So Far, It’s LeBlanc by a Country Mile

As the Liberal leadership race settles into its three-way configuration, the presence of Dominic LeBlanc highlights everything that’s wrong about the candidacies of Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae.

I am not — and don’t intend to become — a member of the Liberal Party. Yes, this is one vote I can cheerfully sit out. But I can say that at this point LeBlanc would have my vote, until and unless he loses it.

The game of “he said … no, he said” that we lived through these past few days, as Ignatieff and Rae (and their many spinmeisters, spokespeople, cling-ons, etc. spun the story) over last Sunday’s Liberal meeting in Mississauga and whether it was to be open or closed to the media has, much like digging through the pile of turds stacked outside a slaughter-house, reminded me of the stench that surrounded these two the last time around. There is, after all, a reason why the Liberal Party did not select either of these candidates, and why there were clear “Anybody But …” initiatives on the floor of the last conclave. Liberal insider politics has been emphatically told to change by the Canadian electorate, and these two power-hungry sexagenarians simply don’t see that the rules of engagement, both with each other and with us, have changed.

(Of course, why should they see it? The mechanics of leader selection still come down to who can mobilize the largest army of arm-twisters and spread the most fear, uncertainty, doubt, guilt and emotion about the other candidates. Two guys who never really had their 2006 machines stand down, and who have the necessary mother’s milk of inside politics — ready cash — mobilized already are likely to steal the show before reform can begin.)

But, hey: isn’t the Trudeau-Chrétien-Rae faction vs the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff faction infinitely interesting? (It’ll keep Don Newman and Mike Duffy happy — every day a scintillating battle to aid and abet their battles for ratings — but I’m not so certain the rest of us, frankly, give a damn.)

Is Dominic LeBlanc the sine qua non of leaders? Who can say — he does bring youth and experience, and doesn’t (so far) seem wrapped up in the old Liberal internecine warfare, the one that said intra-party battles were the real elections and the ones where we vote are just the sideline. This means that he seems, as well, to get the fact that the Liberals made themselves irrelevant, and that it’ll take more than recycled promises, hooks and taxpayer-funded bribes, and business as usual to (in a country where 41% cast a majority vote for “none of the above” by staying home) awaken us to take a look the next time around.

I expect Ignatieff to run away with this — and when he does the Liberals will remain in the wilderness. Oh, they may get more seats: they won’t get a clean victory, and might not even pass the Conservatives. In other words, it is Canada that will remain adrift — and don’t be surprised if the percentage voting “none of the above” rises again. This, I believe, is the real message of the Nanos poll: Liberal and Green gains are vote parking when intentions are asked. Yes, there’s a sense that the Conservatives are anything but (and hence the drop in their heartland — the West). But this isn’t sober second thought about election day that we’re looking at.

Still, it could be. A policy-oriented campaign, a generational change of leader, the said-in-public sense that it’s a long journey to revitalize, not the Liberal “brand”, but Canadian Liberalism: it is LeBlanc who speaks of these things. Then we might well see fewer “none of the aboves”: the only path for any party to grow to a majority.

No, I don’t expect him to win: the Liberal Party never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, thanks to its core belief in the inevitability of its accession to power, and the spoils thereunto. (Never forget Stéphane-qui?’s first call to action on his own leadership win: it presumed that inevitability, as did Paul Martin’s television broadcast to plead for the job he’d wanted all his life.) The power hungry will not respond to a call for time to rebuild; they will respond to “a winner”.

But the best thing that could happen to the Conservatives and the NDP, by far, is to have a vibrant Liberal Party to contend with. It would be a dose of reality for both of them.

Nothing Too “Liberal” About the IggyBob Race

$90,000 to run. $1,500,000 maximum spending. 10% of all donations to your campaign “tithed” to the party. These are the rules for the upcoming Liberal Leadership race.

If you’re Michael Ignatieff, or Bob Rae, these are not huge hurdles. You have your organization largely in place from 2006; you’re a proven fund-raiser; you’ve got name recognition going into the game. For other potential candidates — and I include Dominic LeBlanc, a declared candidate in this group — these are huge hurdles to overcome.

Name recognition, and convincing delegates at riding association after riding association to vote for you, requires travel, which does not come cheaply. In many cases riding associations are partly if not completely moribund — there are great stretches of Canada where Liberal party members are thin on the ground — and the candidate’s campaign has to create the infrastructure as a part of trying to win votes. Along the way time must go into the “passing of the hat”: money must be brought in, starting with the $90,000 just to play in the game. It’s a tremendous challenge to do the rest on so little, having to put so much in the pot simply as your ante.

Candidates, of course, choose to enter leadership campaigns not merely to win them: in many cases, they are playing for future leadership races, and trying to win a decent critic’s role and possible Cabinet post from their candidacy. With a more sensible entry fee, perhaps there’d be more of them. Otherwise, it’s a duel of the two front-runners from last time.

It’s hard to fault the party apparatus: they’re in debt, not all the leadership campaign debt from the last go-’round has been discharged, and another campaign with seven or eight candidates running up millions means years before “normal” party funds flow again. This is something the Liberal Party can’t afford. Indeed, they need to siphon, via the 10% tithe on income streams, monies to pay down their existing obligations even while funds flow to the candidates in this new race. Nevertheless, the decision boils the campaign down to what will effectively be an IggyBob race.

That would not be healthy. Both Ignatieff and Rae are polarizing candidates: for every supporter they attract, they repel at least one. If you’ve enjoyed American politics for the last two decades, with its 50.1%:49.9% splits and deep senses of disenfranchisement and desire to overturn the winner simply for existing, an IggyBob race would be a very good way to turn a campaign in a division in the party deeper and more vicious than any of the Trudeau-Turner, Turner-Chrétien or Chrétien-Martin struggles. The candidates may well be able to work together. Their supporters: not so likely. (Witness the never-ending swirls of rumour that Ignatieff supporters worked against Dion from December 2, 2006 onward: whether they did or not didn’t matter, they were presumed to.)

The nasty part, of course, for Liberals at this juncture is that neither Ignatieff nor Rae would make a good leader for Canada. Not only do both of them carry strings of baggage behind them, they’re also far better suited to being Cabinet Ministers (should a Liberal Government emerge at some point during their active political lives) than to be Prime Minister. One is an opportunist jumping on the promise of power; the other the same. Prime Ministers, on the other hand, must have a strong sense of purpose tied to a very flexible and quickly responsive mind to deal with “events, my dear boy, events”, as British Prime Minister Macmillan described the most vexatious part of his premiership. Purpose (beyond power) escapes those seduced by the promise of power.

So the paradox is clear: the Liberals need a wide field of viable candidates, both to avoid yet another split in an IggyBob run-off, and to find someone capable of wielding the role of definer of the party, fund-raiser extraordinare, builder of the riding associations, campaigner par excellence and defining Prime Minister for a government (should it happen) that would most likely be a minority and occurring as Canadian economic, energy and infrastructure interests have come under increasing strain. The 2010s will not be good years in the Western world, including Canada.

So, you may ask, what about Gerard Kennedy? To that (and I know many of the Liberal bloggers whom I enjoy reading are strongly suggesting he ought to be a candidate and become the leader) I say “let’s see him prove himself”. It’ll be harder for him to do that with the limits that are in effect, limits that aid and abet an IggyBob finish. But time will tell. After all, May in Vancouver is a long way away.

Why the Liberals Need New Leadership Blood

Michael Ignatieff. Bob Rae. The two front runners from the 2006 leadership struggle are ready to engage in their fight to the finish again. (It would be in their interest, of course, to have a short campaign and something close to an annointing: they have the organizations, proven fund-raising credibility, the recognition, etc.)

The other prior candidates: Martha Hall Findley, Gerald Kennedy, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, etc. Most of these are no doubt exploring their chances, even if only to say “no, not for me”.

Then there’s the names that didn’t contend last time: John Manley and Frank McKenna, plus those who served in the last Chrétien Government who may want to return: Martin Couchon comes immediately to mind.

It seems a field of contenders that give the Liberal Party choice as to how to proceed into the future. It is also a field likely to perpetuate old battles.

Ever since Trudeau eliminated the vestiges of responsible government, centralized decisions in the PMO and subordinated his Cabinet Ministers (remember, this is why John Turner resigned in 1975) the Liberal Party has been adrift. Trudeau used the party as a vehicle to power for his own agenda, and fixed the mould of the party solidly in the form it is today. From then on, the Liberal Party has been the scene of one “inheritor” after another (Trudeau to Chrétien to Dion to, potentially, Rae; Turner to Martin to, potentially, Ignatieff). It is this alternation which is one of the three things that must change for the Liberal Party to arrest its long-term decline that started (at the latest) after the 1980 election.

The next leader of the Liberal Party needs to break this mould of armed camps at war with each other. A strong and dominating leader, such as Chrétien, was able to force the battle to quiesce at least to the point of campaigning as one team. As we know, Martin was able in turn to organize his putsch in the background and thus rip the leadership away from Chrétien. It is with the elimination of the sense of “my camp” and “your camp” that this evolves.

This means fresh blood: members of the party never considered before as potential leaders.

The second thing the new leader must do is revitalize the party. Riding associations (many are semi-moribund due to years of a failure to elect/compete effectively) must be rebuilt. The loyalty of the EDA executives must be to the party first, to the leader second, and not to a particular leadership candidate (an idealistic goal, but one that should be sought). The fund-raising conundrum must be solved: the Liberal Party must be competitive with the best available party in this area (which, at the moment, is the Conservatives by far). Just as with cabinet building, as I discussed in a prior note today, critic building must look to talent and expertise, not either the rewarding of grandees (there are no entitlements) nor “provincial balance”. The job of rebuilding the party requires nothing less than the best available talent. Those unwilling to work under those conditions should be ushered firmly to the back benches.

Third, the last major policy renewal of the party occurred under the tenure of Lester B. Pearson in 1960. What is the raison d’être of the Liberal Party going forward? Is it simply to be “anti-Conservative” and to moan incessantly about the existence of the NDP and the Greens as “siphons of votes that should be Liberal”? Or is it to stand for a clear vision of the future and specific means to make this come into reality?

As a part of such a renewal, new members of the party can be sought to seek elective office, so that required expertise and vigour can be found. This, if one recalls, is also part of Pearson’s legacy — and, with the odd individual exception such as Chrétien recruiting Dion, something not done since. Yes, “Dream Team” candidates have been sought — but not as a response to a coherent, complete policy rethink. It is long past time.

The existing candidates for leader are not only tied to their past associations and supporters, they often — at least amongst the “big names” — are also closing in on the end of their window of opportunity to lead long enough to become Prime Minister and serve for a period suited to achievement of their goals. (In other words, age creeps up on them, as it does on us all.) This rebuilding may well require multiple years and two elections to be effective. Someone — not unlike Stephen Harper himself, if the point of his winning the leadership of the Canadian Alliance is taken as a starting point — who is of an age and determination to build toward success over the required period of time — is what the Liberals now need.

Can they do it? A good question: certainly the cards are stacked against this type of outcome. But to eventually end the “Pizza Parliament” syndrome we need two viable, electable, broadly-based, truly national parties (which means members are elected coast to coast) — and that involves reinventing the Liberal Party, before the NDP or Greens figure out what’s needed to pole-vault over them.

“Dion Steps Down”: What Might Happen Next?

For the past fifteen months and a bit so much of Canadian politics has focused around Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. The NDP has clearly moved into a full-on press to squeeze the Liberals out by focusing their attacks on Dion, from the Commons to the by-election trail, with attention being paid to campaigning against Dion himself in Toronto Centre, as Jeff Jadras of “A BCer in Toronto” posted. The Conservative posture has been a resolute anti-Dion campaign, a shift from 2006’s anti-Liberal approach. Even Dion’s erstwhile partner, Elizabeth May of the Greens, has raised questions about Dion in the wake of his approach of Abstentia totalis. (The Bloc we can safely set aside: Stéphane Dion will never make their Christmas Card list. For Blockers, the Clarity Act is original sin redux.)

Add to this Jane Taber’s sideswipe over funds in this morning’s Globe & Mail — an article that immediately sent noted Dion supporter Jason Cherniak to the keyboard to illustrate Dion’s selflessness at fundraising for everyone other than himself — and the incessant jokes passed about Dion’s ability to make a decision and hold to it, about how Pâques est supérieure au principe, and the like and you really do have to wonder, sometimes, how he stands it all.

Well, whether through an election defeat (should his courage ever find its way to the House during a division with enough of his colleagues in tow or 19 October 2009 come in due course), through a Party revolt at their fall gathering, through a well-timed stab in the back by Ignatieff on one side and Rae on the other, or through his own decision to stop being everyone’s favourite punching bag, the day will come when Dion is gone. What might this mean for the country?

(Incidentally, I do think it fair to say that the odds on Stéphane Dion ever being able to become “Right Honourable” as a Liberal leader on the Government benches are so long as to be out of reach. Getting there from here — there is no fate more sure to seal a politician’s future as “the former” than to be the butt of continuing public ridicule [the Rt. Hon. C. Joseph Clark, PC, is the exception that proves the rule, and it took the complete and obvious misgovernance of Pierre Trudeau, coupled with Trudeau having run out the electoral clock to the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute, to create Clark's minority win], and Dion gets as much ridicule per day as Clark did in a week. He may salvage Official Opposition status; he will not bring the Liberals out on top.)

Well, for Liberals, of course, the prospect of a new leader means that, as with any party faced with the chance to put a fresh face forward, there is hope. The trouble — for the Liberals — with this is that it once again subordinates a much needed Liberal debate about what the party stands for, how it differs from the rest of the divided left, how it differs from Harper’s move of the Conservative Government into the soft centre of the Canadian political spectrum, how it would propose programmes in the face of the Harper Government’s stripping away of the hoard of spare cash and truckloads of replacement cash generated each year by intentional eleven-figure surpluses to the fire storm of leadership candidates competing for delegates, raising money for those campaigns, and yet another convention. Lots of coverage, yet, but the holes in that party that plague Dion’s tenure and reduce the Liberals to a group of screaming toddlers rather than (other than the accident of Dan McTeague with his private member’s approach to budget making) proponents of much of anything will still exist, and still need patching.

Make no mistake, this lack will continue to haunt the party. A party without a solid core tends to waffle all over the landscape, held hostage to the last person who’d never met a microphone, camera or reporter’s tape recorder they didn’t like. The lack of a solid core reduces the party’s appeal to historical labels and memories of yesteryear. The damage done to the Liberal brand through this lack, from the stay-in-power for no reason other than staying-in-power of the late Chrétien years (when multiple Red Books with the same promises exposed the lack of interest in ideas), to the everything’s-a-priority of the Martin years (when too many commitments made none of them worth anything), to the explicit failure to deal with policy in 2006 … 2007 … and into 2008 has left the vacuum at the heart of Gritland clear for all to see.

Canadians are, paradoxically, a deeply conservative people — not conservative in the party sense, but conservative in the sense that we don’t change easily. Much of the Liberal strength that remains has its source in this multi-generational source. But all things do eventually erode, and the underpinnings of Liberal strength began their erosion under Trudeau with his disdain for the party and its local needs. Mighty oaks look strong until the day they are toppled by a storm, when at last their hollow heart is exposed. Without an attempt to build new, solid wood, the Liberal tree is in danger of falling.

The second major change waiting in the wings is that the raison d’être of the Liberal party has always been about power and access to its fruits. This has led to its sources of funds (and their concentration, historically) and indeed to its past power to attract those of other persuasions to change parties and “come to where the action is”. But this sword also cuts both ways: when out of power, and when prospects for improvement are not there (what issue, pray tell, despite all the sound and fury of the great play staged in Ottawa, would rally hope the way fighting the FTA did for Turner’s Liberals in 1988, thus preserving the party through to 1993 and the resumption of power aided and abetted then and thereafter by the immolation of the Progressive Conservatives on the sword of regionalism) wouldn’t those simply seeking the fruits of power shift their attentions to those in power?

But the demise of Dion will also throw Harper’s Conservatives into disarray — the inclination of today’s party is to fight an enemy but to immediately demonise the next Liberal Leader will backfire, as none of the likely winning candidates are so obviously able to be picked on as Dion was, nor do they have the record as a Minister to start from. The NDP, too, would have to start all over again, for they have failed to say why someone should be a New Democrat; they merely say “don’t be a Liberal”. Dion’s departure will also give the Greens the opportunity to move away from their misguided link to Dion — which was highly personalised — and may, indeed, topple May in the process.

Canadians, therefore, are likely to see all their parties lose their way even further when Dion goes. The worst habits will be reinforced; the system will not be recovered. We, therefore, have not only been the losers by this disastrous period in Canadian politics; we will continue to pay the price for it for years to come.

We deserve better, but that would require the Conservatives to change their approach. Pit bulls seldom become friendly Labradors. We are living in a world of excess that will run its course: hubris through ate to nemesis.

We are not in the hands of the Fates, but the Furies, and Dion’s tenure threatens to set off a Götterdammerung for Canada.