Whither the Liberals #nlpoli

[revised and edited 4:45 PM]

The tale is not told in the view of columnists  - Stephen Maher, Chantal Hebert and Susan Delacourt - who try to link a series of different events into one explanation.

The tale is told in the comment of one long-time Liberal who bumped into another in St. John’s recently.

The Liberal Party doesn’t speak to me any more, said one.

Exactly, exclaimed the other.

The Liberal Party may have won six seats in last Tuesday’s general election but it stands at an historic low.  Only 11% of the electorate in Newfoundland and Labrador voted Liberal on Tuesday.

Voters in Newfoundland and Labrador looking for something other than the ruling Conservatives opted for the New Democrats last Tuesday and they did so in record numbers.

They did it in St. John’s for the most part but also in Burin-Placentia West,  Labrador West and The Straits-White Bay North. 

While the New Democrat resurgence is a subject for another day, the key thing for this post is which party voters chose last Tuesday and it was not the party that dominated politics in this province for so much of the post-Confederation period.

The reason is simple:  the Liberal Party does not speak to them any more.

A decade or so ago, the dominant voices in the party shifted to an increasingly rural focus on the party.  The Blame Canada commission with its pile of old axes reground was symptomatic of the shift.  So too was the resurgence of make-work as a core government policy for rural parts of the province and the transfer of government offices to major centres outside Capital City.

In this most recent election, ruralism took centre stage in the party’s platform.  And the leader the party executive chose overwhelming was not just committed to the ruralist agenda: he started out the election by loudly proclaiming his fierce “nationalist” sentiment.

Some may blame the Liberal fortunes on the last-minute change of leadership.  Others will focus on the impact of what appeared to be the most ineptly run campaign in provincial political history. 

Both had their part to play but both the campaign and the focus were already in train before the executive board picked Kevin Aylward.  And, if anything, Aylward did not apparently want to shift the dominant internal party trends so much as reinforce them. 

Aylward is scarcely any different from Yvonne Jones who fixated on the idea that building a Stunnel to Labrador was the winning party policy.  Party insiders fought to keep it out of her convention speech and her Facebook posting during the campaign was nothing more than a last-ditch effort to push the stunnedest of stunned ideas.

Beyond the ruralist core, the Liberal Party simply does not know what it stands for. 

In the last election, the party became the nothing more than a political sideshow.  There were plenty of contortionists: cast-offs from other parties abounded.  There was a star of the open line shows.  A perennial favourite of the political fringes stage-mothered a couple of her current charges through their political appearances on the ballot rather than run herself.  A few students came along for good measure as did staffers hounded relentlessly until they agreed to be names on ballots at their own expense.

The only thing missing was the sword swallower.

The Liberal party does not speak to anyone, anymore.

The people running the party seem to have no desire to speak to anyone other than themselves out there on the tattered edges of the provincial political landscape.

They are so far out in the political woods, they’d have to come in to hunt.

What’s worse, though, is that they seem to have lost the desire to hunt.

You can see that in the party after the election.

The leader disappeared.

The party president popped up to do a couple of interviews about the latest leadership crisis.

But while political life carried on, and issues and targets abounded, the party fell completely silent.  Shameful comments by the Premier about the legislature went unchallenged by Liberals. 

They said nothing about anything that truly mattered in the province and in the stuff that mattered only to the people involved in the party, they said little.

The Liberal party no longer speaks to the people of the province.

And, as it seems, the party doesn’t even speak to itself any more either.  Maybe the few of them still out in the political woods need to take heed of that. 

The rest of us [in the province] already have.

- srbp -

The way not to change #nlpoli

Kevin Aylward did a yeoman service to his party by stepping in and leading it through a tough time.

He didn’t add anything to the seat tally. 

Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shite. Those seats came from the hard work of the individuals running in each of them plus, in one case, the marvels of the internal combustion engine.

Now Aylward finds himself a leader without a seat in the legislature.

The political gods have a fine sense of humour.

Not to worry. 

There’s not much point in Kevin hanging about. Even if your humble e-scribbler had not already suggested that convention dictates he go,  Kevin is facing the advice of one of his old caucus mates.

Chris Decker told listeners to a CBC radio call-in show that Kevin needs to go:

For one thing, Decker said, the Liberals would lose Opposition status, as they would then be tied with the NDP at five seats each.

As well, Decker said, Tuesday's election showed that the Liberals cannot count on voters in any particular district.

Former cabinet minister John Efford chimed in and suggested the party should hold a leadership convention so that Kevin or John himself or anyone else who wanted it can have a go at the job.

Tuesday night proved to be a “holy f***, that was close” moment for the people running the Liberal Party and for people, like John Efford, who want to run the party. 

Now that the danger has passed they want to get right back to the old ways of doing business that put the party in his current sorry state.

The party needs to change.

A credible political party cannot afford to have a repeat of recent history including the way Jones left the job a few weeks ago and the board picked her replacement.

Change means things have to be different.  More of the same is not an option.  Change also means that so many people within the party will have to give up the traditional Liberal Party delusion that some saviour, some messiah will appear and make all the problems go away.

The party also can’t afford to try and recycle someone – whether Aylward, Efford or Jones – even on a temporary basis.  temporary has a tendency to become permanent, especially when the shock of a near death experience wears off.

That would be the way not to change.

And if people want the Liberal Party to survive, change is the only choice left.

- srbp -

Uniting the Left: a reminder

So with the Liberal meeting in Ottawa, the idea of uniting the left is coming back around again.

Not surprisingly, Liberal leader Bob rare is pissing on the idea.
Now Bob’s reasoning may be somewhat different than the one your humble e-scribbler offered last June but the point still holds up:

Meanwhile over on the left, the New Democrats united with the other left wing party – the Bloc – and became the official opposition. Now they’ll basically face the same sort of question the Conservatives already addressed.  There’s no guarantee how they’ll answer it nor is there a correct answer.

… 

Do they head toward the centre, as other successful left-wing parties have done, or will they continue to embrace their ideological base and potentially kiss power good bye? 

Put another way:  Is Jack Layton going to emulate Tony Blair or Michael Foot?

And that’s really the point.  The left wing in the country is already united.  The Bloc and the NDP merged even if the Blocists weren’t willing partners to the political marriage.

Put another way, the Bloc NDP essentially pulls together the ideological left in the country.  At the same time, the NDP is well on its way to morphing from being a national party with representation in all the regions of the country to a party representing regional interests nationally.

Meanwhile, the Liberals remain a coalition party that has, historically, shifted ideologically from the centre left to centre right based on the dominant trends in the country.

So if Denis Coderre wants to frig off to join the Bloc NDP, he can certainly go ahead.

But since the ideological left is already united, why would the Liberals – a federalist party of the political centre that long ago rejected reactionary politics of the left and right – ever want to join with the Dippers or the Connies, for that matter?

- srbp -

 

*  edit to eliminate repetition.

Why the Liberals lost…and the way ahead

You will read plenty of commentary on this election and the overwhelming majority of it will be complete and unvarnished horseshit.

Put it all out of your mind.

If you want to understand why Michael Ignatieff and the federal Liberals tanked so badly, read Rob Silver’s take on things.

Unite the left?  Rob puts it slightly differently that this but your humble e-scribbler is in the exact same neighbourhood: the two left-wing parties in this country at he federal level already got together to form the Bloc NDP.

Then read his ideas on what the party needs to do to come back.

He’s got that right, too.

- srbp -

Phoenix

The provincial Liberal Party convention looks for all the world like the first big sign of a political party on the come-back trail.

A relatively large turnout – upwards of 200 people – and the election of a raft of new faces on the party executive suggest that interest in the party is rebounding after a few years of the doldrums.

Lawyer Judy Morrow replaced Danny Dumaresque as president. For all the concerns expressed around these parts about Dumaresque’s leadership intentions and the deferred leadership convention, the fact is the Danny and the old executive managed to keep the party alive and out of financial ruin. That was no small feat over the past four years. The old crew have passed on a pretty good foundation on which the new crew can start rebuilding.

One of the big tasks will be fund-raising and to handle that the party elected a new treasurer - John Hogan - to replace the septuagenarian senator Joan Cook.

One of the surest signs of revival is the speculation about Dean Macdonald as potential leader. Dean would normally not [inserted the word "not" which was left out of the first draft] be considered leadership material but the fact that some people are pushing him and the fact he’s been flitting about again over the past couple of weeks are a sign that the opportunists are sensing a potential vehicle for their own agendas.

Oddly enough, Macdonald told a Young Liberal breakfast meeting why he wouldn’t be a good leader. Differentiate yourselves from the other guys was his good but hardly novel advice. Coming from a guy who has already publicly stated his support for the other guys and for continued Dannyism, it’s pretty much impossible to differentiate yourself when all you offer is more of the same.

A new leader will turn up; he or she just won’t be one of the names that have cropped up already. In the meantime, politics in the province may get back to some sort of health if the Liberals can continue rebuilding and start offering a competitive challenge to the current set of policies from the Provincial Conservatives. Politics doesn’t work when one side dominates the agenda so completely.

-srbp-

Another resounding victory...

1. In the cause for electoral reform or political reform or some kind of reform: another riding taken by a party already in dictatorship territory, with 38% of the vote.

2. For incompetence: Proof the current executive of the party - and especially the president - need a vacation.

Well, more like a retirement, actually, but a bit more permanent.

3. Blindness: New Democrats. A wake-up call that there is no "labour" vote. Re-think your approach to politics

-srbp-

Woodrow packs it in

John Woodrow has quit as the Liberal candidate in the deferred central Newfoundland election.

He didn't do it for the right reasons; he did so claiming as vocm.com put it that "he did not feel he had the support of the party executive or caucus."

The Advertiser has a more detailed version of the story:

Mr. Woodrow’s decision to withdraw from the race was also made following comments by provincial Liberal Party president Danny Dumaresque in the most recent edition of the weekly provincial newspaper, The Independent.

In the news story in question, Mr. Dumaresque stated, “Basically the people of the province have already cast their opinion and undoubtedly we would love to win it (the seat), but I don’t see it as a must-win at all as far as importance to the party is concerned.”

Dumaresque should be the next to go.

The result of the last election - which Dumaresque uses as an excuse in the central fight - rests in some measure on the head of the president. That to one side, even, Dumaresque should give up as party president since he signed endorsed Woodrow's candidacy without checking on the guy's history.

Instead of packing it in, Dumaresque seems to be quietly soliciting support for a run at the party leader's job. In light of the Woodrow mess, Dumaresque should have a very hard time convincing anyone he's the right guy to lead the party into the 2011 general election, that is, unless he plans to promise four more years on the opposition benches.

-srbp-

March-ing toward oblivion

News that former ombudsman Fraser March might run for the Liberals in the next provincial general election should leave the party brass cold, especially in light of this story from Monday's Telegram.

Liberal Party president Danny Dumaresque is quoted in the Telegram saying, among other things, that polls don't bother him at all especially in light of the 1989 general election. He also claims there are a "number of prospective candidates of 'significant stature' who are coming forward for the next election".

Well, if Fraser March is an example of the candidates Dumaresque is turning up, better he focus his attention on something other than media calls. Apparently, the only thing Dumaresque has done so far is cause people to wonder who is actually leading the Liberals.

Normally, the party president is a back room job, a behind-the-scenes organizer. You know. The kind of thing a political party needs a scant five months before an election.

But Dumaresque appears on the airwaves and in the papers seemingly as often as party leader Gerry Reid. In the meantime, no star candidates have emerged. No prospects have been rumoured.

There's a convention coming up in June. So far little has been heard of it. Perhaps Dumaresque could have talked about that as another key step in the road to the fall election, rather than chat about the government's budget. Maybe there was something could have talked about instead of his skill at whistling past the graveyard.

Is March the sort of top notch candidate Dumaresque has in mind? Sadly, there isn't anybody else that Dumaresque has been able to offer up, so most voters will draw their own conclusions.

Bottom line is that Dumaresque talks a lot but his claims produce nothing good.

Results count.

Better for Danny Dumaresque to keep himself out of the news media. Better for him to stay in the back room and sort things out. Let results be the measure of his ability.

So far the combination of Dumaresque's unsubstantiated claims and stories like the March one make people wonder why we are even bothering to have an election in the fall anyway.

-30-