, to vote on, and has been crowned by a few tens of thousands of Liberal yes men – sorry, “yes persons,” or better “yes plants”? The answer is that he has no theory of democracy, he just believes in the system. Whatever the system does is democratic by definition. “Democracy” and “good” are two equivalent words. When he complains about our “democratic deficit,” he simply means that we don’t have enough of the good things that will be brought by his own policies. Mr. Martin is a pidgin democrat.
In fact, he has no theory of the state, that is, he does not understand why the state does what it does – why, for example, it has grown non-stop during the 20th century, and continues to grow. For him, the state is a black box, and a personal playground. After all, he comes from a family of democratic rulers.
His slogans are empty hunches, like when he talks about “the absolute necessity of reducing the distance between the nation’s capital and the regions of the country.” He has no grasp of the real problem, which is that some individuals want their lifestyles, with their own money and property, their smokes, their guns, their boats without licences, their freedom of speech, or whatever, while some others, of which he is, want to forbid these lifestyles. It’s not the regions, it’s the individuals, stupid!
Despite what Martin said, his election was not “a vote for different ways of doing things”. How can he talk without laughing about “a fundamental shift in the way the government is going to operate”? One sees how empty all this is when he adds that he is “not interested in the extreme right or the extreme left. The question is how to expand the centre.”
Perhaps even more distressing was to the image of the young Liberal apparatchiks en fête when their democratic boss won the post-dated election with a proportion of the vote reminiscent of Eastern Europe. No doubt, they were born with their social insurance numbers tattooed on their foreheads and their medicare cards in their mouths.
Two decades ago, we could perhaps have taught some ideas to Paul Martin, but then, he would have failed at the dream of his life: to become the Prime Minister of contented sheep. As long as the state wants to be everything to everybody, only political animals, i.e., enemies of liberty, can make it to the helm.