The Liberal party’s “show Canadians we’re hard at work” tour touches down near rural Canada this week when leader Michael Ignatieff and a clutch of MPs gather to discuss rural issues.
They will listen to rural leaders talk about the need for a national food policy, investment in rural infrastructure, better rural health-care services and measures to transform the rural economy.
The event in Guelph, Ont., Feb. 5 will give Ignatieff another platform to fret about the gap between rural and urban, to promise that despite poor Liberal representation outside the cities, his Canada includes rural areas and that Liberals plan to offer policies attractive to rural Canadians.
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And then he’ll be off to highlight some other top priority area for the party’s election planners.
The rural discussion is part of a dizzying pace of activity that party planners have organized for the leader and MPs as they take advantage of political vacuum created by the Conservative decision to suspend Parliament this month.
After a first year of Ignatieff leadership that even Liberals concede was unfocused and disappointing, it is also a party attempt to raise the leader’s profile and begin to sketch out Liberal policies that differentiate it from the governing Conservatives.
However, the party has to be careful about policy overkill. If everything is a priority, there are no priorities.
One day, Ignatieff is vowing to develop policies to keep Canadians healthy.
The next day, poverty and homelessness will be eradicated. Then on to a promise of loan guarantees to the forest industry and did we mention that helping people cope with family members dealing with Alzheimer’s and dementia also is a priority?
All of this activity, coupled with daily Ignatieff news conferences and a planned national thinkers’ conference in Montreal at the end of March, is clear evidence that the Liberal brain trust has decided the party must reinvent itself by offering a new vision of what it would offer Canadians.
Simply being against Stephen Harper’s Conservatives will not be enough to propel the party back to power.
In the short term, all the activity and some missteps by the Harper government have erased what had been a substantial Conservative lead in the polls, although both leading parties are mired deep in minority territory.
However, Liberal life will become much more complicated once Parliament resumes March 3 with a throne speech, a budget and subsequent confidence votes.
Throwing out promises and parading the leader around the country could turn out to be the easy part.
There will be plenty of chances to topple the minority government in the months ahead but the party is far from election-ready and Ignatieff still needs leadership training wheels.
Yet after months of telling us that the Harper Conservatives are unfit to govern, how could the Liberals justify not bringing them down, whether Canadians want an election or not?
It is the same dilemma that plagued the Liberals last year until the New Democratic Party came to the rescue by supporting the government on confidence votes.
In the new session, continued NDP support may not be a sure thing.
It’s why party strategists get paid the big bucks.
