Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Globe and Mail, is a column by Jeffrey Simpson that,
I think neatly and fairly sums up the Liberals’ dilemmas:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081017.wcosimp20/BNStory/specialComment/home
The Liberal Party needs more than a new leader
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Monday's Globe and Mail
October 20, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT
Beaten, broke, divided and diminished. That's the Liberal Party, post-election. Someone must eventually lead it. Just who will consume Liberals (again) for months.
Whoever leads better face reality, not myths. Even today, too many people call the Liberals “Canada's natural governing party.” They aren't, and haven't been for a long time.
Conservatives and Liberals have roughly split power evenly since 1984. Today, the Conservatives are newly re-elected (albeit with a minority), better financed and organized, and growing in every part of Canada, except perhaps Quebec.
Liberals, by contrast, are pitifully weak west of Ontario, largely absent from Quebec outside Montreal and environs, and have been beaten in the industrial cities of Ontario outside Toronto: Hamilton, Windsor, Kitchener, Sudbury, Thunder Bay.
The coalition that sustained Pierre Trudeau has largely vanished. No more Quebec. No more industrial Ontario. No more swaths of support in Western Canada. Tories are increasingly competitive in ethnic communities. What's left for the Liberals are Atlantic Canadian strongholds, Montreal ridings with lots of ethnic voters, the Greater Toronto Area, a little pocket in central Vancouver, and scattered ridings such as one in Regina and the Yukon seat.
This shrunken hulk is also broke. A Liberal government under Jean Chrétien passed a law for financing parties. It abolished union and corporate contributions and set a $5,000 limit. With it, the Liberals shot themselves in both feet.
The party had relied more than others on large individual and corporate contributions. At a stroke, these vanished, and so did the Liberals' financial underpinning. The new law's public, per vote subsidy couldn't make up the difference, since the act's entry into force coincided with the decline in Liberal votes that has continued since Mr. Chrétien left office. Matters were made worse for the Liberals when Prime Minister Stephen Harper dropped the maximum contribution to $1,100.
Finances aside, the Liberals have lost their voice in large parts of Canada.
Quebec's political culture is highly nationalistic. What exists there are various shadings of nationalism. The Liberals are still perceived in the province as strongly federalist and not terribly welcoming to nationalist discourse. The shadow of the sponsorship scandal hasn't entirely gone away, either.
The West overwhelmingly sees Liberals as a Central Canadian party. Every leader in its history has come from Ontario and Quebec, except perhaps for John Turner, who was born in British Columbia. Stéphane Dion and those who want to succeed him are mostly from Ontario and Quebec, too. In the divided left-right world of provincial politics on the Prairies, the centrist Liberals are a marginal force – just as they are federally.
The Liberal Party always was a big-tent, protean kind of party, full of shadings and interests. Power, however, kept the party united, and pushed differences underground.
Once the party lost power in 1984, it developed the debilitating habits of factionalism and disagreements over policy. The frustrations of opposition have only deepened them.
The Turner-Chrétien rivalry was succeeded by the Chrétien-Paul Martin rivalry. The last leadership campaign reflected the absence of an obvious successor, so that Mr. Dion emerged as the winner – the least objectionable second choice for the largest number of delegates
It was superficially an impressive victory to come from behind and win. But that kind of victory contained seeds of trouble: defeated candidates, badmouthing, lack of cohesion, debts, all compounded by Mr. Dion's inability to listen and form a team.
The factions remain: the supporters of Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff and maybe other defeated candidates last time, waiting to reassemble for another go. The party would dearly love to find someone other than these two men in their early 60s – someone in his or her late 40s or early 50s. A scan of possible names reveals a disturbing paucity of genuine leadership talent. When a party shrinks, so does the talent pool. So does the money pool.
The Liberals, with a dreadful record on climate change in office, tried to paint themselves green in electing Mr. Dion. His Green Shift tax policy flopped, whatever its intellectual merits. With the economy tanking, the environment will fade somewhat as an issue.
The Liberals will need a leader who can speak (in both official languages) intelligently about the economy, someone who knows how to run things should the country sour on the Harper Conservatives, an orator who can inspire, and one who is open to new ideas that might put the party back into the discourse in the wide swaths of Canada where the party has almost disappeared.
Just to add a bit, and at risk of repeating myself: Lester B Pearson reshaped the Liberal Party and, consequently, Canadian politics by:
- Changing the
’style’ of the political processes by bringing e.g. Jim Coutts and Keith Davey into the
centre and, thereby, changing how
politics is done – in a much more American manner, and
- Bringing Québec’s
three wise men, very left of centre 'wise men,' Marchand, Pelletier and Trudeau to Ottawa and, explicitly, changing the very nature of the country by recognizing Québec as one of the
deux nations.
In so doing Pearson broke with Laurier, King and St Laurent who always recognized Québec as
special, maybe even as
primus inter pares but who recognized
French Canadians, all of them, not just those in Québec, as one of the
founding peoples.
Trudeau took all that Pearson had done, politically, and then, effectively, repudiated (in his disastrously ill-conceived and stupidly drafted 1970 white paper
A Foreign Policy for Canadians) all of the St Laurent/Pearson foreign policy and economic/fiscal ‘heritage.’ He steered the Liberal Party sharply to the left and, thanks to his charisma, he inculcated a generation of Canadians with simplistic left wing and anti-American ideas.
John Turner fought back, hoping to move he Liberal Party back to the St Laurent/Pearson fiscal and foreign policy
centre but Trudeau’s
machine was much too powerful. The Trudeau/Turner
war ‘morphed’ into the Turner/Chrétien battles which, in their turn, evolved into the Chrétien/Martin mêlée.
I will repeat
my view that the Liberals are
LOST, lost, lost if they cannot end this war – in favour of the St Laurent/Pearson/Turner/Martin position - and move the Party well back into the
centre. The left, even the centre-left is too crowded, and who wants pretend-left-Liberals when a real-
no-shit-left-NDP is there?
Am I blaming it all on the long dead Trudeau?
Yes!
Am I, a card carrying Tory, gloating?
No! (Well, honestly, maybe just a wee, tiny bit. :-\ ) Repeating myself again: The Liberal Party of Canada is an important national institution; we need it to be a 'government-in-waiting.' But we do not want a loony-left government-in-waiting, we want a sensible, centrist party ready to take the reigns of power.
