"That's it, fight amongst yourselves" The Devil and Alf Apps

For the last two years or more, I've been predicting the ultimate death and burial of the Liberal Party of Canada. If you read closely enough through my many essays on the topic, you'll note that I never said that it would be a single bad election that would do them in. Rather, they would be finished off by everything that happened afterward. I also thought that the LPC's decline and final fall would occur over the course of a decade or more. The fact that it's happening so quickly is the only surprising thing about recent events.

Amazingly enough, no one in the blogosphere, the Goddamn Liberal Media or the party itself has yet bothered to trace back the chain events that has brought ruination to the most successful party in the history of democracy. And it all began with one of the Grits' winningest prime ministers, Jean Chretien.

In the early fall of 2000, it had become clear that Chretien's finance minister, Paul Martin, was organizing to wrest the leadership, and therefore the government, away from Chretien. Chretien used an idiotic challenge to call an election by the dim-witted Stockwell Day to isolate and neutralize Martin. If he won a third majority in the process, all the better.

Of course, it only worked for a short time. By the summer of 2003, it had become clear that the writing was on the wall and Chretien's days were numbered. The pressure within the party for change became unbearable and Martin was ascendant. As one of his last acts, Chretien passed a debilitating campaign finance reform bill into law that banned the lifeblood of the Liberal Party, corporate donations, replacing it with a per-vote government subsidy. It was as if  le petit gars de Shawinigan were denied the leadership, he would ensure that the leadership wasn't worth having.

Then came the ticking time bomb that Chretien left behind. The Sponsorship Scandal that ran throughout the Chretien years crippled Martin's government just as it had begun. His entire tenure was dedicated to dealing with Chretien's mess, not unlike Gerald Ford's presidency was consumed by te continuing fallout from Watergate and the Nixon pardon. Adscam first reduced the Liberals to a minority, then defeated them outright.

And that's where Alf Apps enters this sad and depraved tale. When it became clear that Paul Martin wasn't long for the world, Apps was part of a sad, depraved and incompetent troika that was looking for a saviour. Their quest took them to Harvard, where they convinced Michael Ignatieff that only he could save Canada's Natural Governing Party, and therefore Canada itself. And yes, Liberals really do think like that. Their hubris has always been endlessly entertaining to watch.

Iggy, already convinced of his Christ-like personage, returned to Toronto from his 34-year odyssey abroad. Winning his seat in Etobicoke-Lakeshore was easy enough and considered a mere formality. He would establish himself as Jesus Trudeau shortly after the final humiliation of Paul Martin.

Then something unexpected happened. Ignatieff lost the 2006 leadership campaign to the longest of long shots, Stephane Dion. What happened next is a story almost as old as the Liberal Party itself.

I heard things, I saw things. And it wasn’t pretty. I was in the office of Bill Graham, interim Opposition leader when Stephane Dion beat Michael Ignatieff for the leadership in 2006. The grassroots of the party rejected Ignatieff at the Montreal convention.

It was a stunning upset, and the start of nasty backroom games to undermine Dion, led by the gang that went to Harvard to convince Ignatieff to return to Canada to lead the party in the first place.

Ignatieff was their messiah. To others, he was an English version of Dion.

For two years, Dion’s leadership was under constant threat. He was pressured to name Ignatieff as deputy leader, a fatal mistake he was warned to avoid — but didn’t — which left the rival for his job gunning for him from the office next door and partisan soldiers lurking in the open reporting every move back to the Toronto generals.

I watched with fascination the bullying, the backstabbing, the threats and the neverending plotting.

Most disturbing were the bloated egos, the power-hungry who put themselves before their party. It was already on life support after the Chretien-Martin feud, but these zealots wanted Dion gone even if it meant further destruction of an institution already in a death spiral.

Dion was done away with during the coalition crisis that followed the 2008 election and Ignatieff was installed in the leadership without a vote. It was seen across the country as a stunning victory for both Iggy and Apps, who was named Liberal Party president.

Except it wasn't. Ignatieff and Apps never appeared to understand the party they now headed. Alf, in particular, had spent the last three decades backing losers in the leadership wars. And Ignatieff had spent so long outside the country that it was miracle he could still find it on a map, let alone properly navigate the treacherous waters of the Liberal Party.

"The bullying, the backstabbing, the threats and the neverending plotting" never ended under Iggy. Forces in caucus loyal to Bob Rae constantly questioned Ignatieff's continuation of the Dion strategy of constantly supporting Harper to avoid an election. I believed that Iggy could very well have formed a minority government had he defeated the 2009 Tory budget. When he blinked, I was certain that the Grits had another genetic loser in charge.

Armageddon didn't come as quickly as most folks think it did. As I demonstrated at the beginning of this missive, it began back in 2000 with Chretien's Samson Option. Since then, they've lost over half of their seats and their geographic and electoral bases are evaporating. The Conservatives first won Ontario, them Toronto itself. Quebec is now NDP country and will likely stay that way for some time.

This isn't, as some commentators and wishful thinkers like to believe, like the fracturing of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1988-93. The old Tory vote was intact, it was just divided three ways. But their national support was still there waiting when the factions reunified under the Conservative banner in 2003.

More importantly, the Progressive Conservative Party rump neer went to war with itself. What's happening now in the LPC more closely resembles the last days of the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day's disastrous leadership.

The PC's under Jean Charest and Joe Clark had no choice but to rebuild from the ground up. They were so thoroughly discredited in '93 that the party structure itself was completely rebuilt. Specifically, there was no one like Alf Apps lingering among the ruins.

The Ignatieff faction - unelected and unaccountable to anyone, much like Iggy himself - is still calling the shots. And they're not letting trivialities like the the party Constitution get in their way. First, they established criteria for an interim leader, usually the domain of the elected parliamentary caucus, that seems designed to specifically exclude Bob Rae from consideration. Now they're violating their own Constitution in delaying a leadership convention until late next year. Under the LPC's rules, they are supposed to hold one within five months.

As you might expect, the caucus, the rank and file membership and every Liberal blogger in the country is being driven bouncing-off-the-walls nuts by Alf's machinations, and they're all doing so in a very public way. The civil war that began under Trudeau and John Turner and continued through Ignatieff and Rae, is exploding, even in the absence of any leadership at all. Virtually everyone is calling for the head of Alf Apps, but there isn't anyone capable of delivering it.

Oh, the media is covering this, to be sure. But this is hardly the kind of coverage the party wants or needs. I've always said that the Liberal Party only exists because they like winning elections more than they hate one another, but that was a pretty lonely thing to say before this month. Now the national media and the parliamentary press gallery is starting to echo my thoughts.

Would you give people like this your hard-earned money? Would you place your name as a candidate for such a motley crew? Would you even want to assume the leadership of  a party like that, knowing that you'll spend more time watching your back than looking forward? If Apps gets his way, it'll be 18 months before the party can even begin to redefine itself. And if those people should have learned anything from the Ignatieff leadership debacle, it's that if you aren't willing to define yourself, someone else will be more than happy to.

Under these circumstances, it's only a matter of time before we start seeing Liberal floor-crossings to both the Conservatives and the NDP. Once that starts happening, there will be nothing left to rebuild. It'll all be over.

But I'll bet you anything that Alf Apps will still be there.