IT WAS A gift for a columnist seeking a metaphor to describe the Liberal national convention as an attempt to move the party beyond the failures of the recent past.
In delegate registration bags containing serious stuff – policy resolutions, proposed constitutional amendments and agendas – was an item meant to be practical.
With the Liberal logo attached, there was an “instant stain remover” stick in the package.
Could this have been a sincere true-believer Liberal organizer recognizing that delegates were apt to spill their drinks on their clothes as they toasted the inevitable return of the party to its rightful place as Canada’s governing party?
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
After all, the Liberals think, surely Canadians will recognize that the Conservatives now in power are unworthy. As to-the-manor-born New Democrat turned Liberal Bob Rae said of his old to-the-manor-born friend/rival Michael Ignatieff, he has written more books than the Conservative caucus has read. It’s time to drum the knuckle-dragging philistines out of office!
Hoist and spill the drink knowing there is an instant stain remover in the delegate package.
Or maybe the instant stain remover tube was included by some Liberal planner with a sense of humour, someone who saw the coronation of Ignatieff as a chance to air brush some of the stains from the Liberal record.
In a rural context, that would be a more appropriate interpretation.
A key challenge for Ignatieff as the new Liberal leader is to figure out why the party has become the representative of downtown urban Canada and what policy stains must be erased from the fabric of the Canadian body politic to reverse that fatal trend.
A frank and fascinating rural workshop at the convention and conversations with prominent rural Liberals offer some clues:
- The inability of Liberal head office to understand rural culture and rural values, choosing to write off antagonism about gun registry as simple right-wing reaction.
- The growing Liberal view that rural areas are grandpa country, something to be subsidized for nostalgia’s sake while the real action is happening in the cities.
- A series of disastrous bureaucracy-driven farm support policies that had enthusiastic support of bureaucrats and economists but did not work well for farmers.
- Liberal cuts to agricultural research and the end to the Crowsnest Pass freight rate subsidy, which has cost prairie farmers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
- The perceived bias by a series of Liberal transport ministers toward the railways, allowing deregulation that led to abandoned lines and higher costs.
This is just a partial list and David Orchard, one-time contender for the Progressive Conservative leadership who is now a Liberal, said during the convention that the party has a high hill to climb to convince rural Canadians it cares.
“There are a lot of sins to atone for.”
Ignatieff has correctly noted that in the distant past, rural Canada was a Liberal stronghold, a place where William L.M. King was found a safe seat when Ontario voters rejected him and where they found a safe rural seat for prime minister Lester Pearson.
But that was then.
Will the Liberal “instant stain remover” work? It is Ignatieff’s challenge to see that it does.
