Michael Ignatieff’s thinkers’ conference in Montreal this month lacks some thinking. It is like the referendum, Dalton McGinty dumped on Ontario voters in 2007. It was a referendum on our political process that lacked input from people who make the political process work. Ignatieff’s Liberal thinkers’ conference lacks input from liberals who make the political process work for the Liberal Party.
And it is hardly that the subject has slipped his mind. He has had to live with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s abuse of the political process every day that Harper allows parliament to be in session. He can hardly complain about Harper without recognizing that, if in power, he would have the same levers to pull.
“Trust me,” he tells us.
“Trust me,” Jean Chrétien told us.
“Trust me,” Paul Martin told us.
“Just watch me,” Pierre Trudeau told us.
“Screw you,” Brian Mulroney told us.
Kim Campbell and John Turner were in the mix as prime ministers also but never long enough to learn where the levers were located.
The problem for Ignatieff is that the next federal election is going to be decided in Ontario. Harper’s Conservatives are united in Ontario under the thin disguise of the supposedly benign banner of ‘Bill Davis’ style Tories. While they have to travel under true ‘Reform’ colors in Canada’s western provinces, Harper’s control of the party brooks no controversy in any area.
Ignatieff’s Liberals, in the meantime are fighting for existence in the west, looking at slim pickings in Quebec and will stand or fall in Ontario—outside of Toronto. That is hardly helped by the Ontario liberals being caught up in internecine fighting for power by the Ottawa-based party and the Toronto-based party. Aided by the hapless leadership of the McGinty Liberals at Queen’s Park, the Liberal Party of Canada (Ontario) organization based on St. Mary Street is fighting to exist while there is an assault from Ottawa to take over the Toronto group’s last vestiges of power.
It leaves the federal ridings that the party needs to win adrift, caught occasionally by the eddies of influence from the two power centres of the party. The party has understood for some time that the real power centre should be the individual ridings. Individual ridings should be the funding base for the party. They should be the origin of the party’s policy. They, alone, should make decisions about who should be chosen as candidates. They are not and they do not. They are creatures of the party leadership and we all know what happened to democracy in making that choice.
But that is not what Michael Ignatieff’s thinkers’ conference is about. Maybe the party needs to ask: What is it about Michael? And what is its relevance?
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