Here we go again -- the Red Book 3.0, yet another build-up of Liberal election promises just like the ones we've seen before (though I admit the one about changing the voting system might be hard to dodge). The most infamous, of course, was Jean Chretien's, which he held high and waved at every opportunity in the 1993 election. Co-authored by Paul Martin, it promised the world as we would like it: strong communities, enhanced medicare, equality, increased funding for education, an end to child poverty. You could almost hear the violins playing. But what turned out to be the most remarkable thing about the book of promises was the record number that was ultimately broken: all of them.

The only time you can trust the federal Liberal party is when they don't have a majority -- and even with a minority government they have to dragged kicking and screaming to do anything that does not please Bay Street. This fact needs to be repeated over and over again in the next few months leading up to the election as political amnesia is a dangerous condition to take with you into the voting booth. It's been 10 years since we had a Liberal government and even longer since we had a majority Liberal regime. A trip down memory lane might serve as a curative.

The effect of amnesia as it relates to the Chretien regime (actually the Martin regime) leaves most Canadians recalling Martin as the deficit dragon-slayer, saving us from our profligate, self-indulgent, entitlement culture and getting us back on the road to solvency. A few will actually recall that Martin chopped 40 per cent off the federal contribution to social programs -- but even that memory is diluted by another one: the legendary "debt wall" built exclusively of hyperbole and hysteria over the three years preceding the 1993 election. But few today would credit the fact, documented in my book Paul Martin: CEO for Canada?, that the 1990s under Martin's guidance was the worst decade of the century (except for the 1930s) in terms of growth, productivity, productive investment, employment and standard of living. Unemployment was higher during almost all of Martin's reign than it was as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. But what is worse, this so-called liberal actually made it happen. It was a deliberate strategy, fancied up in policy terms as a commitment to "labour flexibility." The social and economic carnage and the increased personal misery (an additional 300,000 unemployed) was staggering.

He is all artifice. More than any Liberal party leader in the past 35 years, Trudeau is an empty vessel with little choice but to be filled up by his party's corporate brain trust. Bay Street desperately wants back into the game and the Liberals are their only option. While they have been given lots of goodies by Harper, they have been cut off from their historic role as the principal source of federal policy-making. (Harper doesn't care what they think.) In addition, the federal bureaucracy has been made to reflect the ideology of pro-business "efficiency" to such an extent over the past 20 years, a genuine small "l" liberal would have to replace most of it to get any advice contrary to the status quo.