Latest column and posting by Warren Kinsella

Warren Kinsella's latest thoughts....

Can a political party win by losing?

In the election campaign that effectively begins today, that is the question many Liberals are asking themselves. And, in quiet moments, many of them are concluding that losing power – not for a long time, but long enough – would be a good thing.

As a former senior Liberal cabinet minister told me just last week: “We need renewal. We need new people, we need new ideas, and we need the kind of things that can only come with some time in the penalty box. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need to lose.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Liberal Party of Canada is broken. Beset by a paucity of ideas and energy, struggling with mounting debt and scandals, riven by infighting and division, despairing of an ineffective cabinet and a dithering leader, the formerly great party of Pearson and Trudeau and Chrétien is great no more. Its soul is lost.

No better recent example of this can be found than in the sad drama that unfolded in the past few days in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore. For more than a decade, the riding had been ably represented by Jean Augustine – an honest, respected woman of colour who would have easily won re-election in 2006. But last week, as Ms. Augustine cried in the national Liberal caucus, disbelieving Members of Parliament learned that she was “stepping aside.” Having endured nearly two years of bullying by Paul Martin’s aides, few believed that Ms. Augustine was doing so willingly.

This week, Liberals in Etobicoke-Lakeshore witnessed the astonishing spectacle of hard-working local Grits being excluded from the process – literally denied entry to party headquarters, whilst Mr. Martin’s minions inside ignored their pleas to open the doors. And, shortly thereafter, the locked-out Liberals learned in the media that Ms. Augustine’s successor had already been decided – a white man and foreign resident named Michael Ignatieff.

The Globe and Mail and a few members of Toronto’s brie-and-chardonnay chattering classes have been championing Mr. Ignatieff for many months, now, talking him up as a successor to Mr. Martin. Despite the fact that Mr. Ignatieff has not lived in Canada for more than two decades – despite the fact he supports George W. Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, opposition to which remains one of Jean Chrétien’s most popular legacies – Mr. Martin and his bunkered circle of advisors were undeterred.

Mr. Ignatieff, a Harvard University professor and author, arguably possesses an impressive curriculum vitae, as do many of the other rumoured aspirants to the Liberal Party crown – among them former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna, former Minister of Justice Martin Cauchon, or former Ontario Premier (and former NDP member) Bob Rae. All of these impressive men (no women among them so far, another telling indicator of the Liberal Party’s state of disrepair) would be laudable candidates for leadership.

But – and I say this as one who possesses no enthusiasm whatsoever for Mr. Martin’s leadership nor the insular group around him – what the Liberal Party needs is much more than a leadership race. A leadership race will not attract the sorts of things the Liberal Party of Canada desperately needs: new ideas, new approaches, new people and a new generation of leadership. What Liberals need is not just a new leader – what Liberals need is a new Liberal Party.

Power, which Liberals have been privileged to wield since 1993, tends to have a corrosive effect on political parties. Cabinet ministers and Parliamentary secretaries start spending more time in Ottawa than in their ridings; senior staff and Parliamentarians socialize with deputy ministers instead of local mayors and community leaders; the opinions of national media columnists take on a greater significance than the voices raised in town hall meetings and church basements.

In time, Liberals (and, before that, Conservatives) find that they have lost touch with the people they were hired to represent. They start to make mistakes, as they did again in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. They become, in effect, what they were sent to Ottawa to change.

Thus the Liberal Party of Canada, circa 2005 A.D. Dispirited, disliked and divided in much of the country – and spared the loss of power only by the fact that their principal adversaries are (for now) distrusted by many female voters. Too many Liberals confuse the Conservatives’ continuing inability to win an election with enthusiasm for the alternative. One day – and one day soon, I believe – the Conservative Party will attract the support of enough Canadians, and Liberals will bitterly rue the day they forsook renewal.

Some Liberals, and all of Paul Martin’s sect, will dismiss all of this as the carping of an exiled Chrétien-era Liberal, naturally. That is their way. Their cloistered arrogance – their near-total inability to make out the country that lies beyond the Parliamentary precinct – led to the loss of Mr. Chrétien’s majority and, a few weeks hence, will further reduce the dimensions their listing, listless minority government. Their opinion, at long last, counts for nothing.

For the rest of us, however – for a majority of Canadians and, I believe, for a silent number of traditional Liberals – we know that an election loss would be a good thing. For the country, and for a once-great political party, too.

I think he is thinking exactly what I am thinking, though he has much more disdain for Martin than I. I am just simply disappointed in PM the PM.

The game begins....

A.L.