James Travers: Liberal Fest Will be Lost Weekend

Maybe the Liberals need a grassroots tea party goading them. Ignatieff needs some sort of hearing aid so that he can listen to the base rather than go off on a weekend thinker's conference that as Travers claims is full of experts trying to figure out what would be the best way to create some new props to attract votes. The parties are to raise funds and do all the grunt work on campaigns. A few hacks may get some payback but mostly the grass roots are meant to stay underground and just feed the tops. This has nothing to do with a green shift by the way! This is from the Star.

Travers: Liberal fest will be lost weekend


By James Travers
National Affairs Columnist
Drape the long-suffering political party in mourning. Another nail is being driven into the coffin of grassroots democracy by a weekend Liberal conference dominated by professionals, not the eager amateurs whose energy and ideas once propelled parties forward.

For the second time in a little over a year, Liberals are about to sacrifice accountability to expediency and a show. Last winter the party elite scuttled a leadership campaign to crown Michael Ignatieff with scant regard for his values, campaign readiness or rank-and-file opinion. Now those same insiders are posing him, like Auguste Rodin's celebrated sculpture, as thinking hard about where to take party and country.

To keep it sound-bite simple and silence dissent, the caucus is being advised to stay away. Counterintuitive and embarrassing, that's only one superficial symptom of a deeper, wider malaise.

Beyond raising cash and providing campaign workers, political parties don't matter much any more. They have little control over the leaders they choose and even less influence over defining policies or election platforms.

As Conservatives learned to their surprise just weeks after the 2008 federal election, card-carrying loyalists are merely one among multiple groups of "stakeholders." No matter how profoundly felt or long held, the ideology that attracted them to the Reform party and now binds them in the Conservative coalition carries about the same weight with the leader and now Prime Minister as nagging advice.

That evolving reality is on a sliding scale. On one end is an NDP that talks often and earnestly about divisive issues and expects its leaders to be sensitive when adjusting convention resolutions to changing circumstances. On the other are Liberals who became the Western world's most successful political organization largely by resisting the temptation to let principle get in the way of the pragmatic pursuit of power.

It's that pragmatism that took Liberals to nearby Aylmer in 1991 to distance themselves from John Turner's lost battle against free trade. It's that pragmatism that's taking them back to Montreal, where they hope to regain past glories by persuading voters that Ignatieff – impressions of uncertainty notwithstanding – has a compelling plan.

Far from the worst of recent ideas, the weekend conference accepts that more than a decade in office made Liberals dependent on bureaucrats for ideas. Loose and begging top-down manipulation, that process also recognizes the urgent need to put something fresh in the window for the coming election.

But there's a crucial distinction between safely parading experts across a stage and the risky process of asking Liberals to decide what's now important about being Liberals. That difference separates being in the crowd from being a player and, among other things, helps explain why less than 5 per cent of Canadians now bother to join political parties.

It's true, as Conservatives were reminded by Stephen Harper's cameo appearance when they last gathered on a blustery Winnipeg weekend, meeting the party in public sometimes leads to awkward moments we-the-media gratefully exploit. Questions better left unanswered are asked by those ignorant to the fluid twist and turns demanded of leaders determined to win and hold power.

Still, democracy is messy and fragile. Its component parts are connected by the chain of accountability that stretches to the snapping point when elites take their parties for granted.

That, too, is something Liberals should think about this weekend.

McParland: Ignatieff heads down same path as Dion.

A sense a strong anti-Liberal bias in this article but nevertheless McParland has a point. So far Ignatieff has not had much to say about what his policies will be. At least his statements about child care are a beginning. Perhaps McParland reads too much into what Ignatieff says. Ignatieff may not make the issue into his main focus as Dion did with the Green Shift. What Ignatieff fails to do is to put any price tag on his policies and in a time of increasing deficits this will surely be important to voters. This is from the National Post.


Kelly McParland: Ignatieff heads down same path as Dion


Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff pledged that he would spend the days before Parliament resumes announcing Liberal policies and making clear where the party stands on the issues of the day.

It's never too late to tell voters what you believe in, even if Mr. Ignatieff has waited a curiously long time since taking over the leadership a year ago. Even with his activities this week he's still being economical on detail: His latest proposals have been vague at best, perhaps because the party is planning a brainstorming session in Montreal next month and doesn't want to spoil the show.

Nonetheless, on Monday Mr. Ignatieff declared that a national childcare system would be the No. 1 social item on the agenda of a Liberal government, even if he doesn't know how he'll pay for it.

"We will find the money, because it seems to me an excellent investment," Ignatieff pledged. "I am not going to allow the deficit discussion to shut down discussion in this country about social justice."

It's difficult to argue against daycare, since few people feel that absence of care is desireable. The devil is in the detail, and of course we're not getting much of that from the Liberals. Mr. Ignatieff doesn't do much to alleviate that problem by offering statements he may feel are self-evident in their worth, but which hint at a worryingly shallow set of presumptions.

"It's also the best anti-poverty program. I want every single child in Canada to have the opportunity to get a square meal when they come to daycare; to get loving care and tender care," Mr. Ignatieff said. "A lot of children in our country, we don't like to admit it, start in very turbulent difficult environment at home. The great thing about these programs is they give kids an equal start."

Well. So what's that tell us? That to ensure every child in Canada has an opportunity at a loving and tender environment, we should get them away from their parents at the earliest opportunity and enrol them in a state-backed institution? Forgive me if I have trouble with that notion. There is no question that too many Canadian children suffer difficult home lives; but you don't solve that by imposing a sweeping national program that gets children away from their parents at the earliest opportunity, loving or othwerwise.


Perhaps Mr. Ignatieff isn't talking about all children. Perhaps he's just talking about underprivileged children, or those from troubled homes. It's impossible to tell from his limited signals. If so, just what criteria will be used to weed out the children from bad homes, but not good homes? Will it be based on income, or parental performance? How will you induce wealthy, unsatisfactory parents to send their children to government daycare?


Trying to solve problems like that -- to fine-tune a large, national program so it helps the people you want without turning into an expensive subsidy for many more who don't -- is the problem with the kind of big splashy schemes the Liberals embrace. Mr. Ignatieff appears to be headed down the same wrong-way street travelled by his predecessor, Stephane Dion. Rather than deal with the issues Canadians say are at the top of their agenda, Liberal leaders prefer to identify a national ill and pledge their unshakeable determination to eradicate it.

For Mr. Dion it was the environment. Nothing in Mr. Dion's universe was a greater priority than the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and he devised an aggressive plan to deal with it. The Green Shift involved wholesale changes to tax laws and the rearrangement of national financial flows, with extensive potential disruption to the daily lives of ordinary Canadians. Mr. Dion was fine with that, because he figured voters shared his sense of the crisis we were facing.

Unfortunately for his party, he was wrong on that. Canadians cared more about the usual issues -- health, the economy, security. So Mr. Dion lost his job and was replaced by Mr. Ignatieff, who has decided that daycare, not gas emissions, is the crisis du jour, and must be "solved" at any cost.

Perhaps Mr. Ignatieff should pause to reflect. Most Canadian children come from caring homes run by loving parents. They don't need crisis intervention sponsored by the Liberal party. The Liberals have been down this path before, several times, having apparently convinced themselves Canadians are clamouring to have the burden of raising children off their hands. The failure of voters to take them up on the offer should have provided all the evidence necessary that most Canadians don't share their bias in favour of institutional care, nor do they need their priorities defined for them.

Mr. Ignatieff has insisted on his determination to listen to Canadians. So far he appears only to have picked up the same old Liberal preoccupation with intrusive government.

National Post




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Ignatieff pledges to give Federal watchdogs more bite

Some of these proposals have a telltale odor of opportunism about them. Ignatieff is taking advantage of the fact that Harper has tried to get rid of watchdogs or clip their wings so to speak. Ignatieff refuses to go into details but is trying to make hay while the gloom shines on Harper! Polls seem to suggest that perhaps Ignatieff's policy of saying little positive but launching a few jobs when he can may be working as Harper continues to punch himself.


Ignatieff pledges to give federal watchdogs more bite


Daniel Leblanc and Colin Freeze

Ottawa — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail



.Weakening the office of the prime minister has emerged as a new theme for Michael Ignatieff, with the Liberal Leader promising yesterday to strengthen agencies that oversee the Canadian Forces, the RCMP and other federal bodies.

If his Liberals were to form the government, Mr. Ignatieff said he would gladly deal with headaches stemming from the independent criticism of their actions. The proposal was made one day after he said he wanted to limit the prime minister's ability to prorogue Parliament, in the hope of capitalizing on anger toward Stephen Harper.

"All of these are pre-commitment strategies to limit and control the authority of a prime minister in a democratic system," Mr. Ignatieff said at a news conference.

"I'm saying as clearly as I can, if the public decides that is what they want to do with us, I'm willing to accept those limits."

The Conservatives responded by mocking the Liberal record on governance, pointing to the sponsorship scandal that marred the Chrétien and Martin governments. The Prime Minister's Office said the government appoints only qualified people to watchdog positions, and the jobs are not "lifetime sinecures."

"The Liberal record speaks for itself, and we will not take lessons from them," said PMO spokesman Andrew MacDougall.

Mr. Ignatieff was accompanied by two former watchdogs who complained about their treatment under the Conservative government.

Paul Kennedy, former chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, criticized his replacement by estate lawyer Ian McPhail, who conceded having little knowledge of police matters and will do the job part time.

Peter Tinsley, the former chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, called for greater legal independence for some oversight bodies, which could answer directly to Parliament like the Office of the Auditor-General.

"Every one of these agencies is a creature of Parliament and perhaps Parliament should have a way of looking at its creatures," he said.

The Liberals will look at giving more power to some watchdogs, but Mr. Ignatieff didn't want to provide further details. He said that Mr. Harper has abused his powers since coming to office in 2006, and that checks are needed on future prime ministers.

"Our democracy has been eroded in the last four years, and we need to strengthen it," Mr. Ignatieff said. "I think you judge a prime minister by his willingness to accept limits on his own authority, and we think this Prime Minister does not."

Still, Mr. Ignatieff acknowledged he will also have to learn some lessons from previous Liberal governments. Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien had no qualms in 1997 about pulling the plug on the public inquiry into the actions of the Canadian Forces in Somalia, and he has been a critic of the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

At a forum organized by the Liberals, the former chief executive at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission said that administrative tribunals are "under attack by the federal government."

Linda Keen recounted how she was fired by the Conservative government in 2008.

"I said at the time this is going to send a chill through federal tribunals," she said in a videotaped message. "Are we in an era where tribunals must be more interested in meeting the needs of the government than in doing their jobs?"

Where or where is Liberal policy gone?

It seems that there is a deliberate Liberal strategy of representing nothing to anyone except to be an alternative to Harper for everyone! Imagine a supposed intellectual saying that he does not want to scoop himself. Rather he does not want to lay out any policies that the Tories might attack and take attention away from their own faults. But if he had a decent set of policies that Canadadians accepted a Conservative attack would simply be counter productive for them. The idea that Harper is simply going to defeat himself may be correct but more likely it is wishful thinking.

In search of Liberal policy
By Susan Riley, The Ottawa Citizen
Will the thinking never end? The federal Liberals are competitive in the polls again, but how sustainable is their revival if they continue to be coy about their agenda?

Not that they appear to have an agenda, hidden or otherwise. All leader Michael Ignatieff offered on a recent tour of university campuses was predictable criticisms of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's style and polite evasions.

He didn't want to "scoop himself," he told those inquiring about his employment policies. "You're taking me farther than the Liberal party is prepared to go," he said, in answer to a detailed critique of university funding. The tarsands, he repeated, are a fact of economic life -- nothing he can do about that.

He encouraged anti-prorogation organizers in a Facebook posting this week, and confirmed he will be attending Saturday's protest in Ottawa, but refuses to back Jack Layton's call for legislation limiting future use of prorogation. When asked to define his political values, he paused then replied: "I'm passionate about freedom." So was George W. Bush.

On the pressing issue of looming deficits, he told reporters it isn't his problem, it's Harper's problem -- and he, Ignatieff, isn't about to help his rival out of the swamp. (Never mind what happens to the rest of us, I guess.)

He continues to answer questions with questions, urge patience and promise a bold new vision any time now. He sounds like Karlheinz Schreiber: wait until next week, then the true story will emerge.

But shouldn't you know where you want to take the country when you enter politics? Should you have to consult so widely to unearth your deepest convictions?

This policy striptease is supposed to end next week, when the Liberals hold mini-seminars on selected issues, including the job market, governance and Afghan detainees. We'll see if concrete, memorable proposals emerge -- but the precedents are not encouraging.

To date, Ignatieff's "substantive" speeches -- on foreign affairs, the environment, the economy -- have fallen flat. They are a predictable mélange of Harper-bashing and recycled nostrums about Liberal values. Nothing daring, nothing novel, nothing remotely appealing to disaffected voters.

All demands for more precision (including from anxious Liberals) are now fobbed off with the promise of a thinkers' conference in March in Montreal, an ecumenical gabfest designed to prepare policy for the Canada of 2017 to coincide with our 150th birthday.

No one -- well, hardly anyone -- is against thinking, particularly long-term thinking. In fact, outside the hothouse of daily politics, it happens all the time.

The challenges of coming decades have been exhaustively chronicled and are obvious to any alert citizen: climate change, the shift in economic power from North America to India and China, an over-taxed and inadequate health-care system, to name a few.

But while Liberals ponder the future, they are vague, or mute, about present-day problems. Making development aid effective. A $56-billion deficit. Unconstrained greenhouse gas emissions. A limping health-care system. Disappearing pensions. Persistent unemployment. (Let's add, for mischief, the ludicrous expense of shipping snow to the ill-chosen winter Olympics site.) At the same time, the prime minister isn't idle, one day distributing remaining stimulus cash, the next talking gravely about cutting unspecified federal programs -- madly peddling the fiction that further punishing an already demoralized public service, along with a robust economic recovery, will be enough to get us back to surplus.

If Liberals want to be taken seriously -- if they differ from the government in anything but style -- they would join a growing consensus calling for a temporary increase in the GST to help pay down future deficits. Former Liberal finance minister John Manley, now president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, is the latest to endorse this approach.

If the Ignatieff Liberals were truly visionary, serious about courting youth, they'd revive the idea of a national carbon tax, too -- to hasten the transition to clean energy and replenish depleted federal revenues.

Unfortunately, there is only one leader with the guts and cunning to try something that daring and Harper is hardly going to endorse a GST hike, given that he created the monster cuts in the first place. (He has tempered his anti-carbon-tax rhetoric somewhat, however.)

The sorry truth is that no major party is honest enough, or respectful enough, to present Canadians with hard choices. Easier to pander, or ponder.

At least Ignatieff is emphatic about one thing. He wants Liberals to stop thinking of themselves as the natural governing party. He says: "If I can achieve one thing as leader of this party, it's to get that out of the vocabulary."

He's succeeding. Polls aside, it is increasingly hard to see the Liberals as an obvious alternative -- in fact, it is hard to imagine them saying anything pertinent about anything.

Susan Riley writes on national politics.

Ignatieff defines policies-and himself.

This is from the Star. This is a very positive article on Ignatieff. Among the policies mentioned I see nothing about the environment. I guess Dion taught the Liberals to be content with criticising the Conservatives. As the article mentions key policy areas are outlined but there is little on detail except that they will retain a popular Conservative taxable benefit for pre-schoolers.



In small gatherings across Ontario, Liberal leader defines policies – and himself
April 18, 2009 Tonda MacCharlesOTTAWA BUREAU
It's 7 a.m. Wednesday and hundreds of cars exit the clogged QEW to head into a chamber of commerce breakfast featuring Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.
More than 750 men and women in business suits have paid up to $35 for buffet bacon and eggs, and to listen to the man Conservatives portray as an elitist academic, out of touch with the country he left for 30 years.
There is a caffeine-fuelled buzz in the air – and there's no election on.
Ignatieff slips into the ballroom, with his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar. She arrived back in Canada the night before from Hungary. The tour team urged her to join the last day of a four-day swing through southwestern Ontario and the Golden Horseshoe.
Ignatieff is fighting a chest infection, on "heavy-duty antibiotics," and is clearly tired.
But his wife has perked him up. So has the better-than-expected turnout of business leaders from the Oakville-Burlington area. Zsohar whispers in Ignatieff's ear the best line of his speech.
"This is what recovery looks like."
Ignatieff uses it to outline his ideas and his faith in the people in the room to lead the way to economic recovery. They eat it up.
He may as well have been talking about political recovery.
In Oakville, the bursts of applause don't come on the policy lines. Rather, it is Ignatieff's emotional pitch for hope and unity that appears to strike a chord. People seem hungry to hear the words.
"Getting there is going to require unity," says Ignatieff before launching a sharp critique of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, without ever uttering his name. "The prime minister of Canada has only one job, one job, and that is to unite the people of this country. ... This is the core function of a prime minister: to unite and not divide."
They clap, and clap again. Are they all Liberals? Or are they just sick of the current political discourse? Impossible to know.
However, three consecutive national polls show public opinion is warming to the Liberals under Ignatieff, especially in Ontario.
A convention at the end of the month in Vancouver will seal his leadership and some basic platform commitments. This week, Ignatieff signalled some key planks.
He says a Liberal economic renewal strategy would include employment insurance reform; a national early learning and child-care program that would retain the Conservatives' taxable $100-a-month benefit for preschoolers; a national affordable housing strategy; improved access to post-secondary education; more federal money for basic science and research; basic literacy, numeracy and language training; and pension reform.
These ideas are tailored to appeal to what he called "the industrial heartland" of Ontario where traditional manufacturing has been hard hit but where the "knowledge economy" represents hope for the future. They are policies that will be shaped to reach a national audience. But the road to any Liberal return to power lies in regaining seats lost in Ontario, as well as Quebec.
Ignatieff says the party is "urgently" crafting the strategies and estimating costs.
"That sounds a lot like a pre-election speech," Vin Tsui, an Oakville lawyer, says afterward. He doubts there's much appetite for an election but says he was pleasantly surprised Ignatieff appeared to have a plan – albeit one short on details.
"Given where the economy's going now, what he's saying is interesting to us, and sort of gives us hope that there is a solution and some light at the end of the tunnel."
Part of the Liberal leader's tour is to solicit advice. Jeff Kehoe, Ignatieff's Ontario campaign chair who's also in charge of candidate recruitment, is along, busily taking notes and policy suggestions from the private meetings. Part of it is also to work the bugs out.
In Cambridge, Ignatieff blundered into political no-man's-land, answering a hypothetical question from an audience member about how he'd tackle a deficit if all other revenue-raising efforts failed after a recovery took hold. He suggested he wouldn't rule out tax hikes, but only as a last resort.
Still, Ignatieff's Oakville Chamber of Commerce talk, like those he gives to audiences in Hamilton, Chatham, Brantford, Cambridge, Waterloo, London and Niagara Falls, had another goal in mind.
It was to frame, define or "brand" Ignatieff as a passionate Canadian. He remains an unknown to many voters, even though he was the front-runner in the 2006 Liberal leadership race that saw Stéphane Dion come from behind to win.
Since the winter prorogation and coalition crisis that led to Dion's downfall and Ignatieff's rise, people have begun to pay attention.
So in speeches all week, Ignatieff repeatedly returns to a theme that is central to a book he launches next week as well – one that frames his ancestors as "nation-builders."
It's not just personal family history. It's a rebuttal of Conservative suggestions he's somehow not truly a Canadian because he spent most of his adult life outside Canada.
Ignatieff invokes his maternal great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, who with Sanford Fleming travelled from Halifax to Vancouver in 1872 to survey the transcontinental rail route.
Ignatieff calls for the kind of "grit and determination and unrelenting vision" they had to get through the current economic crisis.
He proclaims his passion for Quebec by invoking his Canadian parents, and his Russian grandparents who "are buried in the soil of Quebec" next to a French-Canadian farmer next to an Irish farmer, and advocates changing the question from "What does Quebec want?" to "What can we do together?"
In London, a university lecture hall is crammed with a few hundred people. About half are students. Final exams are on. The rest are area residents, professionals, seniors. Ignatieff, at home in a classroom, fields questions for an hour. Here, as elsewhere, when he hits the emotional notes, the room goes quiet. People listen intently.
Ignatieff claims he's in no rush for an election, saying he's got to work on the Liberal party's "machinery of battle" – fundraising, and candidate recruitment, while he tries to hold the government to account.
But he makes clear where it's all headed – sooner or later. "I will make Parliament work as long as I can and if we can't make it work, then we have to go back to the people. That's how the system works."