The Liberals and their hang-ups

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This article was published 10/05/2010 (5985 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By Don Martin

Jean Chrétien jumped out of his chair and rummaged through a briefcase looking for the cause of his “hanging” on Parliament Hill later this month.

Chrétien wasn’t suggesting a noose, the increasingly likely fate for current Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. The Liberal prime minister from 1993 until 2003 was talking about the “hanging” of his official portrait on May 25.

“They say you shouldn’t smile,” the 76-year-old Chrétien shrugged as he showed me the two options painted by Canadian artist Christian Nicholson. “But I think I look a little austere.”

Well, austere is one way of describing it. Another might be to suggest it resembles the tight-jawed look a testy Chrétien was sporting just before he throttled a Quebec protester with his legendary Shawinigan handshake.

Standing against a plain orange backdrop, the defiant head-and-shoulders portrait favoured by Chrétien frames him for eternity as the no-nonsense streetfighter who survived a scrappy parliamentary career spanning 40 years. There’s no hint of the humble little guy from Shawinigan in this stern, slightly abstract portrait.

But there’s irony in that Chrétien today is the happiest Liberal in a capital filled with truly blue Grits, even though he complains at how his 11 golf handicap has jumped to 18 thanks to a globe-trotting schedule that keeps him off the course.

Our recent accidental encounter on the street led to a 40-minute informal chat in his office with the door closed. “That way they think I’m working,” he laughs.

There were no tape recorders or notebooks and the content wasn’t for attribution, but listening to Chrétien unspool memories of his greatest political hits was to hear the soundtrack to a Liberal version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.”

If Chrétien is unhappy with the party’s faltering fortunes under iffy leadership, he’s not willing to say so. He’ll give advice to the current regime if asked, but he isn’t asked very often.

Still, having the talkative Chrétien opt to say nothing about Ignatieff actually speaks volumes about the Liberals’ predicament as a late, great party with no revival in sight.

The amateur-hour mistakes piling up under Ignatieff’s reign have to stop soon or the party could, predicts a senior party strategist who has served three Liberal leaders, hit the rocks at just 50 seats, which would guarantee a Conservative majority.

If that happens and Prime Minister Stephen Harper axes public financing for political parties, as he almost certainly will, the party Chrétien built into a majority monolith will crumble into dust.

The list of activity in just the weeks since the party’s Deep Thinkers conference has become the Red Book of self-annihilation.

While taking aim at rural seats, they’re pushing to keep the unpopular firearms registry alive. They want the West back, yet they’re behind a private bill to force Supreme Court nominees to be bilingual.

The party that has given Canada five years of reliable health-care funding can’t figure out where it stands on Quebec’s proposed $25 doctor visitation fee and seems to lack a meaningful position on the radical reforms needed to keep health care affordable.

Ignatieff’s recent push to extend Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean’s term was so bizarre, a Liberal strategist refused to defend it on CBC’s “Power and Politics” show last week.

It couldn’t get worse. But on Wednesday it did. Incredibly, Ignatieff ran away from a move proposed by the Conservatives to expand lobbyist contact registration to include all MPs, not just cabinet ministers. The mind reels at such irrational behaviour.

OK, so it’s often premature to write off an Official Opposition leader caught in the most thankless of assignments. Harper’s case was also considered hopeless five or six years ago.

But even optimistic Liberals can’t see a salvage strategy for a party that’s falling toward the 25 per cent palliative ward of voter approval, a polling dip all the more inexplicable coming after weeks of the Conservative lobbying scandal and abortion funding controversy.

The Liberals would be advised to enjoy their final salute to Chrétien in three weeks. The next one, tentatively set in 2012 for one-term minority prime minister Paul Martin, could be the last “hanging” of a Liberal leader for a very long time — unless it’s in a figurative noose.

» Don Martin is a national affairs columnist for the Calgary Herald and National Post.