Newman’s obituary for Liberals sees Iggy as convenient fall guy
Bestselling author Peter C. Newman, a prominent political commentator and chronicler of Canadian prime ministers, initially set out to write a book about Michael Ignatieff’s journey to the prime ministership. But the dramatic events of the May 2011 federal election rudely changed that.
Instead he has written about the Liberal party’s fortunes under Ignatieff’s tutelage and the subsequent collapse of the big Liberal tent. And his second overarching aim is to examine the significant nation-building role that the party has played in Canada — especially as a driver of economic progress and social reform.
Not surprisingly, his depiction in When The Gods
Changed of Ignatieff’s crash and burn, to say nothing of his prediction of a death spiral for this historic party, has left rank-andfile federal Liberals angry as hell about Newman’s latest offering — not unlike Conservative party supporters who were outraged by
his 2005 bestseller The Secret Mul
roney Tapes.
Even before the 2011 campaign, argues Newman, the Liberals were already on life support and fading quickly — compliments of the Quebec sponsorship scandal, a deep sense of entitlement and overbearing arrogance, and the general loss of its political mojo. For Newman, Michael Ignatieff was merely “the agent of death” and a convenient fall guy.
For whatever reasons, and no one can be sure what they were, Ignatieff never caught on with Canadians. “The voters discarded him like a Zellers sweater they hadn’t even bothered to try on,” Newman points out bitingly. A big part of the problem, as the author notes halfway through the book, was that though Ignatieff was an accomplished academic and public intellectual, he just never found his political feet or comfort zone with the electorate. Perhaps he was away from the country too long, posits Newman.
According to sources close to Ignatieff, he had a habit of doing his own thing and not listening to party members and advisers. This was starkly on display at a September 2009 party event in Sudbury, Ont., when he made the colossal error of defiantly shouting: “Mr. Harper, your time is up!” It was a huge strategic error because everyone in the Liberal caucus knew it was an empty threat (and thus many MPS lost confidence in him), and it spoke volumes about Ignatieff’s lack of political judgment. His support of the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq also did little to endear him to Liberal supporters.
But as Newman also rightly emphasizes, the disintegration of the Liberal party was not just “Iggy’s” fault, since the Grits were well behind the times by the early 21st century, and their organizational prowess had virtually disappeared. There was no longer any vaunted Liberal political machine to speak of.
“Like it or not, the Liberals have long been our political gods, turning this awkwardly giant land mass into a field of realizable dreams. But the gods have changed,” declares Newman. As he goes on to explain, the party has long been plagued by a failure to renew its structures, to end its interminable party leadership infighting and to revitalize itself with fresh ideas.
Still, for most of the 20th century, as Newman ably chronicles, the Grits were known as the natural governing party — always striving to be all things to all people. They had built a progressive, innovative and forwardlooking country and placed Canada firmly on the world stage. But those days are now long gone. By the mid2000s, and after a devastating internal feud between the Martinites and the Chretienites, the book points out that the Liberal machine was barely firing on one cylinder.
The major election shocks of the 2000s for the federal Liberals were not isolated setbacks, as some party insiders maintain, but life-threatening body blows. “Harper’s astute management of Canada’s Conservatives has resulted in the party displacing the Grits as Canada’s Natural Government Party,” Newman writes bluntly. Obviously, the 2011 election results exposed the sharp decline in the once proud Liberal juggernaut.
“They couldn’t even seem to make an issue of how much money the Conservative party was willing to spend to basically propagate a lie: $10 million, to portray the Liberal leader as an opportunist come home for his advantage, instead of ours,” writes Newman.
Instead of responding with an aggressive advertising campaign of their own to counter the incessant Harper attack ads, the party (actually flush with cash) found itself earmarking a large portion of its funds to every federal-provincial party association and special interest commission within the party.
When The Gods Changed is an easy and engaging read replete with lively writing, and Newman’s use of extensive personal interview material certainly strengthens the work. Of course, this is not a sophisticated academic treatment, with suitable comparisons to other political party systems, of the Liberals’ existential crisis. There are obvious gaps in his analysis. He does not, for instance, even entertain the notion of a Liberal-ndp merger, the possibility the NDP could self-destruct in a post-jack Layton milieu or that the Liberals could gradually rebuild their party brand. I’ll leave the last word on this subject to Newman: “Ottawa is a company town. Liberals invented the franchise. It just expired.”