Enemy of the state

Until this morning, it seemed unlikely that any prominent Lib would do more than Michael Ignatieff to hand over the rhetorical playing field to the Cons. But then the National Post got a hold of Tom Axworthy's hatchet job against the very concept of government:

On the eve of the Liberal leadership convention, the man charged with leading the party's renewal process has dropped a bombshell by questioning one of liberalism's key convictions -- that government actually works.

In a hard-hitting policy paper obtained by the National Post, Tom Axworthy, a former top advisor to Pierre Trudeau, says there is an "implementation gap" between what Liberal governments promise and what they deliver.

"Liberalism's dirty secret [and it is not so secret these days] is that government doesn't seem to work well much of the time," he says, citing such examples as the 800,000 potential immigrants waiting for their applications to be processed; massive cost overruns at the gun registry; lengthy procurement delays for military equipment; poor water quality on aboriginal reserves; and the Jean Chretien Pledge to Africa Act, which promised to produce generic drugs to help fight AIDS but has yet to export a single pill.

Now, anybody taking a close look at the issues involved should be able to see just how ludicrous Axworthy's argument is based on the examples involved.

On the immigration processing issue, the obvious problem is a lack of government capacity to handle the applications, not an excess of state involvement. The same goes for military procurement delays. And in both cases, one has to ask the question: is Axworthy seriously suggesting that the function involved (either evaluating potential immigrants or determining how to spend military dollars) is one that could be carried out in the private sector?

With respect to the gun registry, Axworthy seems to be blissfully unaware that the cost overruns happened due to the Libs' choice of private contractors, not due to anything inherent in government involvement. (In fact, a stronger government might have had the capacity to put the project together internally, thus avoiding the problem altogether.) This in turn became a scandal due to the Libs' own suppression of the costs...making the problem plainly one of Lib government specifically, not government generally.

On reserve water quality, the problem is again plainly one of management: in some cases needed investments simply haven't been made, in other equipment purchased by the government wasn't backed up with sufficient staff training to ensure that the equipment is used effectively.

And finally, the Pledge to Africa Act has thus far failed due to the failure of private drug manufacturers to either approve of the fabrication of drugs for which they hold patents, or step up to manufacture those drugs. Which makes it rather implausible that pushing government out of the picture entirely would improve matters at all.

Of course, there are some government failings involved in each of these examples. And there's undoubtedly a need for any government to actually focus its attention on areas in which it can do better than the private sector, rather than trying to be everything to everyone while never seeing anything through.

But for each of the examples cited by Axworthy, the problems lay either in the Libs' own mismanagement or in the degree and type of private involvement, not in government involvement in general. And it should be an embarrassment to the Libs that Axworthy is willing to hand ammunition to Jim Flaherty and his anti-government assault squad for use against all future government actions in order to pretend that the opposite is true.