WITH LESS than two weeks left in the 37-day federal election campaign, the Liberals remain mired solidly in second place nationally with little indication their campaign is gaining traction.
Of course, election campaigns can (but rarely do) turn on a dime and the Liberals are putting much hope on this week’s national leaders’ debates. If Stéphane Dion can score the mythical knock out punch against prime minister Stephen Harper, they dream their fortunes could reverse.
Much of the blame for the limp Liberal campaign has been laid at the feet of Dion, everybody’s second or third choice who snuck up the middle at the 2006 Liberal leadership convention to become the party’s 11th leader. He lacked a strong base of Liberals who actually thought he was the best person for the job.
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Like Joe Clark as the compromise Progressive Conservative leader in 1976, that lack of solid base has hurt Dion as supporters of other candidates snipe that he is too weak looking, too deficient in charisma and communication skills, too unfocused.
He risks becoming only the second Liberal leader in Canadian history to miss becoming prime minister.
But any reasonable observer of the campaign would conclude that Liberal problems run far deeper than Dion. To begin in rural Canada, Ipsos Forward Research reports this week that the Liberals run a distant second to the Conservatives across the country with farm voters. This is a rural disconnect that started to develop decades ago and can hardly be blamed on Dion.
But it does put the Liberals at a disadvantage in the 100 or so rural seats that make up one-third of the House of Commons.
The greater problem, however, is that in many ways, the Liberals this time are running against themselves.
For more than two years, they sat in the House of Commons, refused to bring the government down and allowed the minority Conservatives to govern as a de facto majority.
Tax cuts, changes to immigration policy, daycare policy, the Afghanistan war and agricultural policy changes all were implemented with Liberal compliance and refusal to block for fear of an election.
Now, they are running around the country denouncing all those policies as the seeds of the destruction of Canada.
There is a credibility issue here that is difficult to reconcile. They are running against their own record of political cowardice.
Similarly, Dion and his lieutenants are crisscrossing the country warning that the Conservatives have spent and tax-cut Canada into a deficit. At the same time, they have been making lavish spending promises that far exceed the revenues to be raised by their controversial carbon tax proposal.
Is the country in deficit or isn’t it? If it is, this is no time for multibillion-dollar promises and if it isn’t, quit implying it is.
The Liberals have many problems to overcome, among them Dion’s image.
But all Liberals must answer for their party’s complicity in allowing the Conservatives to implement their agenda, fearful as they were of an electoral defeat if they opposed.
Insisting now that the Conservative agenda would destroy Canada is to expose the fact that they were handmaidens to the agenda.
It is tough to credit Liberal outrage about the policies for which they played midwife.
