Andrew Coyne, National Post
October 18.2006

They Haven't Learned a Thing

Seven months into the Liberal leadership race, the party has at last found its voice. No longer divided and despondent, party members have rallied around a positive, optimistic vision of the country, a message of hope they will take to the Canadian public in the next election. And the message is: We forgive you.

To be sure, Canadians deeply disappointed the party last time out. After 13 years of Liberal rule, they seemed to have forgotten why they had voted for the Liberals in the first place. The public appeared dangerously out of touch, as if they believed they had the presumptive right to elect whomever they please. Clearly, they had lost their way.

But that was then. In the interim, the public have had a chance to do some serious rethinking. They've engaged in a bit of soul-searching, and perhaps shaken off some of that arrogance the Liberals found so trying.

And the Liberals? Not so much.

After nine months in opposition, the party offers little evidence that it has learned anything from the experience. The leadership race, which many had anticipated would be a chance for the party to rethink some of its traditional assumptions, has instead merely confirmed Liberals in the belief that, fundamentally, nothing has changed. The Conservatives may be in power for the moment, but it is clear the Grits view this as a temporary inconvenience.

Fully 81% of Liberals surveyed in a recent Strategic Counsel poll said they expected to be back in power at the next election. Liberals, Susan Delacourt reports in the Toronto Star, "feel they're finally getting their game back. And a faint, though still elusive, scent of power is wafting around them again." At last week's leadership debate, she writes, it was clear: "[T]he federal Liberals aren't interested in electing an opposition leader."

Well, no. That's what opposition parties do. And the Liberals aren't in opposition. They're on holiday. So there's no need to invest much thought, say, in how to spur Canada's moribund productivity growth, or to question whether Canadian content regulations have any relevance in the age of the Internet. All that is required is to find the right leader, and ride that pony all the way to office.

Certainly that was the mood in the hall during the debate. As platitude followed platitude, each candidate emphasizing how right the party was about gun controls, how much they agreed on Kyoto, how awful that man George Bush was, the audience cheered and clapped their approval, in that way that people do when they want to signal how very closed their minds are.

It fell to Scott Brison, at the end of the debate, to remind them that no one had said a word about the economy. And while Gerard Kennedy took up the cause of party "renewal" (read: cleaning up our act) in his closing statement -- since it was not one of the themes organizers deemed worthy of formal debate -- you got the feeling this was not a message party activists wanted to hear. Much nearer the mark was Stephane Dion: "Liberals, we need to get back to power as soon as possible."

Well, all right, but how? What are the issues the party is going to make its own? Health care? No one's so much as mentioned it in the campaign. Afghanistan? The party has no position, or none that differs in the essentials from the Conservatives. The environment? After what they did, or didn't do, on Kyoto? Quebec? The front-runner, Michael Ignatieff, has endorsed the provocative idea that the province should be recognized as a "nation" in the Constitution. The others have demurred, but no one has made an issue of a proposal they must know is toxic in the rest of the country.

Which region is it that will form the basis of the next Liberal majority? The West? Don't make me laugh. Quebec? A grand total of 3,700 votes were reportedly cast across the province in last month's leadership ballot -- and that's including the dead. Ontario, perhaps, assuming the party is led by someone whose first and last names are not Bob and Rae.

Which takes us to their leaders. Is there a breakout choice, a candidate who is likely to take the country by storm? Mr. Ignatieff, with his dropped bricks and Vulcan charm? Mr. Rae? A "failed one-term premier" (I'm quoting the leader of his former party, here) from another century? Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Dion, who between them have mastered both official languages? And hovering over all of them, the awful spectre of Joe Volpe, the Trust Issue personified, who may be expected to spend the convention extorting promises from each of the candidates in return for a pledge not to endorse them.

Look: There are some good candidates in the running, and the party has some enduring strengths. But the idea that Liberals need only offer up their august selves to be returned to power, unreformed, unchastened, and seemingly unaware of how the world has changed, is -- well, that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?

© National Post 2006