Pie Palace

When I think of the Liberal Party, I don’t think “progressive.” Why?

• The Liberals voted against same sex marriage in 1999 and effectively did the same thing in 2003 by asking the haters to abstain from the vote.
  
• The Liberals allowed a chronic disinterest in environmentally positive legislation (eg, the Kyoto accord).
  
• During the Chretien/Martin tenure virtually no progress was made on native land claims.

Which is why I was so surprised when I attended last Saturday’s Progressive Bloggers get-together in Ottawa. I expected to meet a bunch of quasi-hippies who had arrived by bike, foot, or bus; eating vegan, vegetarian, or organic fare; discussing the technical side of blogging, or Canada’s future. Politically, I expected most to be NDP, Green, or a discerning shade of unaligned.

Instead I met eight or nine Liberals, two NDPers, and another Green. As far as I could tell, I was the only one to have arrived by some mode of transit other than car. When one of the Liberals asked me if I had trouble finding parking and I brightly said “Yeah, I couldn’t find a single bike rack,” I was rewarded with a blank stare.

Conversation that I heard ranged over the quality of Stefan Dion’s leadership, to the Liberal leadership convention, to potential Conservative cabinet shuffles. There was some interesting talk of the Ontario referendum of changing the voting system, but as far as I could tell, that mostly bounced around between the Dippers and Greens. There was a tantalizing moment when someone said that they didn’t think that a website could be called a blog unless the unwashed masses could comment on posts, but the depths of that topic were left unplumbed.

I’m not dissing the folks who showed up, or Scott Tribe‘s hard work in administering ProgBlog and organizing the event. They were nice and the event was enjoyable. I’m just surprised that (a) there were so many people there with a party affiliation, (b) that Liberals were in the vast majority. Where were the hippies? Where were the militant feminists, the ecofreaks, libertarians, and human rights campaigners? You know, the people who are actually pushing our society to be a little more… progressive.