Re: "Has the centre vanished?" by Stephen Clarkson (October 2011).

Flanagan, Tom ; Westell, Anthony

I can feel Stephen Clarkson's pain. He has spent much of his adult life writing about the Liberal Party of Canada, and it's fallen into third place, not just in Canada, but even in Toronto. Clarkson's Trudeau and Our Times won a Governor General's award. He borrowed a phrase from the Hell's Angels when he wrote another book on the Liberals, The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics, which described in detail how they beat up Bob Stanfield, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell, Jean Charest, Preston Manning and Stockwell Day. But now the Big Red Machine lies in the ditch, having been sideswiped by a Bigger, Badder Blue Machine. It's all very sad.

Even sadder is the effect of melancholia on Clarkson's vision. He sees Stephen Harper as a dangerous reactionary, bent on dismantling all the wonderful achievements of the old Liberal consensus; but other observers see that Harper bought into the Liberal consensus as the price of achieving power. Henry of Navarre famously said, "Paris is worth a mass," as he converted to Catholicism to become King Henry IV of France. Harper has not only gone to mass; he has said rosaries and novenas on his way to majority government.

Harper has adopted the Liberal shibboleths of bilingualism and multiculturalism. He has no plans to reintroduce capital punishment, criminalize abortion, repeal gay marriage or repeal the Charter. He swears allegiance to the Canada Health Act. He has enriched equalization payments for the provinces and pogey for individuals. He has enthusiastically accepted government subsidies to business, while enlarging regional economic expansion. He now advocates Keynesian deficit spending and government bailouts of failing corporations, at least part of the time.

Yes, he has terminated a few Liberal programs, but government programs are not immortal. If you win a democratic election, you get the right to govern, which sometimes means making changes. Yes, Harper is talking about budget cuts, though far more modest than those inflicted by Jean Chretien and Paul Martin in the mid 1990s. And yes, Harper plays hardball politics in order to survive, but he's still way behind the Shawinigan Strangler, who shut down the Somalia inquiry, obfuscated the Auberge Grand-Mere affair and stonewalled in the face of scandal after scandal. Clarkson should take a Valium, throw away old Liberal talking points and realize that the Liberal consensus lives on. It's just under new management.

TOM FLANAGAN

CALGARY, ALBERTA

Studying the tea leaves of the vote in the May 11 election in which the Liberal vote collapsed, Stephen Clarkson suggests the centre in Canadian politics has disappeared. May I suggest a different interpretation: it is the Left that has disappeared. The NDP had began life as the CCF, which was a democratic socialist party. Becoming the NDP, it transformed itself into a social democratic party. For some years before Jack Layton it had been edging into the centre, competing with the Liberals.

In the recent election in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper ran one of the most dishonest campaigns in memory, he focused and succeeded in destroying the inept and inexperienced Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff. No ideologue, Layton seized the opportunity to occupy the centre. It remains to be seen if the Liberals will join the NDP in the centre, or, as Harper no doubt hopes, reopen the battle with the NDP and so split the centre vote.

ANTHONY WESTELL

TORONTO, ONTARIO