It's time for Liberals to read the tea leaves
Adam Radwanski
National Post
Saturday, September 02, 2006
There, next to a photo of Michael Ignatieff on the cover of Wednesday's Toronto Star, was a headline intended to give Liberals pause: "If he loses, will he quit?"
The question of whether candidates will stay on as MPs after losing a leadership campaign is one of those goofy loyalty tests that partisans get far too worked up about. Unless your belief is that parties should only be led by lifelong politicians, as opposed to people who might have better things to do than sit as opposition MPs after their own parties reject them, it's not entirely clear why leadership candidates should campaign on what they'll do if they're not elected leader.
When it comes to Ignatieff, though, it's not a bad idea for the Liberals to start reading the tea leaves. In this case, they should be asking themselves a slightly modified version of the Star's question: If he wins, then loses, will he quit?
In other words, does he have the stomach to stick around after leading his party to a crushing defeat at the hands of Stephen Harper's Conservatives? Because that's by far the likeliest scenario awaiting the Liberals.
Whoever wins the leadership will be taking over a broken party with no policies, empty pockets and a non-existent organizational structure. The Tories will likely call an election by next spring or summer -- well before the new Liberal leader has had a chance to get his party's house in order, much less plan out a national campaign. That leader can then expect the unique pleasure of being humbled -- possibly humiliated -- in front of the entire country, as a gaffe-filled Liberal campaign falls prey to a slick Conservative machine.
If that's enough to drive Ignatieff back to academia, then he was never the right guy for the job. Because it's only at that point that the real work will begin.
The Liberals don't need a facelift; they need to be wholly remade and reinvented. That will take years, not months. It will take not only vision, but patience. It will take a leader who learns from his mistakes, not one who comes in assuming he has all the answers.
This is how it often is in opposition. Of the seven current provincial premiers who took their parties from opposition to government, four suffered at least one defeat first. Jean Charest lost a Quebec election he could have won; Gordon Campbell lost an election in B.C. he should have won. Gary Doer took four campaigns to get the Manitoba NDP into power. Dalton McGuinty looked hopeless losing to Mike Harris, then remade himself and his party en route to a majority victory.
Turning defeat into victory, as these leaders did, requires both patience and determination. They had to to stare down the doubters who wanted to throw them overboard, and then sit through years of tough slogging -- grilling the government, working the barbecue circuit, going to an endless number of fundraisers. And this, if anywhere, is where the questions about Ignatieff start to arise.
If the campaign were just about who will be most exciting on the campaign trail next year, he'd win hands down. While other candidates are penning 750-word op-eds that serve only as studies in how to say nothing as politely as possible, Ignatieff is explaining how to "strengthen the spine of our citizenship" in five-page essays for Maclean's.
But it's his own spine that still has to be questioned, for fear that he'll concede to his critics and step down if his first election as leader goes badly. If Ignatieff is only here for a good time, not a long time, the Liberals would do better to choose someone like Gerard Kennedy -- a younger candidate who would start off slow, but work around the clock between elections to rebuild the party.
Asked why he refused to commit to running in the next election if he loses the leadership, Ignatieff said this week that he doesn't feel the need to answer hypothetical questions. That's perfectly reasonable. But how much time and effort he'll put into rebuilding the party can't be brushed off as hypothetical. Whenever he's asked that question, he'd best have an answer ready.
aradwanski@nationalpost.com
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