Liberals Hating Liberals

Party unity this ain't. While the Grits look for a new leader, their talking heads do their best to make sure no one would want the job.

The Liberal party's much-reduced caucus will select an interim leader tomorrow as they try to rebuild while searching for a more permanent boss. But card-carrying members, such as Jeff Jedras, are already flinging insults at each other over that selection process. Jedras takes aim in the National Post at Liberal party president Alfred Apps in a rant over the “closed, backroom process” used by the party's executive to draw up rules that seem tailor-made to disallow Bob Rae from leading in the interim. “We need openness and transparency and this process, whether you agree with the outcome or not, has had none,” seethes Jedras. “And that’s symbolic of the problem with today’s Liberal party.” That, and increasingly vehement infighting, apparently.

Warren Kinsella, another dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, uses his column in the Sun papers to trash Bob Rae for spearheading the cross-party agreement on extending the combat mission in Afghanistan until 2014. Because of that, Kinsella believes Rae should be made interim leader just so he can't run for the permanent leadership. “As pretty much every Liberal now agrees, that decision by Rae and Ignatieff – along with a few other rightward lurches – persuaded thousands of voters to abandon the Liberal party for the NDP,” says Kinsella. “Quebecers, young Canadians, left-leaning Grits didn’t like what they saw, and would go on to vote accordingly.” Combined with Rae's “steamer trunks of baggage from his time as Ontario’s NDP premier,” Kinsella all but swears to disavow the party if his nemesis ends up leading the party into the 2015 election.

So if not Rae, who from the depleted Liberal stocks could take over? Lawrence Martin pleads in The Globe and Mail for the party to go young, and offers Justin Trudeau, Scott Brison, and Dominic LeBlanc as replacements for a position that has never gone to someone under 45. “Given the veteran nature of the other party leaders, the trio presents the Grits with the potential of regeneration and relevance,” says Martin. “The young guns arrive at a time when Canada’s post-baby-boom generation finally appears ready to assert itself.” That's certainly true – but they seem to have done so through the NDP.