Maybe you know me. I've been writing your obituary for several years now. When I first started doing so, I thought that the process would take ten to twenty years, but you've managed to surpass even my expectations. Uh, congratulations?
I finally finished reading Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada last night and I was shocked to learn that my predictions of your demise were altogether too conservative. After having read that book, I'm shocked that you're not an actual corpse, as opposed to just being in a political oxygen tent.
To read Mr. Newman, one would have thought that your terminal stupidity would have ended you years ago. My educated guess is that your national brand is the only thing that's kept you even partially alive thus far. However, this is where things get difficult for you. Being branded as "The Natural Governing Party" is only worth anything as long as you were at least in Opposition. Now you're not. As a matter of fact, you only have 36 more seats than the Greens do.
I don't know why I'm writing this, other than I really enjoy showing off how smart I am. It's not one of my more attractive qualities, I know, but it remains one of my favourite ones. But I have a few suggestions as to how you people might resurrect yourselves.
Do I think they'll work? Probably not. In my opinion, you're too far gone and still entirely too arrogant, given your station. Do I think you'll even listen? No. No, I don't. You folks honestly believe that you got where you were by being smarter than everyone else, ignoring entirely that's also what got you where you are.
But I'm doing this more for me than I am for you. I like feeding my own ego and who knows, it might even get me laid.
My suggestions are as follows;
1) Lobbyists: Get rid of them. All of them!
More than any of the other parties, the LPoC has been dominated by scumbag lobbyists (or worse, scumbags who want to become lobbyists,) for decades now. Much of your nearly four-decade civil war can be traced back to staffers and mandarins that have placed their own careers over the future of the party.
While the Grits were the default choice of most Canadians, despite the careerist sleaziness inherent in your infrastructure, that was only true when there were no other plausible governing choices.
But even that overlooks some important history. Whenever the Tories have had a halfway competent leader, the Grits lost. John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney nearly crushed you into dust and it's entirely likely that Stephen Harper (who I heartily dislike) is going to do it once and for all. Since the days of Louis St. Laurent, the Liberals only won when the Conservatives went out of their way to lose. Remember that even the Sun King nearly lost to Bob Stanfield and actually did lose to Joe Clark.
People voted for you largely despite your party culture, not because of it. When the Tories lost, they went to you because there was nowhere else to go. That's no longer true. People like the NDP opposition far more than anyone thought they would.
That means that you're going to have to fundamentally reform your culture. No one is going to vote for a party controlled by people that use their position as a sinecure to a comfy life as a Yorkville or Bay Street asshole. And that supposes that Yorkville and Bay Street will even take to their bosom the assholes from the third-place party in Parliament anymore. After all, why would they?
The Harper government has already had two fairly significant lobbying-related scandals. My guess is that there's going to be a huge one at some point before they're finally defeated, whenever that might be.
You're going to want to be able to exploit that, which you can't do while your party remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of registered lobbyists. At least not while the purer-than-thou NDP is the national alternative.
You need to send the message, early and often, that the Liberal Party is no longer going to be the personal preserve of lobbyists. They won't be welcome in your campaigns and governments and, when your Members and operatives leave to lobby, they won't be welcome back. The New Democrats are populated with true believers. If you're not, you're dead.
I'm sure that there's no polling to support that, so you're just going to have to trust me, which you won't.
2) Start Acting More Like a Modern Party and Less Like a Cult: One of the most shocking revelations of When the Gods Changed was that the LPoC actually had $25 million on hand to refute the Tory "Just Visiting" campaign against Michael Ignatieff, which was itself only a $10 million buy. And here I was thinking that you were too broke, too lazy or too stupid to respond.
I was shocked to learn from Peter Newman that the money was there, but was earmarked for regional and constituent interest groups. For the love of Christ, your leader was turned into a goddamn pinata for two years because the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing just had to get their tithing for the quarter.
Who in the fuck does that? The NDP doesn't, and the Conservatives sure as shit don't. Their interest groups pay them, not the other way around.
Lookee, you no longer have the filthy lucre of open-ended public financing to support you and your meaningless little interest sectors. If you don't start being grown-ups with your own money, nobody in the country is going to trust you with theirs. Unless I'm wildly mistaken, the Ukrainian Lesbian Liberal Alliance of Kapuskasing hasn't elected a goddamned soul to Parliament ever! If they want a seat at the table, they should be paying you.
Why would anyone vote for a party that has to use valuable time and money to bribe their own natural constituents?
3) Quit the Stunt Platforms: One of the things that killed Ignatieff was his wholesale repudiation of everything that Stephane Dion stood for. In turn, Dion repudiated everything Paul Martin stood for. And so on and so on.
All that accomplished was to confuse the part of the electorate that wasn't convinced that you're desperate. In the last four elections, you've managed to create the same messaging nightmare that Mitt Romney is suffering from today.
The "Family Pack" and "Green Shift" were stunt platforms that came out of nowhere and ultimately meant nothing. It was obvious to anyone that was paying attention that no one was going to vote for either.
The Liberal Party of Canada needs one issue - and only one - to break through. Luckily, you have only have one.
Stephen Harper has talked like the Tea Party while spending like George W. Bush. By all rights, you should own deficit reduction as an issue, given the Chretien-Martin legacy. Except you don't, because you've had two leaders in row trying to compete with Harper and the NDP on who can spend the most money on the most useless shit.
You Grits have one thing that you've done in the last thirty years that you can actually be proud of, and that's deficit reduction. Start acting on it. If you think that you're ever going to out-promise the NDP, you're kidding yourselves. If you think that you're going to out-demagogue Harper, there isn't a lot I can tell you other than that you deserve to be doomed.
The Dippers and the Tories are replacing you in the mushy-middle. And by the time that you finally get a permanent leader and (if) you get some cash in the bank, they'll have succeeded. There's only one issue that you have national credibility on that they don't. Use it.
4) Quit the Stunt Leaders: By the time you finally get around to electing your next leader, almost two years after your last one was humiliated, you will have had six leaders (counting Bill Graham and Bob Rae) in a decade. There have only been seventeen leaders since 1867, six of them between 2004 and 2013.
Here's where this gets serious. As Peter Newman points out, you've lost an average of thirty seats in each of the last four elections. If that trend continues, you'll be left with about four seats after 2015. Part of the problem is that you've gone into the last three elections with different leaders, whereas the Tories, Dippers and Bloc were constant in all of them.
I'll grant you that Dion was an accidental leader, elected entirely because he wasn't Rae or Ignatieff.
But Paul Martin was sold as the messiah, infused with everything that right about Chretien while lacking everything wrong. And he was dumped over the side, setting up a leadership race that no one in your party was prepared for, which is how you ended up with Dion. And then you dumped Dion over the side.
Then you went with Ignatieff, who was sold as The Smartest Guy in the World Who Wrote Books that Very Smart People Read. Except his only political experience was that Liberals didn't like him very much, as evidenced by the 2006 leadership race. Then the party let him twist in the winds of the "Just Visiting" ads.
I happen to think that you made an enormous mistake in basically excommunicating Bob Rae, who I think was uniquely qualified to run against Harper. Not only is the the smartest and most experienced politician in the Liberal Party, he's one of the smartest and most experienced politicians in the country.
But it looks like you're determined to anoint another "saviour" in the person of Justin Trudeau.
If you buy the lobbyist-spin doctor nonsense that the Tories are afraid of Trudeau, you're delusional! If you take away his last name, you find that he's about as qualified to be an MP as the "bartenders and college students" that you Grits can't stop mocking the NDP for electing. His professional life consists entirely of teaching drama to teenagers, who are rather expert in that without professional coaching.
Justin is the Conservative war room's wet dream. Not only do they have video of him screaming profanities in the House of Commons, they have him openly musing about supporting Quebec separatism. If you thought the "Not a Leader" and "Just Visiting" ads were a nightmare to contend with, just wait. It's gonna get a LOT worse.
If Team Harper is even halfway smart, they'll just refer to him as "Justin," except in Francophone Quebec, where his surname is probably lethal. And if the Conservatives don't go after the Trudeau name in La Belle Province, the NDP will. Their platform against the Clarity Act was practically designed to target someone with Justin's name. And if Trudeau is seen as going nowhere in Quebec, he's dead everywhere else.
You, in your infinite suicidal genius, have crafted leadership party rules that make it almost impossible for anyone to seriously challenge Trudeau. That means that he's going to cruise into a Martin-Ignatieff-style coronation, completely unprepared for the pain that the well-funded and popular Tories are going to lay into him. And where Harper doesn't hit Trudeau, Muclair will.
Given the stupid rules that your leadership has put in place, it's hard to see any serious challenger preventing another stunt coronation. Don't get me wrong, it'll be a huge news story, too. Most likely, it'll stretch out for six months and might even rake in a few bucks for you.
And I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. It'll probably be your last.
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