Retire the Queen? Legalize marijuana?
There’s a whiff of something special in the air as the Liberal Party of Canada tries to regain traction after its near-death experience in last year’s election. It may be desperation.
As interim leader Bob Rae put it in a spunky speech to his shrunken caucus last Wednesday, the party is eager to resume its battle from the opposition benches for an “innovative, prosperous, compassionate” country, starting with its biennial convention in Ottawa this past weekend.
That’s an attitude the millions who voted Liberal last May 2 will no doubt welcome as an alternative to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cranky conservatism or the New Democrats’ accidental ascendancy.
But the Liberals need more than a couple of razzle-dazzle ideas to fuel a comeback.
The Young Liberals managed to raise a few eyebrows with their proposals to break with the monarchy (constitutionally tricky) and to legalize spliffs (in their dreams).
But the party grownups will need to put something more in the window if they hope to command serious attention and win back the voters’ trust. They need to work up a credible sales pitch.
In Ottawa this weekend, the conversation was more about mechanics than setting the country ablaze with new ideas.
Delegates elected a new party president, voted on broadening the leadership selection process, updated fundraising techniques and stepped up their ground game. Inside stuff. Still, these nuts and bolts matter.
That done, however, the Grits may want to focus their agenda. They can’t just claw at the solidly ensconced Tories and pray that the New Democrats fizzle. Eventual electoral success hinges on rebranding themselves as a 21st-century champion of economic opportunity, social conscience and equity. The Occupy Canada activists showed there’s a market for such an approach.
Credible if not wildly fresh ideas have been percolating up from the grassroots, and were up for debate.
There were calls for a Liberal agenda that champions the knowledge economy on which Canada’s prosperity rides by making it easier for students to obtain grants and loans for college, university and trade credentials, and to work off loans by serving in the community.
There were proposals for a national anti-poverty strategy, for a new deal with First Nations, for programs to build affordable rental and co-op housing, and for universal pharmacare.
There’s a renewed push for national child care and early learning. There were ideas for improving the Canada Pension Plan to help the needy elderly. And calls for a federal-provincial deal to expand home care and to boost chronic long-term and palliative health services.
While Rae rightly cited job creation, the infrastructure deficit and clean energy as priorities, we need to hear more about the “innovation” he promises. How does the party propose to help the private sector grow the economy, exactly?
The challenge for the Liberals is to marshal their progressive impulses into a coherent agenda, ideally leavened with some forward thinking on wealth creation, and put it out there for voters to consider. That’s no small task, given that the party won’t even have a new leader until 2013. But it’s a better bet than banking on reefer republicanism.
An editorial from the Toronto Star.