Wake Up, and Wake Up Now

On Monday, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion is expected to tender his resignation, at which point the Liberal Party will begin the process to replace him. It should be noted that while I initially believed that this was the only reasonable course of action, I continue to remain unsure of what comes next. Not a single person who ran against Mr. Dion last time is equipped to do a better job than he did with respect to rebuilding the Party and leading it to electoral victory. Not one of them has the ability not just to unite the Party and the country, but more importantly to inspire us. I remain unconvinced that the Party can afford a leadership race when we should be focusing our efforts on raising money to build a warchest to defeat Stephen Harper.

However, regardless of my own opinions, regardless of how well I believe them to be held, Mr. Dion will proceed with his plans on Monday. When he does, the last thing we can afford to do is tell ourselves that with a new leader, all our problems will be solved. They won't. We have a serious problem. In each of the last three elections, we have lost seats in the House of Commons. We have lost support to the Tories. We have lost support to the NDP. We have even lost support to the Greens. Mr. Dion was only leader for one of those three elections. By itself, selecting a new leader will not do anything to change this.

Since the end of the Chrétien era, the backroom of the Liberal Party has forgotten how to win. To quote Austin Power, it has lost its mojo. The very meaning of what it means to be a Liberal has become blurred. We have abdicated our right to define who we are to our political opponents, and they have done a fine job of it. Well, it's time for us to wake up and take control of our own destiny once again.

I am sick and tired. I am sick and tired that the Party that I believe in, the party that I left a promising future within the Conservative Party to join, chooses to lie down and play dead. We all need to wake up, and stand up, because Stephen Harper came along and told us that being a Liberal means that we are soft on crime, soft on defense, soft on economic policy, bad diplomats, bad role-models, and risky. And instead of standing up and saying, "Listen up you right-wing, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, gun-toting, anti-choice, environment-hating liar; we're not going to put up with your crap for another second," we've chosen to hide in a corner and beg our opponents not to hurt us. You want to know why our fundraising numbers are anemic? How on earth can we expect people to give us money when we won't even defend ourselves. We are a parliamentary punching bag right now, and until we stand up, tell the country that enough is enough, and that we are going to stand up for our beliefs, we will never escape our fundraising doldrums, nor will we form government.

Stephen Harper has run one of the most divisive governments in our history. In a minority parliament, he has made a career of pitting neighbourhood against neighbourhood, community against community, region against region, Canadian against Canadian. Our surpluses are turning into deficits before our eyes, we have withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocols, we have abandoned our policy of advocating against capital punishment, and we have stood by while the machinery of government has been used to attack the non-partisan institutions of state. And still, somehow we are still losing seats. Many of us are scratching our heads, because we think that we can get along by just sitting here and waiting for people to "come home."

Enough with the sense of entitlement. Enough with the hope that maybe if people get scared enough of Stephen Harper, they'll vote for us instead. We need to grow a spine, articulate our policies, and get out there and get on offense. That's how we win.

Who The Hell is David Herle?

If you didn't know the answer to this one, I'll tell you. David Herle is the man who ran Paul Martin's leadership campaign. By the way, that was the last campaign Herle ever won. In his first try running a national campaign, Paul Martin and the Liberal party hemorrhaged enough seats to be reduced to a minority. Somehow, even though Liberals got mauled that election, Herle & Co. thought they had won. So what does Herle do for an encore? Oh, that's right, to remove all doubt about how we did in the 2004 election, Herle helped the Liberals cruise to defeat in 2006.

So why am I blogging about David Herle? Well, Mr. Herle talked to the press after last night's defeat. Herle suggested that Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion ought to be held responsible for last night's "crushing defeat". In Herle's words, "We are now again, virtually irrelevant in Western Canada and have lost the beachhead we had in British Columbia. The problems in Quebec remain widespread and deep. The NDP and Greens are encroaching on the Liberal party's territory from the left." Now, I suppose if anybody is an expert on crushing electoral defeat, it's David Herle. What most people don't recognize is that he's still trying to cover for his own failings when he was running the LPC strategy shop. Herle's failures led to every single evil he identified, except for BC, which was the only place where Liberals picked up seats last time around. Herle missed most of the story, especially part about the massive role that campaign strategists play in the victory or defeat of their candidates.

So here's my point: David Herle needs to shut his mouth and let Stéphane Dion make a decision on his future as leader, by himself. M. Dion did something that Herle never had the guts to do: namely to put himself up for election by members of his own Party, and then his fellow citizens at large. Win or lose, M. Dion has earned the right to take a bit of time to take stock of the past two years, and of course the past few weeks. Calls by people like Mr. Herle, who haven't stood for election to anything, need to take their rightful place on the sidelines, and shut their mouths for the next little while. It's October; the review is in May. There is plenty of time.

Reality Check

So here it is: Members of the NDP are celebrating tonight. They celebrate because they gained seats, and I suppose they deserve some congratulations. Here's the reality: they have nothing to celebrate, because Stephen Harper has more seats than he came into this election with. That means that the minority of Canadians who believe in moving this country backwards have scored another victory. So here it is: why is it that those of us who are progressive are so stupid? Why haven't we learned from the trials and tribulations faced by the political right during the 1990's? Jean Chrétien won majorities throughout the 1990's in the face of a divided political right. Those majorities led to more rights for women, as well as for a number of minority groups. Canada became a more inclusive place over those years. Now, the Tories are benefiting from the fact that the political right is united while the left is not.

It's time for progressive voices in Canada to stand up to Jack Layton and even more so to Elizabeth May. I haven't done the math (but let me assure you all that I will), but I am willing to bet that in riding after riding across Canada, the Green vote combined with the Liberal vote would have beaten a number of Conservative candidates across Canada. Enough is enough! We have got to stop this nonsense. Let's be real here: there was nearly no daylight between the Green and Liberal platforms on every key issue, so every time someone voted Green instead of Liberal, they split the progressive vote, and handed seats to Conservatives across Canada. We simply cannot do this anymore.

Now, let me be clear: it is no secret that I am a Liberal, and I am not going to sit here and suggest that as Liberals, we aren't accountable for our defeat tonight. We bear a great deal of responsibility for the beating we sustained tonight. Here's the reality: this election wasn't lost tonight, last week, or last month. This election was lost long before Stephen Harper dropped the writ. When Stéphane Dion was elected Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, we all saw Stephen Harper's attack ads. For the first time in Canadian history, an incumbent governing party launched attack ads against another party when there was not even an election campaign. The national strategists in the Liberal party failed to learn from the Swift Boat attacks made against John Kerry. Full of snobbery, they decided that we were better than American voters, smarter than American voters, and they decided that no response was needed to these baseless attacks, because the public would be outraged. For the public to be outraged, the lie had to be exposed, and it wasn't. We made the fundamental error of allowing our opponents to define our Leader instead of defining him ourselves. The moment that happened, the Liberal Party was on the defensive, and you cannot win an election when you are on the defensive. To make matters worse, the Party didn't think about the most basic aspect of selling a vision: branding. Nobody really knew what the Liberal brand was this time, and having spoken to other leading Liberals, these are the basic complaints that were heard.

Let me say that I supported Stéphane Dion's bid for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. I believe that he would have made an amazing Prime Minister. I'm sad to say that as of tonight, it would appear that M. Dion will become part of a very small group: Liberal leaders who didn't become Prime Minister of Canada. I know that there are voices in the Liberal Party who want M. Dion to stay, and in my heart of hearts, I would love to see him have another shot at beating Mr. Harper. I would love to hope that we can recover from the tactical errors we made. For M. Dion to come out of the upcoming leadership review unscathed, he will need to have a minimum of 75% support when that review comes around. The internecine warfare that will be inflicted on the Party if M. Dion stays on will serve only to deepen the wounds that already exist. I don't doubt that M. Dion could survive a review vote, but it's not enough to survive; he needs a slam dunk that I doubt the Party will give him. I have always been a big fan of Stéphane Dion. I've listened to old Tory slogans, and I have to say this: back in 1996, when Stephen Harper was getting ready to leave politics for a cushy job at a right-wing think tank, it was Stéphane Dion who was actually standing up for Canada. The reality now is that the truth won't matter, because it's just too late. I am a big fan of M. Dion, and I wish he could have been more successful, but he picked a bunch of political losers to run his campaign, and it showed. It's time for a fresh start, for tough questions, and for a campaign team (the strategists, not the candidates) that knows how to throw a punch or two, and bring progressive voters home.

Get Out and Vote!

We have finally reached the finish line on what has been, in many ways, a rather underwhelming campaign. The Conservatives, for all their talk, have run ridiculously dishonest campaign. They have denied that there are any economic woes, in spite of the fact that the Bank of Canada has been forced to pump 12 billion dollars into the banking sector (by the way, that money could have paid for a national, universal child-care system AND implemented the Kelowna Accord), and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced last week that another 25-billion dollar cash injection would be needed. All this from a government that has said our banking sector is doing just fine. 37 billion dollars doesn't sound like a clean bill of health to me. That's pretty close to the ENTIRE budget of the Government of BC.

We've heard some other lies, some innocent, and some malicious. I keep hearing Tories say that this parliament was the longest minority parliament in Canadian history. It wasn't. One of Pearson's minorities lasted longer, and depending on how you crunch the numbers, so did one of Mackenzie King's, but then again, anything a Liberal does simply doesn't count to the Tories. This is hardly a big deal, other than the fact that is shows that even on minor issues, the Tories are happy to look Canadians in the eye and lie to them.

The Tory smear campaign over the Liberal Green Shift plan represents yet another example where they are on the wrong side of the issue, so they have lied, obfuscated, and attacked. They have portrayed the Green Shift plan as risky, and a tax grab, in spite of the fact that economist after economist, including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, have come out in favour of plans that follow the same overall framework. The Green Shift is not the mother of all tax hikes, as the Tories have suggested. It is, in fact, the mother of all tax cuts. Furthermore, Canadians won't be hit at the pump by this plan: gasoline is specifically exempted, since the Government already collects an excise tax on gasoline. That didn't stop Stephen Harper from lying about it.

Jack Layton is no better. I don't advocate a 2-party system in Canada, but there is a reality. Jack Layton is not going to become Prime Minister tonight. His votes killed the last Liberal government. His MP's threw around accusations about improprieties on the part of Liberals that they knew were untrue, but used for political gain. They can say what they want, but in the last election, the difference between a re-elected Liberal minority, and the Tory minority we got was decided by fewer than 15,000 votes in a handful of key ridings. The NDP swing vote in those ridings handed each of those seats to the Tories, putting Stephen Harper in power, killing Canada's commitment to a cleaner environment, social justice, healthcare for all, women's rights, the Kelowna Accord, national universal childcare, and a long list of other important social issues.

Here's the reality (and I'm going to brace myself for a deluge of angry comments): Jack Layton is not going to be Prime Minister, or at the very least, not this time around. The only person within striking distance of Stephen Harper is Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion. If you are a progressive Canadian who wants a fairer, safer, greener Canada, there's only one way to accomplish that, and it starts with getting rid of Stephen Harper. In the 1990's the political right was divided, and Canadians ended up with a series of Liberal governments. Fortunately for mainstream Canada, that's where our values were anyhow. This time, the left is divded, and an extreme minority is being forced upon us because we are splitting our votes. The way to defeat the Conservatives is for progressive voters to unite behind Liberal candidates. It may not be politically correct to say this, but it's the cold, hard reality. A vote for Jack Layton is a vote for Stephen Harper.

If you want change this election, if you want to see the truth triumph over lies, hope triumph over fear, if you want a government that governs not just for the next poll and the next election, but for generations to come, if you want a government that believes in uniting us, and not dividing us, then the choice is clear: vote Liberal.