Liberals, please reconsider your leadership candidates.

November 14th, 2008

The election on 14 October 2008 was probably the most devastating for the Liberal Party of Canada in my lifetime. This has necessarily prompted a great deal of thought within the party about what to do next and how to revitalize the party base, starting with electing a new leader. Unfortunately, the Liberals are starting wrong. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Green Party of Canada, and the Liberals are, of course, a rival party. However, since the GPC is not going to be forming a government any time soon, and I for one am not looking forward to a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper, I would appreciate it if the Liberals could form a credible opposition.)

I don’t think that either Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae are bad guys at all. (I don’t imagine Dominic LeBlanc is, either, but I don’t anticipate another surprise leader.) That said, neither one is a good choice for leader. Both of them come prepared with baggage for the Conservatives to attack, and neither really offers much to the Canadian electorate to offset that handicap.

Rae, although his profile in the media suggests that he’s recovered somewhat from his period as Ontario’s NDP premier, is still strongly associated with the recession of the early 90s. All the Conservatives will have to do is say “Remember Rae days?” and watch their numbers soar in the polls, especially with the current economic climate. This isn’t necessarily fair; Rae certainly didn’t cause that recession, and he clearly tried to deal with it without making things harder for people. But that isn’t going to matter. In terms of what he offers, Rae has a long career in public service, and has been the foreign affairs critic since the 2006 elections. However, his work on an education commission and dispute-resolution hasn’t caught much attention, and he doesn’t seem to have sponsored any legislation of his own since becoming an MP. Where does Rae think the country should go? Why should he be running for leader of one of the major parties if he hasn’t already articulated this vision? If he wins, why should Canadians favour his party? It has been obvious for some time now that the Liberal party needs to redirect itself; electing a leader who hasn’t yet expressed what that direction should be, and who is widely disliked in one of the most populous provinces, seems like a bad idea.

Ignatieff, unlike Rae, has very little Parliamentary baggage; he was elected to office for the first time in 2006. He also does not appear to have sponsored any legislation in that time, although he does have a stated position on the economy, the environment, Canada’s role in the world, immigration, and aboriginal issues. However, most of those positions are a statement of what is currently wrong and how things should be, without any statements about how we get there. Say what you will about Stephane Dion‘s carbon tax policy (I note, no longer available from the Liberal website), and his inability to convince Canadians that it is a good idea, at least he stood up and offered a clear solution (even if it isn’t an original idea!) to a major problem. Ignatieff has not done so any more than Rae has, and that is what the Liberals need to shift direction. Besides having relatively little political experience, though Ignatieff is obviously very intelligent, he is also going to be held up as an example of Liberal elitism if he wins. After being out of the country for two decades, he returns and is parachuted into his Etobicoke riding, and a mere two years later he expects to lead the party. The Conservatives will ask, what has he done in his public life in Canada? Why should you vote for a man who didn’t even fight to win his nomination on the ground in his riding, but was offered it by the party leadership?

Stephen Harper has more than enough advantages, given the fact that the Liberals cannot credibly threaten to topple the government until their new leader is elected in May. Rae and Ignatieff do have five months to prove me wrong about them, but I don’t expect that the Conservatives will sit still and wait for one of them to win before they start mounting the attacks. What the Liberal base really needs to do right now is sit down and talk about policy. Rae and Ignatieff both need to start putting out clear proposals for what they want to do and how, and they need to start doing it now. They need to start pushing for the laws that they want in the Commons, and they need to start the dialogue with the party rank-and-file on what kind of party the Liberals should be.