One of the more interesting consequences of the ongoing saga of whistle-blowing diplomat Richard Colvin is the coalition of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc MPs who have joined together in an attempt to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government to release the Afghan records whose credibility the top Canadian military officer has admitted. Whether the opposition MPs succeed or not is still very much up in the air. But for the long run, what is even more critical than their success or failure is whether each party’s stalwarts will take the opportunity to learn something about what they, as a team, have in common, and how different they are from team Harper.

Taken together the Bloc and the NDP are best understood as the beating heart of Canadian social democracy. From the NDP’s point of view, what are ineluctable are all those feelings which Ed Broadbent once characterized as constituting a “caring and sharing” society, which that most successful NDP leader believes to be at the core of our country. It was this organic sense of the nation as a whole – a sense that grew out of the vastness of the land and from the Manitoba-based spirit of the United Church of Canada - that brought together an earlier coalition between the NDP and the Liberal party, which in turn brought about our health-care and welfare systems. That much happened back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

For the Bloc, it’s a similar sense of community – initially reserved for Quebéc but maybe now, after Clarity, extended to Canada as a whole – that is the glue that keeps the party together. The Liberals for their part are less compassionate and more conceptually minded. One gets this much from the very first statement that Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff makes in his book True Patriot Love. “Canada is an act of the imagination,” he writes; as a Liberal, what Ignatieff means is not that he feels nothing about the country but that feelings are less important for his kind of Canadian than they are for the NDP and for the Bloc type. What Liberals under Ignatieff want to represent is more the idea of social democracy than the way this idea percolates down into the most visceral places. But in all three cases, the centre and spine is a certain set of Canadian values that are very different from those that John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin grouped under the rubric of “negative freedom” – the freedom from interference by the state – and very different again from those values called “positive freedom” – i.e., the opportunity to fulfill the potentials of the state – which is the cornerstone upon which the Chinese Experiment marches forth.

The Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc all share in the set of Canadian values which can perhaps be best expressed as a commitment to the relation between positive and negative freedom. Whereas America is all about the latter and China all about the former, Canada, as these three parties see things, is all about the intermingling of the two. This much was also true for the old red Tories – the party to which George Grant belonged. But it does not seem nearly as true of the stampeders from Calgary or for the man who made his way from Etobicoke and has, over time, become more Albertan than the tar sands, and more secretive than the secret dangers of their emissions.

But still, the question remains – will the Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc catch up with their common set of values? Will their respective leaders be capable of putting personal ambitions and historical differences aside for the sake of the country? If so then Colvin’s report may yet prove to be the most important revelation in the history of this great nation, and perhaps even greater than that.