Have the Liberals lost the plot?

After going 81 years without an interim leader, the Liberal Party of Canada has had three in the last 30 years (two of them in the last six), a sure sign the party is rather desperately thrashing about. Herman Goodden reports ...

After this May’s drubbing at the polls when for the first time ever in their 144-year history they formed neither the government nor the official opposition, one might have expected an infusion of candour and fresh thinking when next the Liberal Party of Canada gathered to chart their way forward as they did in Ottawa over the second weekend in January. Such newly won irrelevance can supply a blessing in disguise for any depleted party, freeing them up to really do some soul-searching and try on some approaches that they might not have considered or risked before. When you neither govern nor officially oppose – and when it’s only the first of at least four years of a majority government – you shouldn’t find yourself under the kind of media scrutiny that might make that kind of brainstorming a little awkward.

But these are very strange and vacuous times in Canadian political life when neither the second place NDP nor the third place Liberal Party have a functioning leader. You might think this lack of a leader to rally around would hobble both parties equally but it doesn’t. Sure, the Liberals’ interim leader, ex-NDP Ontario premier, Bob Rae, hauls around considerable negative baggage of his own, but compared to the NDP’s utter non-entity of an interim leader – newly elected Hull-Aylmer MP Nycole Turmel (most famous for her one time membership in the Bloc Quebecois and her Stephane Dion-like gift for mangling the English language), Rae is an irrepressible fount of charisma and charm.

Whether they like it or not, the federal Liberals simply are not going to be granted the relief of a long season on the sidelines in which to regroup. They may not have the seats to make it official, but they are regarded as the ipso facto opposition. With the death of NDP leader Jack Layton last summer and the rapidly dawning realization that Canada’s newly installed Loyal Opposition is otherwise comprised of exhausted hacks and callow amateurs whose main and very temporary base of support in Quebec unfits them to address reality as it is experienced in the rest of the country, Canadians simply cannot and do not take the NDP seriously as a voice of national authority.

After going 81 years without an interim leader they’ve had three in the last 30 years (two of them in the last six), a sure sign that a party is rather desperately thrashing about. While the tradition of the last 30 years is that an interim leader is a stop-gap figure with no future leadership prospects, Rae knows that a tradition isn’t a law and that if he goes digging back into the Liberal Party tradition to 1919, there is the case of one Daniel Duncan McKenzie whose one year term as interim leader didn’t prevent him from throwing his hat into the ring at the next leadership convention, though he wasn’t able to win it.

The Liberals don’t intend to address the question of who their next non-interim leader will be until much later this year. In the meanwhile, Rae keeps mum about his ambitions, apparently hoping that the sort of brownie points he’s been accumulating for his management of the tattered party since Michael Ignatieff stepped down will continue making him the obvious and essential choice.

Even critics like The National Post’s John Ivison acknowledge: “Few dispute that Mr. Rae has dragged the Liberals back from the brink. By any number of metrics – media coverage, internal unity, fundraising, popular support – the party is in better shape than it has been for some time . . . Why would he clarify things when things are running so clearly in his favour? He can use the party machinery in his own interests until October before declaring his candidacy, by which time all other candidates will be sniffing his vapour trail.”

Unsavoury as Rae’s leadership might be to any Ontarian who remembers how wretched his NDP premiership was in the early 1990s, and however suspicious older Liberals might be about his own subsequent conversion to their cause (Could Rae become to the Liberal Party what Joe Clark was to the old Tories? An Orange Liberal instead of a Red Tory?) the ranks of the party are not choc-a-bloc with exciting or attractive contenders for the post. Marc Garneau? David McGuinty? Justin Trudeau? The pool of talent is thimble deep.

Going into their big weekend in early January, optimistically entitled The Road to Renewal, many commentators made mock of the unseriousness and datedness of so many of the proposals up for discussion, such as trying to resuscitate the Canadian Wheat Board or expanding hate propaganda laws so that they included the classification of ‘gender hatred’.

You’d never guess from the list of topics that were debated that most Canadians were far more concerned about the economy and jobs and the unravelling of the social safety net than any of that hooey about which they bloviated so earnestly.

The youth wing of the party was promoting the legalization of marijuana (which passed) and the abolition of the monarchy (which didn’t). In his post-convention column, the Post’s Lorne Gunter confessed that as a university student, he served as whip of the Young Liberals at their 1978 convention in the very same Ottawa hotel where they also passed a resolution to legalize the demon weed.

About the only thing the Liberals got right this month was narrowly defeating Bob Rae-era dinosaur Sheila Copps in her bid to become party president. That honorific instead was bestowed on 42-year-old Michael Crawley – a man who has passionately advocated for a more populist approach to party governance, to putting an end to leader-appointed candidates, having open nominations across the party, and disallowing the leader’s veto over policy – all of them motions that the party turned down, giving more control than ever to the leader they may someday get around to choosing.