The Slow Death of the Liberal Party of Canada Continues

I 've learned over the years to view Quebec Premier Jean Charest as being not unlike cancer. He might seem to go into remission from time to time, but you're a fool if you think that he's ever been fully destroyed. I have yet to see a politician any where with the number of lives that Charest has had over the last quarter century.

In the 80s, he was Brian Mulroney's favorite Cabinet minister until it was discovered that he had improper contact with a judge. That should have ended his career, but within a few years he was running for the federal Progressive Conservative leadership, a race where he was butchered like a hog by Kim Campbell.

Charest finally did become PC leader, but that was only because the 1993 federal election reduced the 156 member Tory caucus was reduced to just himself and Elsie Wayne. And Elsie didn't want the leadership. For years I regarded Charest as History's Biggest Loser.

Then came the 1995 Quebec referendum. Jean Chretien's governing Liberal Party - along with his Quebec counterpart, Daniel Johnson -  had so badly mismanaged the federalist "Non" campaign that there was a very real possibility that the separatists were going to win. Charest effectively took over and the country was saved by the narrowest imaginable margin, just one half of a percent.

After the referendum, it was only a matter of time when Charest would make the move to Quebec City as Liberal leader (there is no Conservative Party in Quebec to this day,) which he did in 1998. He was elected premier in 2003. Since then he's had more political near-death experiences than the Internet has bandwidth for me to properly recount. But he's always lived to fight another day. It's been a rather remarkable thing to watch.

On Tuesday it's very likely that his luck is finally going to run out. I learned through hard experience never to write Jean Charest off completely, but observers far more knowledgeable about Quebec politics than I consider it a sure thing. For the first time, the Liberal Party of Quebec is likely going to be the third party in the National Assembly. I consider Chantal Hebert Canada's single smartest political columnist. She makes very few arguments that I can easily discount.

Then there's Christy Clark, the Liberal premier of British Columbia. Her party is scheduled for complete annihilation sometime in the next year. And no one is suggesting anything other than that.

Ontario should be one of the few bright spots for the Liberal Party. Although Dalton McGuinty was reduced to a slim minority in last fall's provincial election, he also became the first Ontario Liberal to win a third government in more than a century. When he won his second majority in 2007, he was the first Liberal to pull that off in 70 years. There's gotta be some hope there, right?

Not exactly. McGuinty is monstrously unpopular in Canada's largest province and has been for years. He is, however, exceptionally gifted in who his opponents are. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has been beset by incredibly stupid (and possibly diagnostically schizophrenic) infighting since Mike Harris resigned as leader a decade ago. As has been the case since 1985, various factions have alternated in the leadership, making a consistent political message almost impossible.

Harris was succeeded by Ernie Eves, a good man who was fighting for a third mandate while the more populist faction of the party sat on it's hands. Eves was replaced as leader by the great and good John Tory. Tory is the hero of almost everybody in the province, but he's a spectacularly bad politician. In every single one of his races, everybody loved him but ultimately found a reason not to vote for him.

That brings me to the current leader, Tim Hudak, who I frequently refer to as "the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth." In last year's campaign, Hudak pissed away a 15-point lead and managed to get infuriate every faction of the party, which I previously thought was impossible. The fact that Hudak won his subsequent leadership review is, more than anything else, a testament to the suicidal impulses of the Ontario Tories.

But that's hardly an endorsement of the Liberals. There's no shortage of polls out there that show that if the Tories had a leader with any brains at all, the Grits would be driven to third-party status at Queens Park, behind even the NDP. McGuinty has survived as long as he has only because the prospect of a genetic fool like Hudak drives smart PC and soft NDP votes into the arms of the Liberals, who everyone considers chronically evil, but at least marginally competent. If and when that comes to pass, a third-place showing for the Ontario Liberals would be yet another first.

So the Liberal Party is on the verge of getting wiped out completely in Quebec and British Columbia, and they would be in Ontario if the provincial Tories stopped advertising their own death wish.

Canada's population is roughly 35 million people. 25.5 million of us live in Ontario, Quebec or British Columbia. If you live anywhere else, you don't politically matter very much. That might sound cold, but in country governed by the principle of representation by population, it's simply a fact.

What happens to the federal Liberals - themselves recently placed for the first time in history as the third party in Parliament - when their provincial parties are so thoroughly repudiated in the only parts of the country where anybody lives?  I keep hearing about how the Grits are going to rebuild, but in the very near future they're not going to have a political base to rebuild from.

The seemingly ruined federal party has, if nothing else, members of the provincial parties that they can rely on for support. But what happens when the provincial parties are irreversibly broken? Where does the money, political machinery and, most importantly, the votes come from then?

I think that's why Justin Trudeau (who Big City Lib hilariously describes as "Teenage Jesus") hasn't declared his intentions for the federal leadership yet. If Jean Charest gets blasted into hell as thoroughly as the polls and smart folks think he will on Tuesday, the Quebec Liberal machine is going to be destroyed. It's not impossible to think that federalist Quebecers would swarm to the federal NDP and build a new provincial machine for them, which Thomas Muclair has indicated that he wants to do.

This is problematic for Trudeau in that it leaves him without a base. It's bad enough that his last name automatically disqualifies him in most of francophone Quebec, what's he going to do without the money, political minds and volunteers from the Quebec party? My guess is that if Tuesday is as bad as it's expected to be, Justin doesn't run.

Of course, Teenage Jesus might not be as smart as everyone keeps telling me he is. Stockwell Day certainly believes that he's going to run, and win, the leadership.

On the other hand, having Stockwell Day tell me that something's going to happen is perhaps the single greatest indicator that it won't. When Day won the Reform/Canadian Alliance leadership, I immediately stopped voting for them and started supporting minor parties and independents. And I was right to do so. It took him just 18 months to drive the CA directly into the ground. Within three years of his taking the helm, the party ceased to exist altogether, merging with the federal Progressive Conservatives.

But Stock's column is riddled with factual and analytical errors. For example, he doesn't seem to understand what quantitative easing is, or that it isn't controlled by the Obama White House. Given his experience, it's easy to see why the Honourable Mr. Day thinks that the Goddamned Liberal Media can win or lose an election for a candidate, but history doesn't bear that out. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes won with the majority of the press actively against them. So too did Stephen Harper, come to think of it.

The federal Liberals that want Trudeau to run do so because they want to preside over a coronation, ignoring entirely how well that worked out for Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff. If Canadian leadership campaigns and American primaries are good for anything - and they're not good for much - it's that they let candidates work out their flaws when most of the non-geek public isn't paying attention.

Teenage Jesus has a pretty impressive temper and that leads him to do and say spectacularly stupid things when he's riled. If he wins a mostly uncontested leadership campaign, that'll just serve to reinforce his own worst qualities, just as it did for Martin and Ignatieff. And a murderous cyborg like Stephen Harper will exploit that to devastating effect. If I was Harper, there'd be no one I'd rather run against than Justin Trudeau. In three of the last four elections, Canadians have soundly repudiated the personality cults that the Liberals have built around their coronated leders.

In my opinion, the Liberals lost their last best chance when they stabbed Bob Rae in the back. Rae was alone among the Grits in having run a party and a government before. He had more political experience than all of the other federal party leaders combined. And even the negatives from his Ontario government are dwarfed by the fiscal mismanagement of the the federal Tories. I think that if Bob Rae won the leadership, Harper wouldn't have run again. But I can guarantee you that Harper is dying to run against Justin Trudeau.

But all of that is utterly inconsequential. In province after province, the Liberal Party is facing Armageddon. And without the provincial parties, it's hard to see how the federal party rebuilds. It doesn't really matter who the next leader is.

Those idiots are dead and too stupid to know it. But I suspect that they will in the fall of 2015.