OK, I'm not Canadian, and this is the first I've heard of this whole debate, but reading the (real) article linked to (the one about not keeping scores, not the one about not having a ball!), I don't know that I agree with the way people are interpreting this whole topic.
I don't see that its about 'liberals' or 'namby pambys'. Sounds like its a more structured approach to being serious about producing succesful players who can compete succesfully _at the adult level_. Its about playing the long game and preparing properly.
Rather than creating a minature league, and pretending that infant-level soccer is 'the real thing', so that a lot of competitive-by-proxy adults can pretend to be managing real teams while slightly pathetically getting all worked up and competitive about a bunch of little children (who then miss out on being properly taught how to actually play the game well), you instead accept that the real goal at this level is to teach those youngsters basic skills and to carefully hone their abilities (and its not yet clear at this age what any given child's talents might be).
If everyone is playing to win, but nobody yet really knows how to play, its quite possible everyone will get into bad habits - ones that can give you 'victory' when competing with a bunch of other kids that also don't have a clue, but which aren't necessarily what you really need to become a first class adult player who can compete against properly trained opposition.
The same issue arises in academic subjects - if you start off from day one, spending all your time and effort on relentless competitive testing, you can end up wasting time that ought to have been spent getting kids up to speed on the basics. When they come up against other children who have spent all that time actually learning, rather than endlessly testing and ranking, they might not do so well.
There's no rule that says its always best to be plunged into full-on competition right from the start, even when you are still a little kid who doesn't know how to play. Its quite possible that that _might_ not be the way to produce the best players. I think its mistaken to see this as being about 'liberals' or 'hippies'. Sounds to me its about finding a way to produce better players in the long run.