Liberal Unity

Interesting piece from today's Post; obviously I don't agree with all of it but the image of John Turner, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin on the stage with Mr. Dion and Mr. Ignatieff is striking especially when you think how impossible it is to imagine Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark or Kim Campbell on a Conservative Party stage today. Unity is almost there -- it can be finalized at the Convention:

Don Martin: Liberals start to play the long game


The Liberals have become the no-show party of Parliament these days, missing more votes than anyone else and standing to endorse all major legislation put forward by the Conservative government they aim to replace.

Given the furious bitterness on the opening day of Parliament’s return, nobody can blame them for giving the House of Commons a miss while letting this government twist in the wind of hard economic times.

With polls ebbing support away from the Conservatives, government MPs launched a full panic attack yesterday against Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s alleged plans for a post-recession tax hike.

He’s denied proposing any such thing and his quotes would require a vivid imagination to be viewed as anything beyond a vague, long-range hypothetical, but for Conservatives starting to wear the recession through hemorrhaged voter support, it was open season on Iggy with all verbal guns blazing. They filled member statements with five-alarm fear-mongering, warped answers into out-of-context pretzels and threw puffballs for fretting ministers to answer with a gusto that suggested the recession was ending and a Liberal tax hike imminent

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Studiously ignored was any reference to what NDP leader Jack Layton has calculated to be a daily loss of 100 jobs per hour, economic shrinkage that will get worse if the collapse of two car manufacturers has to be factored into his grim calculation. But for the resurging Liberals, playing calm and coy will be the orders of the day for the next eight weeks.

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But on the horizon is an interesting optic that could make the party’s revitalization a lot easier. While organizers are having trouble producing a suitable video to salute former leader Stéphane Dion at next month’s meaningless party convention, they promise one picture that will be worth thousands of words.

Three former in-fighting Liberal prime ministers (John Turner, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin) will take the stage with Mr. Dion and Mr. Ignatieff as a symbol of something more potent — a Liberal reunion of purpose.

For a Conservative government that seems adrift in policy flexibility over principle, pre-occupied with wowing Americans over Canadians and scrambling to paper over cracks in its merged foundations, that’s a worrisome optic. After all, don’t look for Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark or Kim Campbell to set foot on the same stage as Stephen Harper.

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Sounding the alarm against a real or imaginary Liberal tax hike will be the Conservatives. And the volume will rise incrementally and hysterically with every slip the governing party suffers in the polls.

National Post

dmartin@nationalpost.com