Rituals of Rhetoric and Nationhood: The Liberal Anti-Deficit Campaign (1994-1998)

Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 2004 by Weinroth, Michelle

The Liberals won substantial consent for their fiscal project, but not without challenges. Known for their Keynesian disposition, they had to justify their new guise as the fervent ideologues of monetarism. They had to persuade Canadians, who had grown disenchanted with chameleon-like politicians, that drastic cuts were inevitable. They also had to ensure that their firm plan to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP by 1997 (Martin 1995, 3) prevailed amidst contestation from Keynesians on the one hand, and neo-conservative forces on the other. These were not easy hurdles, yet they cleared them and turned the campaign into an historic and paradigmatic moment for manufacturing consent. They shook the general public from its complacency, turned an otherwise exclusive idiom of economic figures into a matter of compelling national interest, and won approval for implementing harsh fiscal policies. What was the secret of the Liberals' success? What made this marketing campaign so brilliant and convincing to large numbers of Canadians?

The questions that I pose reflect a line of inquiry addressed by several critics of neo-liberalism (Klein 1996; Workman 1996; McQuaig 1995; Martin and Savidan 1994; Barlow and Campbell 1995). Each of these writers has shown how a widening culture of anti-deficit thinking took hold of public opinion in the 1990s; how a nexus of corporate-backed think-tanks (e.g., the C.D. Howe and Fraser Institutes) and an elite-governed media generated an anti-deficit ideology that served the interests of the neo-liberal hegemony;7 how major media figures, credit-rating agencies, and the politically ambitious leaders of Canada's capitalist elite contributed to deficit hysteria; how concern over the deficit saturated the national culture and rendered the fiscal question a quasi-religious dogma; and finally, how Liberals fostered consent by tapping a matrix of common sense social values embedded in Canadian sensibility. While my own explanatory model shares much with these studies, its distinctiveness lies in its conceptual framework, for it stresses, unlike these other treatises, that the Liberal campaign deployed a symbolic language of nationalism in fiscal form, and that the mystique and persuasive power of such an ideology resides in its archetypally dramatic pattern. This paradigm may be applied to times of disorientation and political defeat, such as the late 1980s and early 1990s,8 when the battle of persuasion waged over political and economic issues is not always won on the turf of impeccable rationality and sound economic models, but on the stage of nationalist political rituals (Kertzer 1988, 8-14; 40-42; 84-86; 90-91) such as those effectively staged by the Liberals in their fiscal rhetoric. My essay turns its attention to the theatrical and nationalist dimensions of such propaganda in an effort to show the workings of a key episode in Canadian consensus-building.

Vicissitudes of Canadian Liberalism

Any consideration of Liberal discourse in the 1994-1995 juncture must first take into account the evolution of Liberal politics in Canada, from its Keynesian days to its current neo-liberal incarnation. The anti-deficit campaign of the mid-1990s is but the epiphany of a quintessentially Canadian contradiction, embodied microcosmically within the Liberal Party itself: the attempt to reconcile economic sovereignty and a socially just welfare state with continental free enterprise and the monetarist pressures of a competitive global market. This alliance of irreconcilable economic ideologies was bound to sunder and cede to a powerful tide of neo-liberalism.