Liberals are spinning their policy wheels
Party has failed to differentiate itself from Conservatives, further splintering support
Vancouver Sun – May 7, 2010
By Barbara Yaffe

A year and a half after the last federal election, the once-mighty Liberal party remains in a political funk.

Liberals have yet to present well-defined policies to set themselves apart from the Stephen Harper Conservatives and the new leader is nearly as unpopular as the old.

The fact is the issues the Michael Ignatieff-led Liberals are leading on are not ones that stand to significantly influence ballot-box decisions.

They've been in high dudgeon of late about the possible torture of Afghan detainees and the lobbying efforts of former Tory MP Rahim Jaffer, but neither topic shifted party support in April. Canadians primarily are worried about the deficit and economic issues. On those, Conservatives are considered to be performing adequately.

An Ekos poll released Thursday had Liberal support at 26.1 per cent – the same level of popular support as the Stephane Dion Liberals scored in the October 2008 election.

An Angus Reid poll earlier in the week put Liberal support at 28 per cent, well behind Conservatives' 35 per cent. The same poll put Ignatieff's approval rating at 14 per cent, which compares to an all-time low of 10 per cent for Dion, who vacated the leadership in late 2008, making way for Ignatieff. The only other Liberal leader to score such a low approval rating was John Turner, who bottomed out at 14 per cent approval shortly after losing the 1988 election.

Harper, who certainly isn't Mr. Popular, has an approval score of 29 per cent.

A Liberal party official refused to comment this week on the numbers, saying that opposition leaders have a tough job.

It appears the party's high-profile Montreal policy conference in March, aimed at giving Liberals a boost, has not generated much new momentum for Ignatieff or his partisan colleagues.

In June, the party will hold policy meetings for party members in five Canadian cities, including Vancouver, as part of a process to develop a platform that will be released only when an election is called.

Meanwhile, Ekos Research Associates executive director Paul Adams, writing in the current issue of the political magazine Policy Options, argues that Liberals have no time to lose.

"What Ignatieff has begun to outline so far," says Adams, who attended the Montreal conference, "is really a variation on the existing Conservative fiscal agenda, dressed up with a social policy wish-list that is unattached to any realistic funding plan."

Adams refers to "the utter demagnetization of the Liberal party," pointing to the fact that polls indicate Liberals have lost the ability to rally the anti-Harper vote. "Most Canadians who give up on the Tories go right past the Liberals to the NDP, the Bloc [Quebecois] or, in particular, the Greens."

And in case anyone had any optimism about Liberal prospects in the next election, the Ekos director sums up: "The Liberals' election hopes may now hang on the ability of a leader who has never led a national campaign and who is running on a nondescript policy program to come from behind and beat a battle-tested incumbent in a period of economic recovery."

With Ignatieff undeniably failing to impress, some Ottawa-watchers have begun to blue-sky about:
● Possibilities of a coalition grouping of opposition forces, uniting Liberals with New Democrats and possibly Greens.
● Justin Trudeau's leadership potential. The 38-year-old, an MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau, is the eldest son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

While such speculation is premature, there's no question that the party, which has had three leaders in the past 6 1/2 years, continues to search for its political soul.