So there's been a lot of news over the last week, none of it good for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. There are multiple polls out that show the Harper Conservatives within striking distance of a majority, and one poll that shows that almost 50% of the 2008 Liberal vote wants Ignatieff gone.All of these polls miss one fundamental point: The Liberal Party of Canada is heading toward the dustbin of history. I suspect that it won't exist in any recognizable form a decade from now.
Before I go any further, I should state my opinion that Stephen Harper isn't going to win a majority. I believe that he'll fuck it up for the simple reason that he always has before. He's had three clear opportunities to do it and failed spectacularly. In 2004 and 2006 it had become clear that the Liberals presided over a massive criminal conspiracy, and he lost outright in '04 and won only the thinnest of minorities in '06. In '08, the Liberals had the weakest leader in their history and won their lowest-ever percentage of the vote. And Harper still couldn't win his much-desired majority.
That tells me that there's a larger problem in Harperland. The country fundamentally does not trust the man. Yes, his numbers always rise when he plays the fucking piano, but they inevitably crash when ballots are actually cast. having said that, political reporters and bloggers are outstanding at ignoring history, so that goes a long in explaining the Tories' current media glow.
My Conservative friends should recognize that it's mathematically possible for the Grits to completely collapse without the Tories winning a majority. The NDP and the Bloc could divide Liberal seats between them, for example. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Dippers swept the Liberals in the B.C and Atlantic regions, and the Bloc picked apart the Grits in Quebec. There's also lots of ridings in Toronto that the NDP could pick up if the wheels fell off of the Liberals. The Conservatives wouldn't necessarily benefit from a Liberal collapse.
Harper is easily beatable. If Paul Martin could do it in the midst of the Adscam revelations, any halfway decent Liberal can. The problem is that the Liberals don't want a halfway decent leader, they want one that they think can win a snap election. Stephane Dion was a decent man, but an accident of history. He had no business being in politics in the first place. Michael Ignatieff, on the other hand, was specifically chosen for the tactical reason of election-readiness. And on those grounds, he's proven to be an even more magnificent failure than Dion.
Firstly, Ignatieff is in the wrong party. If you look at his writings and media appearances during his 34 years abroad, you quickly learn that he's fundamentally a Mulroney Conservative.
Second, he's a coward, and not an especially bright one, at that. He's refused to force an election when Harper was weak, but tried when the Tories were strong. Other than September of 2009, Ignatieff has been the perfect coalition partner for Harper. Like Dion before him, they supported the Conservatives for no other reason than because they didn't like the way the polls looked. They ignored the fact that if you run a party that way, your polls will never look good. That explains the fall of '09 "election that wasn't" better than anything. Unless you're seen as an alternative, you're guaranteed to be seen as an opportunist. And voting for ever piece of shit bill that Stephen Harper fancies is no way to be seen as an alternative.
But the "small L" liberal problem is bigger than Ignatieff. He's just a symptom of it. Because the left in this country naturally gravitates to the Grits, the Liberal Party itself is to blame for Conservatives winning at all in what remains a center-left country. Because they see themselves as "Canada's Natural Governing Party" more than anything else, they don't believe in anything other than tactics. They'll govern however they have to, so long as they win elections.
Jean Chretien, for example, was the most conservative prime minister this country has had in fifty years. He was well to the right of Harper on almost everything. One of the central tenants of conservative ideology is balanced budgets. Chretien produced a $13 billion surplus, and Harper gave us a $55 billion dollar deficit. Chretien wisely kept us out of Iraq, yet Harper has handed this country's foreign policy over to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Those are just facts.
Just as Ignatieff is more a Conservative than he is a Liberal, Harper is more a Liberal than he is a Conservative. Harper believes in nothing other than winning elections, and his record on that isn't what it should be, given his obvious talents. When given the choice between staying in power and doing the right thing, Harper has chosen power over and over again. Chretien expended vast amounts of political capital balancing the budget, and Harper has essentially bought popularity despite the fact that he has no real opposition. Their record in office leaves me thrilled that I've never voted for the Harper Tories and I can't think of a single reason that any sane conservative would.
I will say one thing about the Tory caucus, though. Historically, they are incredibly loyal to their leadership. Brian Mulroney spent years with an approval rating under 25%, but the caucus stayed fully behind him. There has yet to be any kind of a leadership challenge to Harper, despite the fact that Harper is demonstrably more liberal than Chretien. That just can't be said of the Liberals, who pushed out the successful and popular Chretien for no other reason than they thought they could win a bigger majority with Paul Martin. And Chretien's loyalists did the same to John Turner, albeit under vastly different circumstances.
But the Liberals have no alternative to Harper other than winning elections themselves, which is no alternative at all. Make no mistake, there are plenty of ways that they can win. They can run as true fiscal conservatives, which their record gives them the credibility to do, or they can run as the practical version of the left. Or they can merge with the NDP.
Here's all you need to know about the Liberals. When there were reports last spring about a merger, the sticking point was the Liberal demand that the NDP drop the word "socialist" from their party charter. That ignores both Canadian history and the history of the Liberal Party. Canada is a largely socialist country. And who, you might ask, introduced the vast majority of that socialism? The Liberals. Granted, they poached those ideas from the CCF-NDP, but the Grits did pass them into law. The Liberals deny their own history because they don't believe in it. They don't believe in anything other than electioneering. In that, they aren't any different than Harper himself.
It might take a couple of more elections and a few more disastrous leaders, but eventually people are going to see that the Liberals have no strategic vision for the country, and they haven't in a long, long time. Even Chretien did what he did with the budget because there was no unified opposition to the Liberals between 1993 and 2003. As soon as there was, they reverted to form.
It's possible (although highly unlikely) that Ignatieff will be forced out as quickly as he was forced in before the next election, but that won't make any difference. The Grits will just elect yet another ringer who gives Harper whatever he wants until they Liberals lose a couple of dozen more seats in the eventual next election. The Grits can keep losing seats until they disintegrate entirely. It doesn't really matter if the Conservatives win a majority or not. If the people of Canada really want an expedient whore at the helm, they may as well have one who at least plays the piano and knows all the words to "Jumpin' Jack Flash."
As much as I disagree with them, I at least respect the NDP because they actually believe in something. That's not true of the Liberals. They were only ever respected as a fine piece of election machinery. That machinery, however, is broken beyond repair and mostly appropriated by the Conservatives, who also believe in nothing.
I believe that there eventually will be a Liberal-NDP merger, but I believe that it will be on the NDP's terms. And that's the way it should be. The Grits are a rapidly eroding force that could have fewer seats than the NDP in a few cycles. It's entirely possible that many conservative-leaning Liberals will become Tories, but it's just as likely that many Western Conservatives will form another splinter party, like they did with the Reform Party in 1987. It could take a decade or more to happen, but I think that it will be sooner.
Most importantly, it's far better than the situation we have now. Like it or not, we live in an increasingly ideological world, but the Conservatives are just an extension of the Liberals, and the Liberals are an extension of ... nothing at all. Elections should be about choices, and the choice between the current Conservative and Liberal parties is really no choice at all.
But, yeah, I'm forgetting the really important stuff, ain't I? You just want to see Harper rawk the fuck out. Well, I ain't going to disappoint you.
A General Query: Who keeps linking my posts on Facebook? I keep getting lots of hits from there and I have no way of tracking them back. Right now, more is coming from there than from the considerable Free Dominon and Volunteer links.
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