Red Book (Liberal Party of Canada)
Red Book of America
The Red Book, officially titled Creating Opportunity: The Liberal Plan for Canada, was the platform of the Liberal Party of Canada in the 1993 federal election. It earned its name from its bright red cover, red being the official colour of the Liberal Party. It was a 112-page booklet; many thousands of copies of it were printed, and it was widely distributed.
Purpose
It was exceptional in how specific it was; while platforms before and since have contained few substantive promises and many vague statements of principle, the Red Book laid out a long list of changes that the Liberals would make if brought to power.
It was also rare in Canada to have an entire platform released at once. Generally, a party would release a policy idea, wait for it to gather as much media attention as possible, and then release another. Those ideas had also been released during speeches by the party leader, not printed in unbending prose.
Perhaps most central was that the Liberal Red Book gave costs for each of their promises and summed them. Never before had a party attempted to clearly prove that its promises were fiscally responsible and practical. Paul Martin, the man who led the team that produced the Red Book was less complimentary about the book in private, as during his time in office as Finance Minister, he was often reported to have said: "Don't tell me about the Red Book, I wrote the damn thing, and I know that it is a lot of crap!"
It was one of the first "contract with the public" type platforms, an idea used by the United States Republican Party in its 1994 Contract with America and Mike Harris' 1995 Common Sense Revolution in Ontario.
“Red Book (Liberal Party of Canada)” enters the record as red Book of America. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Book, Liberal and Party can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7303777. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1994 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Red Book (Liberal Party of Canada)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.