Keep It Simple, Lefties

While Stephen Harper croons in the capital, liberals in Canada and elsewhere have yet to find their voice.

Many Liberals are secretly hoping a new leader will soon emerge from the snowy woods, Pierre Trudeau-like, to take over the party, speculates the Ottawa Citizen’s Susan Riley. A recent poll found that 46 per cent of Liberal voters think Michael Ignatieff should be replaced, and Riley blames this on Iggy’s inability to come up with a clear message to counter Stephen Harper’s narrative. “Governing well requires flexibility, emotional intelligence, and experience. But to win an election you need to keep it simple and keep it real,” she writes. What’s interesting is that, as Riley points out, simple messages don’t always make for good policy (see Rob Ford’s transit plan or the Tories’ crime agenda) but they’re what it takes to win an election these days.

Things could be worse for the Liberals, writes the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert. She contends that because they’ve been able to maintain party unity and take clear stances on wedge issues, the Grits “make up a more constructive official opposition than 12 months ago.” That success hasn’t gotten them any closer to winning an election, but neither are they in any danger of ceding the role of No. 2 party to the NDP. That may be cold comfort to a party that has historically painted itself as Canada’s natural ruling party, but Hébert calls for some perspective: the Liberals are hardly on the verge of collapse, even if Iggy’s on his way out.

The National Post’s Dan Gardner interprets the Liberals’ difficulty wrenching control from the Conservatives as part of a global trend that has seen the left unable to capitalize on the recession and the free market policies that fueled it. The British government’s massive austerity cuts haven’t helped the Labour party, and the U.S. Democrats haven’t been able to make hay out of the Republicans’ disastrous financial policy. Thirty years ago, “Nationalization and wealth redistribution vanished from the intellectual climate,” Gardner writes, and nowhere has the left been able to replace them with similarly communicable big ideas. “The free-market paradigm was rattled in 2008, but it still stands.”