Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be with you this evening.

I appreciate very much that you are giving me the unique chance to share with you my thoughts about the Liberal Party at this juncture in Canadian history, the role of National Policy Chair, and the challenges Canada faces.

Most of you will know that I spent much of my professional life in investment banking and that I ran for the NDP in the 2006 federal election in the riding of St. Paul’s in Toronto where Carolyn Bennett trounced Peter Kent and me.

Happily Carolyn has endorsed my candidacy and I can report after meeting her in Ottawa that her endorsement is because she thinks I can do a good job and not because she feels sorry for me.

I have recently been travelling visiting Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Niagara Falls, and Toronto meeting Liberals.

In Montreal at a roundtable event I was asked by a young Liberal, “you worked for Lehman Brothers, you ran for the NDP, and you are running for National Policy Chair for the Liberal Party of Canada, like, what’s that all about?”

It was a great question, and this was my answer: that social justice and a strong economy are two sides of the same coin and this has always been the foundation of my political beliefs and decisions.

This is relevant because I think that the twinning of the market and the community in a balanced and reinforcing embrace must be at the heart of a conversation to renew the Liberal Party, and with Canadians, to gain their trust to govern.

I think the argument that the Liberal Party is being squeezed in the centre is wrong.

There is no political spectrum framed by left and right, there are instead political parties like our opponents whose policies are narrow, irresponsible, and faith based, putting square pegs in round holes, or there is the Liberal Party of Canada, which can be the party of inclusion, responsibility, empathy, and evidence based policy.

These qualities have always been essential to Canada’s success.

In contrast the Conservatives and the NDP respectively see the market and the state as an end -- not the means to an end -- dragging Canada back and forth across an ideological battleground.

I am running for the position of National Policy Chair because I think that Canada is being sadly diminished by a selfish and uncaring politics that is by design narrow, mean, and irresponsible instead of inclusive, empathetic, and responsible, the historic hallmarks of the Liberal Party.

I am running because I hope to help a country of Liberals reclaim those hallmarks and help restore Canada.

It seems to me that Canada’s greatest strength has been that we care for each other, nurtured by the habit of inclusion, governed by the effort to give everyone a chance at a better life.

I always remember a conversation I had in the mid-1990s with a Bernard Simon of the Financial Times who had recently immigrated to Canada from South Africa.

He remarked that the single thing that impressed him the most about Canada was that Canadians cared about each other in a way he had not seen anywhere else.

I wonder if he’d say the same thing today.

To restore inclusion and empathy and responsibility at the centre of our collective Canadian imagination then the Liberal Party of Canada, historically champions of this belief, must reclaim its voice in a Canadian conversation.  

That starts first at home with our own members, elected officers, and Members of Parliament before we can truly engage other Canadians and ask for their support.

This will take time; Canadians will be judging how we govern and how we treat ourselves first before the Liberal Party is given the chance to govern again.

But that Canadian conversation and the public policy it inspires must be rooted in liberal values that are founded on the principle that every life is of equal worth and that it is the duty of the community to give that life its fullest expression framed by inclusion, empathy, and responsibility.

The National Policy Chair role, it seems to me, has a strategic side and a tactical side, or as I like to say, passion and plumbing.

The passion is strategic because it is the foundation on which the core values of the 21st century Liberal Party of Canada must be based.

The plumbing is tactical because it is the means by which the Liberal Party of Canada can express itself in policy.

In the coming weeks, I'll talk more about the practical application of passion and plumbing to our policy process

At this foundational moment in the rebuilding of the Liberal Party the first steps that we take, I think, must be value seeking, strategic in design that gives voice, the words, to express our values in simple and clear language that is defining of our members and our mission.

Finding the words to express our values will provide a strong foundation for the policies that will define  the future of the Liberal Party of Canada.

In the past words like centre and pragmatic were default phrases for Liberals to distinguish themselves.

For me the words inclusion, empathy, and responsibility are foundational words for a vigorous, 21st century liberalism, a rejuvenated and a relevant Liberal Party of Canada.

Inclusion because the word captures the essence of liberalism that every life is of equal worth and differentiates from the other political parties by making the market and the state the means and not the ends to our approach to governing.

Empathy because this is the life blood of a caring Canada.

Responsibility because at heart of liberalism is the duality of the relationship between the community and the individual, the community with the responsibility to the individual to provide the means to be successful, and the individual with the responsibility to the community to use those means to be independent and free, free from the state and the market.

When my young inquisitor in Montreal -- “like what’s that?” -- followed up in polite way with a second question – ‘how an ex-investment banker could really believe in social justice’,  I pointed out that people are often judged by where they are in life rather than where they started, and sometimes by the stops that they make in between.

I grew up in a lower income family in Scarborough, Ontario raised by parents who did not graduate from high school.

How is it that I could spend 12 years in university and graduate without a penny of debt, paying my undergraduate education with just a summer job?

It is because my chance at success in school was created by others, by strangers, who made the decision that best in class education must be available to all Canadian children.

How is it that the few times that ill health cast a shadow over my life I never feared about the cost of seeing a doctor or staying in a hospital?

It is because the science of good health was made my right by virtue of my Canadian citizenship and not my personal wealth.

So my answer, as to why I value social justice despite having been an investment banker, is that Canada made me, Canada gave me the hand up for a chance at the best life I could make for myself in a way that very few countries ever do.

So if all of this is so obvious and the Liberal Party the architect of so much Canadian success why do we find ourselves on the edge of political oblivion and in the grips of one of the most dangerous governments in Canadian history?

I will leave the Liberal Party self-analysis to someone else but there are many people, me included, for which the Liberal Party ceased being a comfortable place to be, and it was in part because of victory of economics over social justice.

In many countries in the West, Canada included, economists had an exaggerated role in setting the political agenda, and the consequence has been a thirty year fraying of our common purpose.

Our politics became ‘market-driven’, the market became uncontained and now we have market societies, with the inequity, turbulence, volatility, and unending crises to prove it.

Jettisoned was the social democratic belief in the necessity and virtue of collective action for the collective good that is dependent on a critical role for the state and public spending.

Embraced was the argument that unless someone benefits directly from something the state does, then they shouldn’t have to pay for it, captured by home owners grumbling that their property taxes are paying to educate somebody else’s kids until they vote away the taxes.

Worshipped were fallacious theories like ‘the invisible hand of the market’ a phrase incidentally Adam Smith never coined, and whose unfettered free market intent a simple review of his writings would show he never even considered, but a phrase that became imbedded in our collective imagination.

This great shift in our thinking about the relationship between our democracy and the economy, the former serving the latter rather than the other way around, has occurred at the moment when the speed and the reach and the impact of globalisation accelerated to the economic equivalent of something approaching the speed of light.

Over the last thirty years because the costs of communicating and accessing information have collapsed, because there is a global financial market, because the power of efficient Japanese inspired manufacturing techniques are multiplied by their connection to the Chinese and Indian economies, there are things much more important to competitiveness than low tax rates and small government.

The pivotal elements of competitiveness are mostly determined by sustainable social investment, the quality of the work force, infrastructure, social peace, the rule of law, and the health of cities.

The most successful countries don’t have unregulated financial markets they have rising female literacy, integrate the first born children of immigrants, and do not tolerate widening income inequality.

These results are founded on social investment in world class justice, education and health outcomes.

It is vital to remember the Canadian model of compromise, of fairness, of inclusion, of consumer protection, and of the effort to give every citizen equality of chance is at the heart of our success.

This has created, in the words of my wife of twenty-six years, who also happens to be of Japanese origin, ‘the happy country’.

This can be done by ensuring that the collective good is championed by policies that come from the deep ground springs of Liberalism.

We owe it to ourselves, and our fellow citizens, to advocate that social justice and the economy are two sides of the same coin.

I think that the way forward for the Liberal Party is to be confident of our values and confident that the hard work of engaging our fellow citizens will give us the chance to win back and build a Canada that is inclusive, responsible, empathetic, and wealthy, a country created in part by policies that today while seemingly radical will simply become the standard building blocks of an excellent Canadian future.

Thank- you very much.