What is it gonna take for the Liberals to change their leader?

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

NorthReport wrote:

There will be no significant changes in Ottawa until all NDPers realize the Liberals are the main hindrance to the NDP  forming government.  

Sorry -- I disagree that this would  make a meaningful difference. Yes, NDP voters must realize this but the more important change is the political cultural one where people are convinced of social democratic values. Otherwise, we are only talking about political party labels and the NDP will become the slightly left o centre option and the Conservatives the slightly right one. You need the people to change their political philosophy in order to allow a change -- once this is done then you need them to back a party. Providing a party without this change means that party will adapt to the political view of the population.

The actual realization that needs to be made is the realization, by those people who identify as "progressives" who identify as Liberal, but would vote NDP if they thought the NDP "could win", that the NDP WOULD win if they voted for it.  Everywhere outside Ontario, voters like that made such a realization in 2011-and they WOULD have made it no matter what program the NDP offered, even an openly Left program.  Those voters drifted back to the Liberals in 2015 mainly because the NDP had a leader who did nothing to consolidate NDP support out in the wider electorate, and did many things to drive that support away-barring Quebec NDP MPs from supporting the Quebec student revolt(even though no groups of voters who might have opposed the students would have even considered voting NDP or held any significant number of progressive views on anything), treating social movements and social activists as the enemy, even though the voters couldn't be assumed to be hostile to the social movements or see them as alien to their experience; wasting much of his time in parliament on a pointless crusade over the petty grift of a Conservative senator that nobody in any Tim Horton's ever even heard of, rather than leading the fight against the Anti-Muslim wars, against corporate dominance of politics, or against Harper's benefit-slashing and anti-worker federal budgets, or FOR a democratic, egalitarian notion of society.

It doesn't matter what programs Mulcair offered in the campaign platform, after years of doing damage to the party, and when it was too late to make any positive difference;  what voters saw in his leadership was someone who would never make any real break with the status quo; therefore, the 2011 voters who swung to Jack-and would have on ANY program Jack offered, because they saw the transformative intent, saw no such intent in Mulcair and swung back to the Liberals because that party at least had experience in maintaining the status quo.