Fortress to flophouse?
A new poll shows support for the Grits is evaporating across the country. Has the once impregnable Liberal Party of Canada mortgaged its hold on power?
Andrew Duffy
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, September 27, 2008
In politics, eight years can be an eternity.
Consider that in November 2000, the Liberal party cruised to its third consecutive majority government. The win extended the Liberal stranglehold on power, giving the party its 16th victory in 24 campaigns.
The right-wing vote was fractured between the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives which contributed to the Liberal haul in Ontario, where the party won 100 of 103 seats.
In Quebec, the contest was a two-party race with the Liberals (36 seats) and Bloc Québécois (38 seats) dividing the spoils.
So strong was the Liberal hold on power that some politicians and academics argued it could only be broken by a proportional voting system to replace the "first-past-the-post" system that had been in place since Confederation.
There was talk of Gritlock, Liberal hegemony and the perils of a one-party state.
Eight years on, the political landscape has been transformed.
The once indomitable Liberal party has been thrust into the role of underdog in this election: the Liberals trail the ruling Conservatives in every major national poll and seem destined to lose even more ground in Quebec, a province that used to vault them into government.
A Harris/Decima poll this week placed the Liberals in fourth place in British Columbia, behind the Conservatives, NDP and Green party. An Ipsos Reid poll done for Canwest News Service and Global National and released yesterday showed the party of Laurier and Trudeau in danger of being replaced as the official Opposition by the New Democratic Party.
The party must now compete for votes against the NDP and Green party on the left even as Stephen Harper's Conservatives encroach further on the centre. The party's finances are a mess, its leader is under assault and its main policy plank, a carbon tax, will not float with an electorate worried about a sinking economy.
Things are now so bad that some analysts believe the Liberals are about to enter an extended -- eight year? -- wander through the political wilderness.
Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente declared this week: "What we have here is a train wreck. It's the wreck of the Liberal party as we know it."
In the National Post, former Liberal party president Stephen LeDrew announced on Wednesday: "Barring a miracle -- that intermittent visitor to political campaigns -- the Liberals are going to take a drubbing in this election, which is exactly what they need in order to survive as a viable national force."
As the federal campaign moves beyond the halfway mark, the fate of the Liberal party has emerged as a critical political question to be answered by this election. It's a question that raises others: How did things go so bad so fast? Is their situation really as desperate as it seems? And finally, what would a Liberal train wreck mean for Canada?
Eight years ago, facing an inexperienced Stockwell Day and riding the crest of economic expansion, prime minister Jean Chrétien's Liberal government appeared impregnable.
But political scientist Richard Johnston contends the Liberals were never the fortress they seemed. "The strength of the Liberal party even then was a bit of an illusion: they were turning in parliamentary majorities all right, but they were doing so with shares of the popular vote between 38 and 40 per cent."
Historically, that level of support would result in a minority government, but the opposition vote was so fractured that the Liberals' win total was magnified.
"The strength of the Liberal situation eight years ago was to a great extent, a function of the weakness of the Conservatives situation," says Mr. Johnston, a former University of British Columbia political scientist now at the University of Pennsylvania. "And we -- I certainly define myself as a guilty party here -- were skeptical that a reasonably consolidated Conservative party could be put back together."
Stephen Harper, of course, engineered just that kind of consolidation after deciding in August 2001 to re-enter federal politics. In quick succession, he won the Canadian Alliance leadership, reunited the party with a band of rebel MPs, merged the Alliance with the Progressive Conservatives, and won the leadership contest of the new Conservative party.
"People should realize how skilled Harper is: he is a dangerously effective leader," says Conrad Winn, a Carleton University political scientist and pollster.
Mr. Harper's tactical acumen has hastened the Liberals' decline, but much of their damage has been self-inflicted. Indeed, before he left office, Jean Chrétien willed to his party three time bombs that would prove disastrous to Liberal fortunes: the sponsorship scandal, campaign finance reform and a toxic succession drama.
The sponsorship scandal exposed corruption within a government program aimed at raising Canada's profile in Quebec. Auditor General Sheila Fraser found that up to $100 million had been awarded to Liberal-friendly advertising firms and Crown corporations for little or no work.
The scandal deeply offended Quebecers and scarred the image of Liberals in that province.
But the sponsorship scandal had other important consequences. In 2003, in response to the excesses it exposed, Mr. Chrétien put in place rules that banned corporate donations to political parties (corporations can donate $1,000 to individual candidates). It means parties now have to rely on individual donors and federal grants tied to national vote totals, rather than large corporate donations.
But the Conservatives have proven much more adept at winning contributions from grassroots supporters than centrist Liberals.
"Generally speaking, money goes from ideologues to ideologues, and people who are middle of the road don't care enough to give money," says Mr. Winn.
In the first six months of this year, for example, the Conservatives raised $8.5 million to the Liberals' $1.8 million.
Last year, according to returns filed with Election Canada, the Liberals had to borrow $2 million to meet operating expenses since the party received only $4.47 million in contributions. The Conservatives raised more than three times as much.
The new rules have altered the balance of power, offering Conservatives the chance to exercise their financial muscle between elections when spending rules do not apply. The Conservatives, for instance, launched ad campaigns earlier this year to negatively define the Liberals' Green Shift environmental program.
The sponsorship scandal also deepened the rift between Mr. Chrétien and his successor, Paul Martin, that had divided the Liberal party. One of Mr. Martin's first acts as prime minister in February 2004 was to call a federal inquiry into the sponsorship affair in the belief that the scandal could be pinned on the Chrétien Liberals.
But the fallout from the inquiry was not so easily contained. Judge John Gomery's preliminary report, in November 2005, castigated the Chrétien government for creating a program so poorly designed as to invite abuse. The findings triggered an election and set the stage for the January 2006 vote that brought Mr. Harper to power in a minority Conservative government. In that election, the Conservatives capitalized on the scandal to make a breakthrough in Quebec where they won 10 seats and placed second in 40 more.
Once in power, Mr. Harper was quick to woo more votes in seat-rich Quebec. He devised in November 2006 a resolution that declared the Québécois a nation within Canada, and then answered Quebec's concerns about the "fiscal imbalance" by transferring billions of tax dollars to the provinces in 2007.
The result today is that the Conservatives lead the Liberals in most Quebec ridings outside of Montreal; the Bloc Québécois remains the dominant party in the province, but is leaking support.
Concluded pollster Nik Nanos this week: "If the trend continues, we are looking at a major realignment in the province of Quebec with Canada's federal parties improving their voter mind share and the Conservatives most likely to pick up seats at this point in time."
Few but the most diehard Liberal supporters doubt that their party is in a dangerous position. The Liberals risk losing their historic place as the federalist alternative in Quebec and risk being eclipsed by the NDP in British Columbia.
"Things are potentially dire for the Liberals because you have so many things happening at once," says Mr. Winn.
The Conservatives, he says, have a skilled leader; the NDP has positioned itself as an alternative to the Liberals; the Liberals remain wounded in Quebec by the sponsorship scandal; the party itself is demoralized.
How bad could it get for the Liberals?
"The nightmare scenario," Mr. Winn contends, "is a decline into poverty."
That scenario has already been tabled by University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan, a former Conservative campaign manager, who has predicted that this election will seriously aggravate the Liberals' financial position. Nine of the party's leading figures, including Mr. Dion, are still paying off more than $1 million in debt incurred during the party's leadership race in December 2006. Those debts could still be outstanding if and when the Liberals reconvene for a leadership convention to replace Mr. Dion, Mr. Flanagan noted in a recent commentary.
"Destruction of the Liberals is not at hand," he wrote. "There will be further sequels to this movie. But if the Liberals are not careful, they, like the federal Progressive Conservatives of sainted memory, could be pushed into a financial pit they can never climb out of."
Carleton University political scientist Richard Nimijean predicted in a 2006 essay that the collapse of the Liberals' traditional "Brand Canada" could trigger significant political realignment.
Brand Canada, he said, was a successful strategy that knitted Liberal party values to Canadian ones. Among other things, it positioned the Liberals as the only party able to manage Quebec nationalism.
But Mr. Martin, in his eagerness to turn the page on the Chrétien years and present himself as a new kind of leader, undermined the Liberal brand, Mr. Nimijean argued.
The party, he says, has never recovered -- and political realignment has come to pass.
"Once you start to question your own brand, then that creates opportunity, and Harper has been quite good at exploiting that," says Mr. Nimijean, who's now studying Mr. Harper's attempt to present his government's brand of conservatism as "the new Canadian consensus."
According to Richard Johnston, the danger now for the Liberals is that Mr. Harper will be able to prove, with time, that his party can also manage the country's relationship with Quebec.
"If you can keep the Liberals out of power for long enough -- I can't tell you how long it is -- then they can't make that claim that they're the only ones who can manage that relationship," he says. "If they lose that claim, they don't really have any other -- other than that they're a moderate voice."
Although damaged, the Liberal brand remains strong enough to survive an election defeat. The party has proven itself resilient after crushing losses in the 1984 (40 seats) and 1958 (48 seats) elections. The party has a storied history and the allegiance of some of the best political minds in the country.
What's more, with two-and-a-half weeks left in the campaign, there is still time to reverse the Liberals' poll trends, but Mr. Dion needs a strong showing in the leaders' debates this week or some kind of Conservative misstep.
Curiously, though, not all Liberals are eager for that kind of turnaround.
Former party president Mr. LeDrew said this week that to avoid extinction, the Liberal party needs to take a beating in the Oct. 14 election. Only then, he said, will Liberals realize the need for a new playbook, one that no longer relies on casting Mr. Harper as dangerous neo-conservative.
"To regain their relevance," he wrote, "Liberals will have to think beyond their traditional tenets, created in the 1950s and 60s ... Liberals must decide what it means to be a Liberal in the 21st century, what needs to be achieved in the new financial, industrial and communications fields and what needs to be done to allow citizens to flourish in this new society."
Mr. Winn believes the political landscape, which has changed so markedly in eight years, is about to go through another major convulsion.
"At the rate things are going," he says, "I think this election is becoming a critical election, an election that changes the fundamental party loyalties of people. Almost the unforeseeable may be happening: the Conservatives rising to become the dominant party of the next generation."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
