(Sidenote: FYI I'm Canadian.)

A truly progressive liberal party would promote (in no particular order):

* Universal single payer health care. This is a no-brainer for anyone more interested in broad outcomes than ideology, narrow interests and grandstanding: universal health care is by all measures vastly cheaper, fairer and more effective than the monumental fustercluck that is American health care.

The American health care debate is instructive insofar as it reveals the fault lines of American power: the only reason there's a debate at all is that some sectors of American business want public health care (mainly manufacturing companies with established workforces) and others don't.

It also illustrates the power of the Overton Window. When the Democrats proposed universal health care in the 1990s, the Republicans countered with a more market-based approach. By the time the Democrats approached the issue again under Obama, it was already more market-based than the Republican counter-offer had been, but the Republicans just continued to shift their demands to the right faster than the Democrats could accommodate them.

The result is an abomination of a policy that leaves everyone disappointed and/or outraged.

* A legislative framework that protects worker rights, including workplace safety, overtime, vacation, maternity/parental leave and the right to unionize. America's record is deplorable on all these measures.

* A constitutional and legislative framework that protects human rights in the broad sense developed over the 20th century, including the so-called rights revolutions against discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and so on.

The US has led some important victories on this, driven mostly by the robustness of its Bill of Rights, but that Bill is also hobbled by an essentially 18th century, classical liberal view of rights. As a result, so-called "strict constructionists" have a legal wedge they can use to undermine the rights frameworks built on implicit legal extensions of the Bill of Rights' measures.

The Constitutions of some other countries (e.g. Canada, where I live) have moved forward to a more inclusive understanding of rights that embeds the 20th century rights extensions into the text instead of pasting them on with legal duct tape.

* Real gun control. Further to the essentially 18th century character of the Bill of Rights is the idea running through it that the only thing that stops governments from tyranny is the threat of revolution. America's own political history, coupled with the reality of dozens of other industrialized liberal democracies, demonstrates that governmental accountability flows not from the barrel of a musket but from robust democratic institutions and traditions, broad civic engagement, civil disobedience and so on.

* Real intellectual property reform: in particular copyrights and patents, which are profoundly dysfunctional.

* Real military policy reform. The US single-handedly spends about half of the entire planet's military budget. That's a staggering missed opportunity to spend that money on the development of social and economic justice.

* Progressive taxation. It's odious that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and it has allowed for a society in which the wealthiest 1 percent controls 35% of the wealth, the wealthiest 5 percent controls 62% of the wealth, the wealthiest 15 percent controls 74% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% control just 0.2% of the wealth.

Progressive taxation would ameliorate that, and far from killing the economy would actually make it much stronger by moving money from people who have more than they need to people who don't have enough. The US is currently so far to the left of the peak of the Laffer Curve that real top marginal tax rates can go up significantly before any nonsense about reverse trickle-down will ever kick in.

* Real campaign finance reform. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision was a travesty of liberal democracy. American governments, parties and elections are fundamentally and thoroughly corrupt (in the Lawrence Lessig sense) and that financial corruption makes every other policy on this list more or less impossible to achieve.