Bob Rae speaks to reporters in Ottawa in February. Andre Forget QMI Agency
The biggest question Liberals have to answer isn’t what went wrong in last week’s election but where do they stand as a party?
Liberals used to claim they were a centrist party, one that stole a little from the left and a little from the right and straddled the mushy middle of Canadian politics. That positioning was enough to make them the most successful political party in the Western world for most of the 20th century.
The last two elections though they have run campaigns from the left and lost.
Stephane Dion’s Green Shift plan wasn’t so much about the environment as it was about redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. It was in a sense, pure socialism.
When Michael Ignatieff came in as Liberal leader thanks to his bloodless coup it looked as if he was going to move the party back to the centre. It never really happened.
Ignatieff, who was never trusted fully on the left because of his Iraq war stance and support for “coercive interrogation” techniques, kept his party on a leftward tilt. After losing seat after seat to the Conservatives over the last few elections, the Liberal brain trust decided to target NDP voters rather than the former Liberal voters who had moved over to the Tories.
On areas where Ignatieff could have gained some support, like calling for a pull-out from Afghanistan, he deeked right and called for Canadian troops to stay. They did and he gave Stephen Harper cover on the issue.
Now we have talk of the Liberals and NDP merging. A formerly successful Liberal prime minister pushing a formerly unsuccessful NDP premier as Liberal leader and the NDP saying they don’t want to merge, things are going just peachy these days.
If the Liberals were still a centrist party they would never talk of merging with the NDP. The fact that they are shows how far left they have drifted and speaks volumes of their identity crisis and their ongoing losses.
The next few months will be interesting.