The Future of the Liberals

First the breaking news: Manley is out of the running. McKenna is in. Groundswell for Dion in the blogosphere.

Now the longer view: There is always a real risk for the Liberals, as a party of the centre. They could be squeezed from both sides, from socialist left and free market right, by the NDP and the Tories, and reduced to irrelevancy. It happened a couple of generations ago to the Liberals in Britain; and for that matter throughout Europe. In Australia and BC, they have fused into permanent coalition with the right. In a sense, the Canadian Liberals are an ideological dinosaur. Broad but shallow, with no real ideology but winning, a long period of adversity is a bigger risk for them than for either NDP or Tories.

Both NDP and Conservatives have been moving to the centre recently. This makes it all the more dangerous for the Liberals. The new campaign financing rules, cutting off their accustomed corporate funding, impoverish them, in both relative and absolute terms.

It would be absurd at this point to write the Liberal obituary. But, by the same token, don’t be too quick to count them back in.