The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
On election night, Stephane Dion left the impression that he plans to stay on as leader of the Liberals, notwithstanding the partyÕs poor showing. That would be a mistake. Dion is an honourable and intelligent man who was unfairly caricatured in a series of Conservative attack ads. But for a political leader, he has serious shortcomings, as the results showed. On election night, the Liberals lost 27 seats (from their 2006 total) and won just 26.2 per cent of the popular vote, a historic low. With numbers like these, Dion does not deserve a second chance. If, nonetheless, Dion insisted on staying in his post, he would plunge the Liberals into an internecine war for the next six months. Party members would tear him apart in the media Ð not all of them anonymously. Caucus would become unruly as MPs plotted and schemed against their own leader. And fundraising would grind to a halt. In the end, Dion would likely suffer a humiliating defeat in a leadership review vote scheduled for next May. Better for him to leave voluntarily in the next couple of weeks and set the stage for another leadership race. That being said, it is clear that leadership alone is not what ails the Liberals. The party had been slipping even before Dion became leader and had begun losing its relevance in much of the country, beyond its metropolitan redoubts of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The LiberalsÕ previously unshakable hold on ethnic and women voters also began slipping before Dion. The Liberals need a policy renewal process to give birth to a 21st-century platform that will enable them to reconnect with the voters. They also need to undergo structural renewal to re-engineer the party machinery (especially in Quebec) and re-energize their fundraising efforts (now that corporate and union donations are banned at the federal level). The situation is not hopeless for the Liberals. The party still has some real strengths, including a strong brand that has managed to survive both a major scandal (ÒsponsorshipÓ) and a weak leader, and a caucus that contains more cabinet material than the Conservatives while half the size. But the Liberals have to address their problems before they can build on these strengths and regain their place as a governing party.
