A Thanksgiving message for members of the Liberal Party.  They might not feel like they have much to be thankful for right now.  And they don't.

So it's not a pleasant message.  But it's one they need to hear if they want still be Liberals when next Thanksgiving comes around.

This post is addressed to Liberals.

Remember Stephane Dion's plaintive cry of how difficult it was to set priorities?  It was a pathetic response to none other than Michael Ignatieff, who in a leadership debate in 2006 demolished Stephane Dion's environmental record.

Your delegates went on to select Stephane Dion anyway.  And he went all environmental on you, presumably to set priorities right, and promptly lost an election in the worst drubbing the Liberals have been subjected to in living memory.

Did you learn from that?  Did you say to yourself, amid the cheering of Conservatives after the 2008 election results, "Boy, next time I'm going to have the chance to select my party's leader, and I am going for someone strong, someone with backbone, someone who can take the heat!"

Of course, you didn't get the chance.  Stephane Dion utterly imploded after the 40th parliament sat, and was ejected from the role of leader.  Instead of going to you, the membership of the Liberal Party, with the new one-member-one-vote system to select a new leader, they told you there was no time, that an election was imminent, or the coalition would take over, so the decision had to be taken immediately.

So Michael Ignatieff was made interim leader while simultaneously being the leading contender.  Dominic LeBlanc and Bob Rae promptly withdrew from the race, seeing the pointlessness of it all.

So you were cheated of your chance to see Michael Ignatieff again in action.  To see for yourself if he had the stuff of leadership, and to cast your vote accordingly.  Instead, a faux convention with one leadership contender was held, and Michael Ignatieff became leader.

Today, the leader you never picked, the leader who was selected by the power brokers of the party who think they know best, is reduced to pleading with Canadians to tell him what he has to do for them to like him:

In reaction, the Liberal leader, recently dubbed by Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin as "Narcissief," became unusually humble: "If there are things I need to do better, I am certainly going to be ready to try, because I want to listen to Canadians and improve my performance any way I can."

It is difficult to imagine that anyone in a leadership position could seem so pathetic short of facing a career-ending scandal.  All Michael Ignatieff has in front of him are two months of miserable polls and already he's pleading.  Pleading!

Yes, he's even worse than Stephane Dion.

Do you think you would have spotted this in Ignatieff?  Do you think the delegates in 2006 spotted that when they rejected Ignatieff in favour of Dion?  Do you think that in a leadership fight, Dominic LeBlanc or Bob Rae would have seriously tested Ignatieff's mettle and found it lacking?

The way it seems lacking today?

Do you think the Liberal Party story of the last nine months would have been dramatically different if you had been asked to help write it?  That was the opportunity that they promised for you.  They broke that promise.

If the Liberal Party is in trouble today, it's not because of Beatles songs and economic good news.  It's because the Liberal Party did not want to listen to its membership.  It listened to delegates in 2006, the ones who rejected Michael Ignatieff, and did not like what it heard.  Those that run the Liberal Party thought they knew better.  Instead of replacing the delegate system with something more democratic, they replaced it with something less, to make certain the choice they had made years earlier would finally be forced on the party as a whole.

The result has been worse, not better.

Tell your party that you demand a real choice next time, and a real voice with which to make that choice.

Tell them that you want the opportunity to make that choice to come sooner rather than later.  Tell them that you are owed the chance to make the choice that they denied to you.

Do it soon, or be tossed into the ashbin of history.

It's up to you.  I'm not inclined to help you in any way whatsoever.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Liberal comes to the same conclusion.  Time for the grassroots to take back the party from the power brokers who broke the contract -- no democratic convention in return for a leader who could win.

Posted by: Steve Janke at 03:13 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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