All Indians and No Chiefs

It’s a bit surprising, at first glance. Harper has only the slimmest of pluralities, and no good coalition partner. Whoever becomes Liberal leader is only a Commons vote away, apparently, from a new election and possible power.

Yet neither Paul Martin, Frank McKenna, John Manley, Brian Tobin, nor Allan Rock want the job.

Probably because, as seasoned politicians, they have done the math and see that, despite appearances, it will be very difficult now to get the Tories out of government.

Here are some reasons:

1. The Liberal Party has no money, and poor prospects of getting much more soon. The Liberal funding was mostly corporate, now heavily restricted by new financing rules. Corporations are not ideological; they are mostly betting on who is most likely to hold power. So losing power loses a lot of this anyway. The Liberals, being non-ideological, are not a good draw for individual money.

2. There may be more scandals to hit; insiders like Manley, McKenna, Tobin and Rock may have been warned by supporters who know. Now that the Tories are in charge, there’s little chance of keeping these hushed up. Not only will this make it hard to beat the Tories next election, it may tarnish by association the reputation of the new Liberal leader.

3. Unlike the NDP and Conservatives, the Liberals have no ideology to give them energy. Centrist parties can disappear quickly in opposition.

4. Any ideological drive there might have been will have been dissipated by twelve years or more in power. They’ve had a long time to implement their program. There can’t be a lot of hot-button issues left to galvanize party activists to work in adversity.

5. Worst of all, perhaps, the atmosphere within the party has been poisoned by the ouster of Chretien. There are now two distinct factions in the party, and they hate one another’s guts. It is almost inevitable, as a result, that any new leader will lead only half the party, with a huge fifth column working against him. It is not just a matter of making up with the other side. That won’t be enough. They may reconcile themselves with you, but the other side will still have enormous problems working together with the many of the other personalities in your campaign.

Had McKenna run, he would have instantly been the Martin candidate. Had Manley, Tobin, or Rock run, they would have been the Chretien candidate. Only a younger candidates has a chance of avoiding identification with one faction or another, but it will be difficult even for them.

This is the price of ousting a relatively successful leader. It happened to the Tories when they bounced Diefenbaker. It happened to the British Tories when they bounced Thatcher.

6. The new factionalism destroys one of the most attractive things about the Liberal leadership in the past: the tradition of disciplined loyalty to the leader.

7. Longer term, demographics favour the Conservatives. Alberta is only going to get more populous and more prosperous, with the price of oil high. While 905 is growing, 416 (and 514) are not. This means, in order to compete, the Liberals are soon going to have to remake themselves to appeal to a different audience.

8. Ironically, the Liberals left Canada and the public coffers in good economic shape, so that the Conservatives will have a fairly free hand to spend or lower taxes. They will not, like Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, be left with the burden of taking unpopular but necessary measures to clean up a mess not of their making.



A new Dominion Institute poll asked Canadians what qualities they most valued in a PM. They rated “having the common touch” number one, and “being a great communicator” second.

I’m not surprised—Canadians are now looking for their own version of Ronald Reagan. Canadians, whether they admit it or not, always follow, at a distance, the American trends.

This bodes ill, by the way, for a Liberal party led by either Michael Ignatieff or Stephane Dion, probably the two most prominent candidates left in the field of likelies. Both intellectual types.