Editorials

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Shooting themselves in the feet

By: Editorial

Posted: 11/25/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

THERE is growing speculation, fed by polls and what appears to a broad public malaise, that the once-mighty federal Liberal party, the self-regarded natural party of government, is steadily slipping into the position of third-place party, after the Conservatives and the New Democrats.

Actually, that might even be fourth place if one were to count the Bloc Quebecois which, although it is not a national party, holds more federal seats than the NDP.

Much of the blame for the Liberal party's perceived decline -- and it is, until voting day, only a perceived decline -- has been laid on the shoulders of party leader Michael Ignatieff. That's not entirely fair. Mr. Ignatieff has been a disappointment since he returned to Canada to seek the Liberal leadership upon the resignation of former prime minister Paul Martin. Many Canadians hoped that he could take a sluggish, self-satisfied political party that was leaning too far to the left -- Canadians have the NDP if they want to go there -- and which was surrounded by at least a whiff of corruption, restore its integrity and firmly plant it once again closer to the centre.

In the end, Mr. Ignatieff lost the crown to Stéphane Dion, who personified the tired old Liberal party that Canadians had come to know and grow weary of, as three minority governments in a row, two of them Conservative, attest.

Mr. Ignatieff the reformer, who replaced Mr. Dion after an election, had already been subsumed by the great Grit Blob, a now rusty crusader who chooses to hang onto the old rather than grab onto the new.

One can blame Mr. Ignatieff for this but one should more accurately blame a Liberal party that still sees no need for change even as it withers in the polls. Well, the polls rise and fall, but Janine Krieber, the wife of Stéphane Dion, and a large number of other unhappy old-time Liberals, seem determined to see that they will not rise again, at least under Mr. Ignatieff's reign.

Ms. Krieber wrote on Facebook that the party was headed for the "trashcan of history" under the cocktail circuit leadership of Mr. Ignatieff and his coterie among the Toronto elite. It is a new mess that even the Liberals are having a hard time cleaning up and certainly a gift to the Conservatives.

Sometimes it seems, in fact, that if anyone can save the Liberals from being ignominiously bumped by the NDP, it is the Conservatives themselves. The Tories have a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, knocking down a potential majority government into an actual minority government. They did it last election with Mr. Harper's cut in arts funding, and they may be laying the groundwork for it again with their attacks on Richard Colvin and his allegations of Canadian involvement in turning prisoners over to the Afghan government for torture.

Those allegations, the PCs say, are completely unfounded, without evidence to support them. Nevertheless, rather than letting the evidence, or lack thereof, speak for itself, they dismiss it as being based on hearsay and Taliban lies and instead of encouraging the enquiry, they criticize Mr. Colvin's credibility on no apparent grounds. It's the kind of Tory stone-walling that Canadians don't like from their governments, and the kind of political obtuseness that, it seems, the Liberals may be able to rely on to deny once again Mr. Harper a majority in the next election.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 25, 2009 A14

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