There has often been occasion in these columns and elsewhere for me to express my admiration for the federal Liberal Party. Having governed for 80 of the 114 years since the first election of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, it is the most successful political party in the democratic world.

Particularly impressive, as constructive political chicanery, was its ability for 90 years to represent itself successfully in Quebec as the party that would make federalism work for Quebec, and outside Quebec as the party that would keep Quebec in Canada, whether, depending on the audience, by bonne entente conciliation or by suppression of French Quebec fractiousness.

I have long thought, though I have no proof of it, that this tour de force of political virtuosity, developed by Laurier and refined by W.L.M. King and Ernest Lapointe after the conscription crisis of 1917, was modelled on the U.S. Democratic Party’s dominance from 1801 to 1861 (13 presidential elections out of 15). It was the champion of the slave-holding South and assured the western spread of slavery, while holding itself out in the North as the party that would keep the South in the Union.

This arrangement was made explicit by president Andrew Jackson in 1832, when he made it clear that he would guarantee slavery south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but would not tolerate the secession of South Carolina (or any other state). To this end, he effectively threatened to hang his vice-president, John C. Calhoun, tore up ratified treaties with the Indian tribes and rebuffed the Supreme Court’s invalidation of those treaty repudiations with the assertion, “The chief justice (John Marshall) has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

He forcibly transferred 250,000 Indians beyond the Mississippi, with great loss of life, to open up cotton-planting areas for a comparable number of new slaves in the South. It was an odious policy, but it probably preserved the Union for 30 years, during which the North so outpaced the South in economic and population growth that when the Civil War came, the North, by a narrow margin, was able to suppress the insurrection. Abraham Lincoln split the Democratic Party, and in a mighty triumph of statesmanship transformed a war to preserve the Union into a war also for the emancipation of the slaves. (And his Republicans were rewarded with victory in 14 of the next 18 presidential elections.)

The lesson here is that the Liberals should not imagine that they can easily go back to taking 90% of the Quebec MPs and winning four out of five elections, nor that they can get away with the bunk about Conservatives being “harsh” and frightening. The two-party system has returned after an absence of 85 years.

Of course, everything is to scale. Lapointe and King weren’t Jefferson and Jackson; Maurice Duplessis and Brian Mulroney and Rene Levesque weren’t Henry Clay, Lincoln and Calhoun either. French Canadians weren’t slaves or slaveholders, and Pierre Laporte and a couple of other victims of the FLQ and its antecedents are hardly comparable to the 700,000 people who died in the terrible War Between the States.

But the Canadian Liberals, whatever their pretensions, inanities and compromises, had only seven leaders in the 115 years from 1887 to 2002, and got the country through some terrible crises. Eventually, with the tangible and cultural appeasement of French Canada and the rise of the Western provinces, Quebec’s ability and desire to disrupt the country declined (as did the comparative strength of the American South from 1830 to 1860).

In the same time, the Liberals’ Conservative opponents had 24 leaders, including three from Reform and the Canadian Alliance, and counting Arthur Meighen and Joe Clark twice each. Between Sir John A. Macdonald, who died in office in 1891, and Brian Mulroney, who was elected in 1984, they were essentially a disparate group of Nova Scotian moderates, Prairie grumblers and Toronto fat cats who didn’t particularly care for each other, but didn’t happen to be Liberals.

The purpose of this laborious prologue is to establish my bona fides for my reluctant but unavoidable condemnation of the Liberals’ latest policy flourish: the insistence on aid to ensure generally available abortion in foreign aid-beneficiary countries, along with “other methods of birth control.” This is an outrage.

To be clear, my own views are similar to what I believe to be the opinions of successive leaders of both major parties: that abortions are distasteful, but they occur and must be sanitary and unstigmatizing; and that the state does not have and should not aspire to have the right to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not wish to have a child. But it is not the place of Canada to require and to subsidize the universally accessible termination of pregnancies in foreign countries, nor is it the province of the leader of the opposition so to affront the roughly 25% of Canadians who regard abortion as manslaughter or worse.

Abortion is not another “method of birth control”; it is a controversial subject of moral implications where heartfelt conflicting views must be respected; and it is fatuously arrogant and insensitive for the Liberal Party of Canada to demand the availability in foreign countries of abortion on demand at the expense of Canadian taxpayers, including the millions of them who are opponents of abortion, on pain of curtailment of foreign assistance to non-complying recipients. And it is very objectionable that all of this is without an apparent thought for the cultural or religious practices of the countries we are supposedly assisting. This, though I am sure Mr. Ignatieff did not intend it to be so, is the ultimate degradation of the “white man’s burden” — thoughtless, overbearing meddling in another country’s civilization and values.

This raises a related question: What is this great party doing making day-care its chief domestic policy initiative? Of course this is an important issue, but the federal government’s primary task is to build and lead Canada to greatness, within itself and in the world. These platform documents should lead with imagination and boldness, as Walter Gordon did (though I often, but very amiably, disagreed with him).

Canada should tax provincial transactions and elective energy sales, the sale-of non-essential goods, and reduce income taxes and abolish capital gains taxes on sales by Canadians of Canadian securities. We should reintroduce private medicine alongside the public health system, as most advanced countries have done. Our health-care system should not be a model for the United States of what not to do, as it now is. We should be proposing drastic reforms to the UN, NATO and the IMF, and building our defence capacity. An army of 19,000 is a scandal for a country as important as Canada. We should assist the private sector in making Canadians owners of a serious automobile manufacturer, and in the fair and advantageous repatriation of more of our industry. And the stocks, if not the lash, should be restored to deal with Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest for fouling our nest by criticizing the Alberta oil sands at the most futile international conference, Copenhagen, since the Defenestration of Prague.

Instead of originality and vision and uplift, or even thoroughness, what was for over a century Canada’s natural party of government is preoccupied with disposing of the foreign unborn, and the regimentation of our own new-born. It won’t do at all.