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   From: puela@nyet.ca   
      
   Andrew Coyne | December 30, 2014 ] National Post   
      
   With perfect hindsight, Postmedia’s national columnists revisit moments and   
   events they observed in 2014 that deserve a second look. Today, Andrew   
   Coyne’s   
   take.   
      
      
   Andrew Coyne: In Canada’s contest of ideas, the left is winning   
      
   It wasn’t until late in the year that it dawned on me: the left is winning.    
   I   
   don’t mean this in a partisan sense.  If the NDP represents the left, it had   
   a   
   terrible year, fading in the polls federally, turning in a miserable showing in   
   the Ontario election and losing two mayoral races, in Winnipeg and Toronto, it   
   had earlier been favoured to win.   
      
   But in the contest of ideas, the left is very much on the march.  Kathleen   
   Wynne won the Ontario election on an aggressively left-wing budget/platform   
   that not only increased spending, taxing and borrowing, but proposed the first   
   major addition to the social safety net in decades: the Ontario Retirement   
   Pension Plan.   
      
   Elsewhere there are serious proposals on the table for a national daycare plan,   
   a national pharmacare plan, a surge in spending on urban transit and other   
   infrastructure.  The left is doing all the running on the environment, where it   
   is no longer taboo to talk about carbon pricing.  Identity politics, with its   
   obsessive focus on race, sex and class, dominates public discourse.   
      
   Now, some of these may be good ideas, and some may be bad.  The point is, where   
   is their equivalent on the right?    What counter-proposal has anyone heard   
   from the right in the last year, or the last decade: to get the state out of   
   something it is now doing, to deregulate an industry or privatize a Crown   
   corporation or, well, pretty much anything?   
      
   The most the right will allow itself is to oppose this or that proposal to   
   expand the state (when it is not proposing them itself: see “cross-border   
   pricing,” inter alia), once it has assured itself it is on safe ground   
   politically to do so.   Occasionally it will even go so far as to roll back a   
   policy that has already been enacted.   
      
   But to put forward ideas of its own for improving society, grounded in   
   principles it believes in?  Nowadays that is exclusively the province of the   
   left.   
   ___________________________________   
      
   	Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne is one of the few left-wing Canadian   
   politicians to have had electoral success in 2014:   
   	http://wpmedia.fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/12/kathleen-wynne1.jpg?w=620   
      
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