Get Over It – He Was No Messiah!

I carry no brief for any Liberal insider, no preference for who ought to become the next leader of the LPC. None, I’m neutral.

I wanted Dion to step down solely on performance reasons. I read a post the other day that described Mr. Dion as a person best suited to serve as Prime Minister but ill-suited to becoming elected Prime Minister.

The fury and outrage of Dion loyalists is profound. I realize that, in any party, there are people who are more closely attached to an individual than to the party. I confess to a bit of that myself when I was young and Pierre Trudeau was our leader. Maybe it’s something one grows out of, who knows?

Not all of our party’s leaders have been iconic. Some, such as Mr. Chretien, caught an awful lot of breaks. Brian Mulroney, after all, left the PCPC in a shambles when Mr. Chretien stepped in and the right remained terminally divided during the Chretien years. I liked Mr. Chretien and happily supported him but I never overlooked the role that circumstances not of his or our party’s making had in his success.

So, now we must seek a new leader. Good, I hope we can focus on finding someone who will unite and motivate the party as Mr. Dion never managed to do. We have to ensure that the next leader has the aptitude for the job, an ability to connect with voters outside today’s narrow Liberal realm. That will be a leader with vision, political acumen, solid communication skills and the charisma essential to motivate voters who stayed away from the polls last week or who voted for Mr. Harper because they saw no viable alternative.

We need a leader, now more than ever.

 

Stop Blaming the Voters

I’ve read far too many posts blaming the Canadian voting public for last night’s Liberal drubbing. That disgusting little narrative holds that they were too dumb to see through Mr. Harper or too weakminded to understand the brilliance that is Mr. Dion.

What an arrogant load of crap!

The Canadians who handed the LPC its head on a platter last night were the same Canadians who have trusted the Liberals to govern the country in the past. If they’re good enough when they support us, they’re every bit as good when they don’t.

You have to win an election. Even the Liberals have no entitlement to govern. Liberals have a genuine advantage in that mainstream Canadians are ideologically compatible with the party. So, when voters turn elsewhere they’ve obviously rejected something or someone in the Liberal campaign.

You cannot win an election if you don’t connect with the voting public. It was Mr. Dion’s job every day since he assumed party leadership to connect with the voting public, to help them understand what the Liberals were offering and why they ought to support it. He went into this election already having failed on that score.

In terms of electoral skills, Dion was completely outclassed by Mr. Harper. Time and again when he ought to have brought the government down, he stepped aside and had his caucus shamefully flee the floor of the Commons. Had he brought the government down on any one of several, legitimate disputes, Dion would have had some control over the timing of the election and, more importantly, an ability to frame the issues.

The only surprise in Harper’s election call was that anyone should have been surprised by it. Parliament had had the summer off and all the scandals and blunders of the Harper government had receded in the minds of the voters. This was Harper’s one chance to not have to run on his record and clear issues. And he caught the opposition, particularly the Liberals utterly flatfooted.

We, the Liberal Party of Canada, did extremely poorly last night. We were completely outmatched and that was the culmination of a whole series of mistakes and blunders. We lost this election, the voters merely responded.

 

Stephane’s Defining Moment

The challenge facing Stephane Dion is to prevent Harper from framing the election on neutral issues.

Harper is going to play on the economy, arguing that Dion’s fanciful ideas would only kick us when we’re already going down on an international downturn.

The downturn, call it a recession if you like, is a global phenomenon – not Harper’s doing, not the Tories’ fault. All the big headline stories have come out of the US or Britain. Just one of those things but a spillover crisis in any case that needs a down to earth leader to fend off. “Down to earth” as in none of that nonsense about global warming or carbon taxes.

How will Dion refute that in a way that resonates with the electorate? He’s already allowed the Libs to be neutralized on Afghanistan. Not only are the Conservatives comfortably off the hook but they also get to boast about revitalizing the armed forces. The Conservative scandals have died down over the summer and won’t surface again until well after the election – if at all. Harper is going to have the gullible scared crazy about economic hard times. The last thing on their minds will be ambitious programmes to fight global warming.

If Dion can’t reframe the election on issues on which the Tories are vulnerable or weakest, he’s left to whine about Harper’s lies. We may find them outrageous but don’t expect the voting public to turn on the Conservatives over them.

Should Mr. Dion not go on the attack and effectively skewer Harper it’s hard to see how the Tories will be defeated. One thing I’m sure of – if the Libs try to wage their campaign on the Green Shift, they risk spinning themselves into a corner to the delight of Harper and Layton alike.

I’ve always had serious reservations about Mr. Dion but now, at least, he has a chance to prove his defenders and supporters right. I sure hope he proves me wrong.

 

Tax Shift – Can Dion Sell It?

Stephane Dion has belatedly unveiled more details of his Tax Shift platform upon which the Liberals will either stand or fall in the next election.

The idea, overall, seems pretty good but I’m going to wait to see what intelligent criticism it draws. If there are serious holes in the idea, problems that haven’t been foreseen or taken into account, then it might be doomed from the outset.

Then there’s the issue of salesmanship. The Harpies are going to go full-bore negative on this and, following the Bush/Cheney playbook, they’ll resort to as much fear-mongering as they can persuade an indulgent media to tolerate. Pretty much everybody now realizes that the Cons are flush out of ideas but that’s not a problem when a campaign is going to be fought over another party’s Big Idea.

The trouble with Big Ideas is that they’re usually pretty tough to sell. There’s a mountain of truly good ideas that never got off the ground and we’re scrapped. You have to be able to sell them to your market. Can Dion sell his Tax Shift?

Once again the Layton NDP will ride to Harper’s side to oppose the Liberal/Green policy, in other words to keep Harper in power for years to come. Of course, being Dippers, once they manage that, they’ll duck all responsibility for the aftermath of their duplicity and try to blame it on the Libs instead. Slimy, sure, but that’s the nature of Jack Layton and those who follow him.

So, Stephane has unveiled his baby. Now the real work begins. This is his chance to show that he can lead the LPC and our country itself. The cost of failing on this could be bigger than we imagine.

 

Check Please, Waiter!

I’ve decided this will be the last post I’ll make on the hapless LPC leadership until there’s some major change at the top.

Dion’s milquetoast performance during the immigration vote was really pathetic although it gave his ever loyal apologists yet another opportunity to expound on his tactical brilliance. Yet that’s not what’s driven me from Mr. Dion’s camp. It’s his rank stupidity that bothers me.

Mr. Dion. If you have a signature policy, one you’re actually willing to fight an election over, then keep it to yourself until you’re ready to unveil it and until you’re ready to explain it and until you’re ready to sell it and until you’re ready to defend it.

Instead of acting like the leader of a political party fit to govern this country, Mr. Dion let the vague idea of his policy dribble out, leaving the policy and the party he’s supposed to lead vulnerable to a summer long spin campaign by the Cons. If he doesn’t want to explain it, he can’t complain when the Cons take full advantage of that blunder. They’ve got the cash advantage right now and they’re all too willing to spend when we give them such a juicy opening.

So, thanks Stephane, for handing the Cons a summer’s worth of rich propaganda opportunities on a neat, little platter. Maybe you can take the summer to come up with an idea that might actually help the Liberal Party. If you can’t come up with something, let me know. I’ve got one idea that I know will help.

 

Stephane Dion Folds on Afghanistan

The great debate seems to be whether Liberal leader Stephane Dion “compromised” or “capitulated” in reaching an accord with Stephen Harper on extending the mission in Afghanistan.

Jason Cherniak opines that it was neither, instead a “marriage of communications convenience between the Liberals and the Conservatives, neither of whom want an election with Afghanistan as the prominent issue.”

I think it’s much more than communications convenience, whatever you take that to mean. Here are excerpts from Dion’s principled Afghanistan policy speech in February, 2007:

“…by May, a mere three months after Canada’s combat force went into Kandahar, the government knew that we were facing a significant and violent insurgency, well beyond anything NATO had experienced in the past or had planned for. And before too long we saw that the Canadian effort in Kandahar had shifted from the original over-riding objective of reconstruction to fighting a violent insurgency.

Faced with that new reality, what should the Canadian government have done? It should have taken the time to determine whether and how our mission could still achieve the goals we had set out, in such a rapidly deteriorating security environment.

Instead, what did Prime Minister Harper do? He extended the mission by 2 years. And he did so without having obtained commitments from our allies to help us cope with the changed situation. He made no prior effort to obtain assurances from the government of Pakistan to secure their border with Afghanistan, across which the insurgents move with impunity. And he got no assurances from our NATO allies to replace Canada at the end of our mission. In other words, he made a rash decision on a critical issue.

In addition, the Prime Minister misled Members of Parliament to get them to support this extension. He promised MPs that this mission would not hinder Canada’s ability to undertake peace-support missions elsewhere, such as in Darfur or Haiti. But within a few weeks of the vote in Parliament, his defence minister made it clear that Canada no longer had any such troop capacity. General Hillier, the Chief of Defence Staff, has more recently confirmed this. With this mission extension, the Prime Minister has thrown away Canada’s flexibility to respond to other international peace and security priorities.

In the face of changed circumstances on the ground, this government and this Prime Minister steamrolled Parliament without facts, information or realistic debate. They told Canadians this mission represented continuity of an existing mission, yet the security context deteriorated so much that shortly after this decision the government went as far as to send tanks to Kandahar.

I will say unequivocally that a Liberal government led by me will not extend Canada’s combat mission in Kandahar beyond February 2009. That means Canada must inform NATO today how firm this deadline is and that it must find a replacement nation for us. The Harper government has not done this. To the contrary, military documents have come to light that show that the Harper government is planning for the Canadian Forces to stay in Kandahar until 2011. Our allies have surely taken note of this. As long as other NATO countries believe our commitment is open-ended, they will never prepare for our departure.”

So, it’s “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Harper, with the requisite endorsement of the opposition parties, extended the mission by two years to 2009, without having obtained assistance from NATO partners or assurances from Pakistan or assurances from NATO allies to replace us when the term ends in 2009.

Okay, now Dion has agreed to an extension to 2011 without having obtained assistance from NATO partners or assurances from Pakistan or assurances that we’ll be replaced when the term ends in 2011. “As long as other NATO countries believe our commitment is open-ended, they will never prepare for our departure.” Well said Stephane so why does this no longer trouble you?

“I will say unequivocally that a Liberal government led by me will not extend Canada’s combat mission in Kandahar beyond February, 2009.” Of course the decision hasn’t fallen to a Liberal government led by Dion but to a Liberal opposition led by Dion. I guess that must let him off the hook.