In Canada, Liberal means something different from liberal. Of course, at the same time, liberal in the U.S. means something quite different from liberal in the rest of the world.

Beep, you ARE a flaming liberal, if by liberal you mean liberalism, the movement that started in England in the eighteenth and esp. nineteenth centuries. The word liberal has a specific meaning, and it's not the meaning used by blowhard commentators in the U.S. with a specific political agenda to push.

Liberalism (as opposed to the Liberals, a political party up here in the GWN) is not the lampoon painted of it in the U.S. For one thing, it places a high degree of personal responsibility on the individual. OTOH, it also recognises that unfettered capitalism leads to bad results, and has mechanisms (as well as theories) about how to manage those problems successfully... which leads to why it's demonised in the U.S.; the people who own the media don't like the idea that their ability to take what they can get should have any limits on it, no matter how bad the results may be.