It is an axiom of Canadian politics that a thing is not known until the Liberals know it. Free trade was terra nullius before the Liberals discovered it, a creature of Tory myth that Brian Mulroney somehow convinced the public to support in 1988. As late as 1993 the Liberals were still campaigning against it.
But then they won power, after which it was suddenly transformed into conventional wisdom – one of those things everybody knows, and what is more has always known. By a similarly mysterious process the GST, balanced budgets and price stability, ideas once so barbaric no civilized person could repeat them, became familiar parts of the Liberal lexicon.
