It's the Party, too.
I've been saying this for a long time, astonished that so many in the media seem to believe that the real problem is just the leadership and not the Party itself.
Even a leftist journalist like James Travers of the Toronto (Red) Star realizes it now.
It sounds, from Mr. Travers's commentary, as if the left-leaning mainstream media is declaring the Liberal Party as unfit to deal with its challenges. The implication of this is that the Liberals would be even more ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of running a complex federation, let alone facing the entire chaotic world...
In other times, say in the dying decades of the last century, even as imperfect a leader as Dion could reasonably be expected to bring the natural governing party back to power. But these times are far from usual and coping with them is proving beyond the party's capacity.
Even before the 2006 leadership convention and what's now remembered as the Montreal mistake, Liberals failed to make renewal the priority. They didn't give enough thought to who and what it takes to win in a new millennium with very different political realities. Nor did they fully deconstruct why and how Paul Martin lost.
Exactly. Since 2005, I've been saying basically that unless the Liberal Party abandons left-wing extremism and its culture of entitlement, corruption, greed and gross, cavalier incompetence and neglect, it would be forever on its deathbed on life support.
It appears that Mr. Travers gets the point that Canadians don't want new social programs and simply want their tax dollars back. I'd add that Canadians don't want their tax dollars to be wasted any further by a bunch of socialist crooks, so they put the Conservatives into power, having awakened to the reality that socialism isn't a good thing after all and that it's actually better and easier to take care of oneself and one's family using one's own hard work and earnings than to hope, sometimes in vain, that the government will do its job, which it frequently fails to do, at least in time and with the quality it's paid to deliver, if not failing completely at times. Too bad the Liberals don't understand this.... blame it on their culture of entitlement and their delusion that the Liberal brand is not only immortal but automatically resurgent towards power.
Realistically, Mr. Travers visualizes:
Just for laughs, imagine Dion stumping the country telling voters to again trust Liberals to wisely spend taxpayer money while Stephen Harper talks about family values, individual choice and government intentionally shrunk so small that its more a nuisance than an obstacle to personal gain. Or, to put it in howler context, think hypothetically of Liberals arguing to reverse Harper's GST cut to have more money to spend on fighting poverty or climate change.
You know, it's highly unlikely that the Liberals will see power again for a long time, if ever. It's up to them. They'll have to really, radically transform themselves and their institution from the grassroots up, preferably get a constitution that impresses voters, and some policies that resonate with the new realities of Canada and the world.
So far, if anyone's expecting that from the Liberal Party, they can fuggeddaboutit.
