During my undergraduate days at the University of Toronto I stumbled upon an old book of Ed Broadbent’s, The Liberal Rip Off: Trudeauism vs. the Politics of Equality, at a secondhand shop. Published in 1970, just a few years after his first election to Canada’s House of Commons, the Liberal Rip Off runs about eighty pages and deals with various issues related to taxation, corporate power, scientific research, and inflation. Though only a few can possibly have read it during the intervening decades, it quickly became a formative and memorable discovery.

On an intellectual level, I was inspired by its arguments: that the task of the Left is to intervene rather than simply respond, and that the brand of liberalism associated with Pierre Elliott Trudeau, however shiny it might have looked, was technocratic and small-c conservative in its implications; that Canadian elites are too deferential — politically, culturally, and economically — to the United States. It also recognized that the welfare state, while an important achievement, is not enough, that the central problem of liberal societies is the power of corporations over economic life, and that the essence of socialism is democracy.

But I was also animated by the book’s style, which bridged the abstract realm of philosophy and the practical world of politics with ease and achieved intellectual rigor in a way that never diluted the radicalism of its arguments. Insofar as I had encountered ideas like these before, I had never seen them expressed with such clarity or scope of imagination — and certainly not by an elected politician.