MONTREAL, Que. – Liberals meeting in their biennial convention last week at least made an attempt to acknowledge that their alienation from rural, agricultural and western Canadian voters is a problem.
“I would be proud to be the first Liberal leader born and raised in Western Canada,” said Ontario politician Gerard Kennedy, raised in northern Manitoba and ultimately the kingmaker who put Stéphane Dion over the top in the leadership race.
“I will not spot the Conservatives 80 seats west of Kenora.”
In workshops, there were earnest policy debates about how the Liberal party can reconnect with a rural Canada that has increasingly decided Liberal policies are urban-centric and irrelevant, if not hostile.
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Surviving rural MPs pleaded with the majority urban delegates to approve rural-friendly resolutions if they ever are to have a chance of reclaiming all that electoral space between the big cities. Sometimes they were successful, sometimes not.
And throughout the Liberal party convention, the storied history of the party was on display.
It is a history that includes a time when Liberalism was so solidly rooted on the Prairies that when prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King lost his Ontario seat in the 1926 election, he was parachuted into a safe Prince Albert, Sask., seat that he held for 19 years.
Of course, convention 2006 was not the first contemporary Liberal convention to pledge reconciliation with Western Canada.
Three years ago in Toronto, triumphant Paul Martin pledged that if in his term as prime minister he did not diminish western alienation, he would be a failure.
All right then, let’s call the asterisk prime minister and Liberal leader a failure. It was one more grand Martin promise that had no implementation legs.
In the 2006 election after more than two years of Martin government, the Liberals lost two of three long-time prairie lieutenants – Anne McLellan in Alberta and Reg Alcock in Manitoba were defeated and only Saskatchewan’s Ralph Goodale was left standing – and the Conservatives increased their electoral grip on the region.
All of which leads to the conclusion that Liberal convention 2006 effectively closed the book on the Martin leadership era in the party.
As outgoing leader, he was feted at the convention during an evening that inflated his record by equating promises with accomplishment.
But successful government surely is a combination of deals signed and deals implemented. Martin’s government scored big on the first and dismally on the second.
The Liberal civil war that saw Martin wrest the party away from three-majority leader Jean Chrétien left the Liberals divided and exhausted and it showed in the last election campaign.
In Montreal, Liberals thanked Martin for his blip as the shortest-serving Liberal leader in history, gave Chrétien the enthusiastic thanks he should have received at the surly 2003 convention and then elected Chrétien man Dion as the 11th Liberal leader.
All candidates pledged to end the civil war fought by the Chrétien-Martin forces.
Trying to figure out how to reconnect with the West was a minor sideshow during the convention. Moving beyond the Martin era was the bigger accomplishment.
