The Liberals on Life Support

In which we devote a column's worth of put-downs to the Liberals as a parting gift.

It's tough not to get hyperbolic about the shocking (see?) results of yesterday's election, but of all the aspects of Canadian politics upended last night, the crushing defeat of the Liberal Party of Canada is the most remarkable. Andrew Cohen enumerates in the Ottawa Citizen the problems that plague Canada's one-time “natural governing party” and hedges that “after Monday, it is unlikely they will last another decade.” They have no obvious successor to the newly resigned Michael Ignatieff; no geographic representation except for out East and sporadically throughout major cities; no secure financing; and no claim to the ideological centre as the NDP is likely to head that way as official opposition. “There is no silver lining, no thin reed of hope, no crack in the wall of gloom where the light gets in,” writes Cohen. “It is an existential crisis.”

Long-time Liberal adviser Warren Kinsella, now a columnist for the Sun chain, issues the first manifesto on how to rebuild the party of Laurier, Pearson, and Trudeau. “We need new blood. We need new ideas, new passions, new people,” says Kinsella, master of the obvious. “Better election readiness. Better policy-making. Better unity. And – most of all – a better understanding of all of modern Canada, and not just the urban enclaves where the party still has some strength.” To us, that sort of sounds like they ought to reconsider whom they hire as advisers.

Robert Silver, another Grit adviser/columnist, delivers a campaign post-mortem in The Globe and Mail that must go down like bitter medicine for the party faithful. The Tories have now usurped the Liberals' long-held selling points as the party of multiculturalism and national unity, and the mid-campaign shift to the left looked disingenuous. “The NDP believed in the positions both parties took, the Liberals less so,” explains Silver. “The voters got that. Why vote for a pale pink imitation when you can vote for the real thing?” Two-front wars are all but impossible to win. Whatever path this defeat leads them down – to a rebranding, merger, or dissolution, take your pick – that's advice the party ought to heed.