It is with some concern and a morbid curiosity that I view the decomposing carcass and slow motion train wreck of what was once a major political force in this country. I am referring of course to the Liberal Party of Canada under its’ last few leaders, most notably Stephane Dion, and now under current leader Michael Ignatieff. Referencing the title of this blog, The Independent View, I am often asked what that refers to, and why I claim to be an independent. What I mean by Independent is that I have no firm party affiliation. I sometimes vote Liberal and sometimes Conservative. I will admit that the NDP holds no allure for me as I find their far left positions to be more useful to a party in perpetual opposition than to a party facing the harsh realities of government.

Jean Chretien was, in my humble estimation, the last truly effective leader of the Liberal Party,  and generally stuck to a fairly centrist course in his ten plus years as Canada’s Prime Minister.  It was of course under the combined tag-team leadership of Chretien as PM and Paul Martin as Finance Minister that Canada’s 25 year addiction to deficit spending was finally kicked into the trashcan where it belongs. I firmly believe that governments should live within their means and not run deficits.  After running deficits since the early 1970s under Pierre Trudeau,  Chretien and Martin finally balanced the budget in 1995. Chretien’s successor, Paul Martin, turned out to be a much better Finance Minister than Prime Minister. He spent much of his adult life angling for the top job, and was incredibly effective in doing so. The only problem was that once he became PM, Martin did not seem to have much of a plan, was reduced to a minority government and acquired a well-earned reputation as a ditherer. Chretien of course, had always enjoyed majorities. While a thoroughly decent man who has had a very impressive career in the business world, as PM Martin seemed to have an overly soft touch and displayed little of the fiscal restraint he was known for as Finance Minister. It seemed that any provincial premier who wished to stick Martin’s head in the toilet for more than about 5 minutes, would be quickly rewarded with a few billion here or there. Danny Williams immediately comes to mind, as do many other instances where Martin quickly found extra money to spend on some new project.

Martin did himself no political favors when he appointed Judge John Gomery to investigate the sponsorship scandal which erupted near the end of Chretien’s time in office. Jean Chretien as PM would have known how to say that the matter was being investigated by police, to quickly sweep the whole affair under the carpet and move on to new business. Instead, Martin’s Gomery Commission turned what might have been a short-term scandal into much longer term sideshow that largely sunk the Liberal ship and paved the way for the eventual election of Conservative Stephen Harper as Canada’s 22nd Prime Minister in January of 2006.

Since the time of his election, Harper’s priorities have shifted more toward the centre, than the far right positions he once espoused. Harper is now running the same sort of essentially centrist government that the Liberals successfully ran for years under Chretien. Canadians instinctively sit in the centre, and any government that ignores this important fact does so at its’ peril.

Since Paul Martin’s departure from the PM job, the Liberals have had two leaders, the hapless Stephane Dion, and now the thoroughly patrician Michael Ignatieff. When Dion got the top job, I thought there had been some sort of mistake. How could it be that fourth place candidate Dion suddenly won the race at the last minute? Ignatieff had been leading pretty much through the entire leadership race, and he now was suddenly beaten by the fourth place Dion. Well, it turned out there had been a considerable “Anyone But Ignatieff” movement going on that was essentially able to pile three midgets on top of each other to beat the tall man in the contest. Dion’s brief time as leader was disastrous for the party. His performance in the 2008 election, where the Liberals suffered their second worst result ever, largely speaks for itself. While a decent man himself, he was not known to possess the stuff of which effective political leaders are made. To say he lacked charisma, and a decent command of english would be to engage in sublime understatement.

This brings us to the present leader of the Liberal party, one Michael Grant Ignatieff (aka Iggy). On December 10, 2008, nearly one year ago, this much ballyhooed former historian and allegedly noted intellectual assumed the mantle of the Liberal leadership, in what was supposed to be a proper leadership campaign, but which ended up being a virtual coronation. Having felt that the Liberals missed their chance to elect Ignatieff as leader in the previous leadership campaign which ultimately chose Dion, many Liberals breathed a sigh of relief when he finally assumed the top job. It was widely agreed that Dion had not been good for the party, and there was a feeling that Ignatieff had the charisma and smarts to finally whip the Grits into shape.

Typically when a new party leader is elected (or “chosen” as was Iggy’s fate), there is a so-called Honeymoon Period where the new leader is poked and prodded by members of the media as we get to know the new person in charge. In Ignatieff’s case, it seems he largely disappeared for about 6 months, rather than bask in the glow of such extra media coverage. Where is Iggy?, people began to ask. Why is he not sticking it to the government and using his new soapbox more effectively? Eventually, it was said that he was getting the party into shape internally and generally getting his ducks in a row. Indeed, there was some progress made on fund raising, an area that the Conservative government holds a well acknowledged lead over the Liberals. Ok then. Still more time passed. People waited for Ignatieff the Effective to emerge.

Now here we are almost a year to the day he was chosen, and he still appears to be missing in action. For months this spring and summer, the Conservatives did a complete hatchet job on Ignatieff, with a scathing ad campaign designed to paint him as an elitist intellectual, out of touch with the people and who was “just visiting” Canada from his previous lofty perches at Harvard and Oxford. The ad campaign, though fairly transparent for the most part, did much to bring Ignatieff’s poll numbers down to earth. Against the massive negative onslaught of those ads, Iggy managed only to make a few vaguely positive ads showing him in a forest setting, spouting non-specific bromides about how “we can do better”. One article I read recently compared this tactic as pitting a Nobleman (Ignatieff) against a Doberman (PM Harper). We can all see how that fight has ended up, at least so far. There are considerable questions as to whether he has the fire in his belly and whether he wants the top job enough to really go for Harper’s jugular.

Finally this fall, Ignatieff decided to make a bold move. He would bring the government down. Why force an election? Perhaps he simply felt it was his turn to be PM. His poll numbers at that brief moment were looking about as good as they had since he became leader. The Liberals were for the first time in recent memory besting the Conservatives, though not by much.

The only problem was that Canadians, after far too many elections in recent years, were in no mood to go to the polls once again. The government dared Ignatieff to pull the plug. It also seemed much of the media did not want this election either, as there were a spate of very unflattering editorials written almost simultaneously across the country debasing Ignatieff and stating why we did not need another election. Within short order Ignatieff’s polling numbers immediately began to tank.

Here we are now a few months later, and the polls have moved decidedly against the Liberals with the Conservatives polling around 34% to the Liberals current 24%. That is a spectacular decline from where things stood in early fall when the Liberals were briefly ahead of the Conservatives. PM Harper’s attack dogs and attack ads have done their job for now, and Iggy now looks almost as hapless as Stephane Dion did during his brief time as leader. In recent weeks, Ignatieff has decided to replace many of his top advisers and to take on a number of the top people from Jean Chretien’s former inner circle.

Perhaps his new advisers can bring some much needed coherency, focus and discipline to the Liberals scattershot message machine. This is a party that needs to decide what it stands for and why, and to do it quickly. My personal belief is that they need to return to the centrist policies that saw them govern the country successfully for so many years, and to stop trying to out-NDP the NDP. There are already too many parties on the left in Canada. Let the NDP represent the far left. As for the Greens, well the less said about them the better. Green leader Elizabeth May, were it not for her undeniably impressive ego, would be better served to fold up her tent and join either the Liberals or the NDP, i.e. a party with actual sitting MPs. Alas, she would no longer be the top dog, and able to bask so lovingly in the majesty her own glow. But I digress. We were talking about the Liberals.

Three ineffective leaders since the departure of Jean Chretien in December of 2003, have turned what was once the so-called Natural Governing Party into just another also-ran party on the left. I believe that Ignatieff has about 6-9 months (or until the next election) to prove himself as an effective leader with his new group of top advisers, before serious calls for his scalp will begin in earnest. We have already seen such calls emerge with the recent release of some highly negative Facebook postings by the wife of former leader Stephane Dion. The job of leader of the Opposition is to position himself and his party as serious contenders and a viable government in waiting. So far in Iggy’s brief reign, we have seen nothing of the sort. The clock is ticking Mr. Ignatieff.