Now that the little distraction that was the American Presidential election is now over and we’re all feeling chipper that Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States, we can roll our eyes back towards this land of ice and snow and start killing snow moose for walrus-men consider the political dynamic here.

On October 14th, Canada held its 40th General Election. On the surface, it seemed like nothing changed. Seats were flipped and Stephen Harper remains a Prime Minister with a minority, just as it had been since 2006. But for the two major players, the Conservatives and the Liberals, everything has gotten considerably worse.

Yes, Stephen Harper managed to get the Conservatives another term in power and even gained a bunch of seats. But, he’s failed to get a majority after facing a severely weakened Liberal party twice. He couldn’t do it against Paul Martin and a Liberal party that was caught in a scandal. He couldn’t do it against Stephane Dion, even after controlling the narrative about Dion being a weak leader and shoving misinformation to everyone about the Green Shift. It’s becoming less likely that he’ll see the majority that he’s been fighting for since he became leader. This draws us to consider who might be succeeding him and it appears that there’s no one obvious yet. This will be a problem for them.

On the other hand, the Liberals couldn’t be in worse shape. Most of the seats that were changed were ones that were red. The party is in a poor state financially and with another leadership race so soon after the last one, the strain on the monies will only get worse. The party’s share of the popular vote is getting gobbled up by the NDP. The chances that the Liberals go the way of the Progressive Conservatives is getting larger and larger and the next leader will be determining whether the Liberals survive or not.

And that brings us to the Liberal leadership race. Immediately, we’re faced again with Michael Ignatieff facing off against Bob Rae, but things are looking a bit different today than it was two years ago. For one thing, there isn’t the cornucopia of candidates running. This time, we aren’t seeing the bitter divides between the two frontrunner camps that plagued the last race. It looks like the Liberals have realized the situation they’re in. And in addition to the sombre mood of the party, there’s the sombre mood regarding the economy.

These two factors greatly reduce the chance of anything like Dion’s from-behind victory from happening again. On the other hand, from the endorsements and support that he’s been getting, it looks like the party is almost ready to just hand Michael Ignatieff the leadership. On the plus side, it doesn’t seem like there will be an irreparable rift between the two frontrunner campaigns this time around. However, I’m not happy with the near-presumption that Ignatieff will just take a stroll until May and win. I think he should have to fight for it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be getting much of one.

I’ve honestly never understood how it was possible for Bob Rae to become a serious contender to lead the Liberals. I know he’s smart and has all the qualities for the job and it looks like a lot of Liberals do too. But outside of that, there are too many people who have a dislike for him, regardless of whether or not he deserves it. It doesn’t matter if he’s changed his positions or that he may have done the best he could in the early 90s, you can bet that the Conservatives will attack that angle relentlessly. Just look at how they controlled Dion’s image.

The other guy is Dominic LeBlanc. He’s young, smart, and is apparently a fine MP. His biggest challenge is the fact that we’ve been hearing nonstop about Rae and Ignatieff for over two years now, while he’s relatively unknown nationally.

I guess it’s fairly obvious who I think should be the next leader of the Liberals by default. But I will qualify that by revisiting the 2006 leadership race. In 2006, I thought Gerard Kennedy should be the leader. He swung more to the left side of the party and had a pretty good record. As the Minister of Education in Ontario, he did a lot to fix the screwups that are the reason that Mike Harris is so reviled by students.

Michael Ignatieff on the other hand was not those things. He’s definitely more of a centrist. His initial support for the Iraq war threw a wrench in his campaign. But most importantly, he was a very new MP and had just returned from the States. Before his return and shortly after it, there was speculation that he returned to try to run for the leadership of the Liberals. The question to me was why we would want someone who came back just to do that?

Two years later, through his time as an MP, we’ve learned a lot more about him. He’s definitely intelligent, but more importantly, he’s also very articulate. Despite being away from Canada for so long, he has an excellent understanding of the national culture. He’s got a vision for Canada, as a nation and for our standing in the world. He has the progressive values that the Liberals stand for. He’s not one of the old-school guys from one of Chretien’s or Martin’s camps. He’s got the support of the party. He understands that the party desperately needs to be transformed and rebuilt. And he’s likely not going to get trapped and smeared by the same Conservative strategy that took down Dion.

He’s someone I can respect and someone who’ll probably be able to make me switch my vote back to red.

Tags: Canada, liberals, Politics

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.