Is the most successful democratic political party in human history poised on the edge of extinction?
Yes, argues veteran Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman in his new book, When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada.
Newman writes that the venerable party, the only one to survive from the days of Confederation, has been "steaming in the wrong direction" for the past four elections. First to go was its majority government, then the minority government, and then even Official Opposition status following the debacle earlier this year.
"That's a loss of about 800,000 votes per election," Newman told the North Shore News. "You can't make that up or repair that."
But as Newman, a former Deep Cove resident, admits early on, this wasn't the book he set out to write. The original working title was Michael Ignatieff: The Making of a Prime Minister.
"Like a lot of other people," he said. "I assumed that when Mr. Harper was making quite a few tactical mistakes and looked pretty beatable, and the Liberals had this world-class intellectual to lead them, that he would win."
Newman joined Ignatieff on his cross-Canada bus tour in the summer of 2010. To judge by the cheering crowds, Newman recalled, things were going well.
"He was getting a very good reception. People applauded, people were smiling, they seemed very happy. I read that he was gaining support. Then the polls came out at the end of the tour and he hadn't made any mileage at all. I quickly realized that the whole thing had been a bit of a farce. He'd been talking to Liberals. It was a Liberal crowd that came out and sure they applauded, but it didn't change the votes."
Those stagnant polls were "a big clue" to Newman that he was going to end up writing about a funeral rather than a coronation. Then there was the impulsive election call in Sudbury that the Liberal leader had to back away from, followed by "many, many, many mistakes."
"It was clear to me that even though he was a very respected intellectual, intellectuals seek truth but politicians seek power.
And those are very different, you need a very different set of skills and he just didn't have them. Politics is just as much a profession as any other. Part of the definition of a profession is that you serve an apprenticeship and he never did. He left the country and more importantly he went into quite different disciplines, and then suddenly he's supposed to be reborn as a political leader of a party that was on the way down."
In the book, Ignatieff comes across as something of a tragic figure, a man who believed he could revitalize the ailing party but was ultimately swamped by its dysfunctional culture.
Although Newman doesn't shy away from Ignatieff's missteps - and there were many - the author says the seeds of the Liberals' demise were sown long before, some perhaps as far back as the wartime Mackenzie King government. During the PearsonTrudeau era, writes Newman, the Liberals were a party driven by volunteers, keen to bring in new people and new ideas. But during the Jean Chrétien regime, "the Liberal party ceased being a democratic or even innovative institution. It was transmogrified into a power-preservation vehicle for its insiders."
As well as being bitterly divided by the Chrétien/Paul Martin civil war, the party was increasingly paralyzed by the costs of funding innumerable local associations and commissions, each with a staff and office budget.
"The Liberals' rotten internal culture meant that the power brokers would rather the party die than lose their little fiefdoms," Newman writes. The result was that even while Liberal fundraising went quite well, the party had no answer to the steady barrage of Conservative attack ads in the run-up to the 2011 election.
Recruitment of strong candidates was also a problem, said Newman. One of the few new stars, he writes, was Dan Veniez, candidate for West Vancouver-Sunshine CoastSea to Sky Country. After the election, Newman got this quote from a defeated Veniez:
"My single greatest and most profound disappointment in Ignatieff was that this extraordinary man of letters who I had gotten to know through his body of work bore no semblance whatsoever to Michael Ignatieff, MP and political leader . . . . It was almost as if he made a deliberate choice to ignore that guy, to become someone he wasn't, and recast himself as someone else that he could never be - a man of the people."
Now, the "natural government party" has been pressed into an unprecedented third place result, and Newman said he doesn't see any way back for the Grits.
"It is unthinkable," he said. "When you look at our institutions, things that separate us from the Americans, most of them are Liberal initiatives, including Medicare and the pension program etc . . . . Canada was formed by these ideas.
And yet, the things I've quoted are facts: the Liberals have no geographic home in Canada anymore, the election trends are against them, and most importantly, they have no money. Third parties have a devil of a time raising money. When you give money to an opposition party, the unspoken transaction is that some day you'll be in power and you'll be able to do something for me."
While there are examples of parties rebounding from crushing losses - the Progressive Conservatives and the B.C. NDP for example - Newman doesn't expect the same to happen for the Liberals. With seperatism "a spent force," he sees the future of the federal government belonging to either the Tories or the New Democrats.
"People write off the NDP because it's full of young people who haven't been in politics very long but there's another way to look at that. It's got new energy, people who have discovered the excitement of politics.
There's a vacuum in Quebec that they filled and can continue to fill. So I don't dismiss the possibility of an NDP government, probably a minority to start with. I don't find that a frightening prospect."
