What has happened to the Liberal Party under Ignatieff's leadership?

Scary.

Political storm whips good ship Grit

http://www.ottawasun.com/comment/columnists/michael_dentandt/2009/11/16/...

Yup, Ignatieff is shining all right. He is shining his flashlight into the aytss.

I don't know who this Kennedy Stewart is - but he's right about Ignatieff, just wrong about BC

Doomed Ignatieff Broke Political Golden Rule

Michael Ignatieff provides an example of a golden rule breaker. Ipsos polling shows that when Ignatieff officially took over the Liberal Party in May, 2009 it had the support of 36 percent of Canadians. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were in free-fall, plunging from 46 percent support in December, 2008 to 33 percent in May, 2009. While the Liberal support was not quite high enough to guarantee a majority, trends were certainly in Ignatieff’s favour.

Thus in May, 2009 Ignatieff faced a real choice of whether to force an election or continue to keep propping up the Conservative minority in Parliament. The Liberals had won back many Canadians, but the Liberal election machine was not yet revved to full capacity. Moreover, Ignatieff and his team were new to the job and perhaps feeling they needed more time to settle in. Everyone was thinking the new Liberal leader would be crazy to force an early summer election. As we now know, Ignatieff balked, waiting for even bluer skies.

What now seems clear is that this was Ignatieff’s best and only shot to become prime minister. Now it is Liberal support that has collapsed. The Liberals currently enjoy support from a mere 24 percent of Canadians, just five percentage points ahead of the Jack Layton’s NDP. The Conservatives are at 37 percent.

By dithering and declining, Ignatieff is now doomed to slide off into oblivion. He won’t go quietly though and perhaps still thinks he can somehow recover. But he can’t and won’t, and will probably have to be forced out by another leadership hopeful in yet another Liberal party coup d’état.

http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/communityofinterest/archive/2009/11/21/doomed-ignatieff-broke-political-golden-rule.aspx

He's still wrong about BC. 

Here's another academic view from the West. Winnipeg is still considered part of Western Caanda isn't it.  ;)

Who is john conway anyways

A political mess from top to bottom

Canada's politics are depressing at every level. No wonder more and more Canadians are disengaging, shrugging, yawning, and saying, "I've had it with all this B.S.!"

Even people like me, political junkies who delight in probing polls and assessing how the votes will break in close seats, are in despair. There is no moral or ideological foundation in our politics, particularly among the Liberals and New Democrats. On the other hand, Harper's hard right position is clear and firm. Perhaps that is part of his otherwise inexplicable attraction to so many Canadians -- he actually stands for something he clearly believes in. The same goes for the Bloc -- they want a sovereign Quebec, typically take strong social democratic positions, and have no ambitions to govern in Ottawa. Few of our Liberal and NDP politicians in Ottawa seem to believe in much or to stand for much -- except the pursuit of power and the holding of office for its own sake. Staking out a position on principle and adhering to it come hell or high water, or fighting aggressively for your version of the public interest seem passé, an historical curiosity. Whether one looks at the parlous state of our politics at the national, provincial or local levels, there is little to hang on to -- except the uneasy feeling that in this new feudalism of late capitalism our ranting and ravings amount to just so much white noise. The business lobby rules and, by all appearances, growing numbers of people have acquiesced in that ugly reality: "so was it in the past, so is it now, and so it will be evermore, amen."

Liberal Leader Michael Igntieff could have taken Stephen Harper down in a fall election. As the new leader, he was on the upswing among voters. The Liberals were taking off in the polls, even in Quebec to some extent. The Bloc and the NDP were on side. Layton had boxed himself in by declaring he could not support Harper, and the Bloc keeps voting against Harper at every chance.

But Ignatieff got greedy. All indications were that a fall election would lead to a minority Liberal government. Ignatieff wanted a majority and gambled that the up-tick in Liberal support was a trend that would continue, giving him a majority in a future election. Meanwhile, Ignatieff embraced most of the essentials of what Harper was doing, even in that dismal and illegal barbarism in Afghanistan. Oh, he wanted improvements here and there, and nitpicked, but proposed no fundamental difference in approach to governing Canada. To avoid an election, Ignatieff was forced to support Harper in the House against the Bloc and the NDP. Big mistake. Layton and the NDP heaved a sigh of relief, since the soft NDP vote, especially in Ontario and British Columbia, would have stampeded to the Liberals to defeat Harper.

When Ignatieff tried to engineer an election for early winter, it was too late. Already the Liberals were falling in the polls. Such an election would probably have returned a Harper minority. Layton had suddenly discovered a reason to support Harper in exchange for some help for the unemployed. Fearing an election polarized between Harper and Ignatieff, and the loss of many NDP seats, Layton propped Harper up against the Liberals and the Bloc. Inadvertently, Layton also saved Ignatieff from humiliation.

The most recent polls suggest the Ignatieff phenomenon may have collapsed, at least for now. The Tories have a 10-point lead over the Liberals and, at 38 per cent, Harper is in majority territory. Harper drools for an election now. The NDP has enjoyed a slight up-tick, but remains mired in its core vote territory. Ignatieff and the Liberals are at a dismal 29 per cent, Dion territory, and Harper's approval rating is twice that of Ignatieff's.

Any lessons here? Both Ignatieff and Layton have no core principles -- both voted to keep Harper in power. For that, many Canadians who want to be rid of Harper (a healthy majority, by the way) will not easily forgive them. Harper is beaming, hungering after that majority that has eluded him. On the upside, whenever Harper's numbers in the past moved into majority territory, widespread fear of the prospects of a Harper majority took hold among the public and his numbers fell back down.

So we are back to the politics of polls and opportunism. One can expect no inspiration from Ignatieff or Layton, who all too eagerly sleep with the enemy whenever it's profitable.

Whatever happened to democracy? We seem to have misplaced it.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/a-political-mess-from-top-to-bottom-70689657.html

'Let Donolo Let Iggy Be Iggy!'

Listening in on BC's Grits this weekend, as they gathered in Whistler to drink and argue about how to revive their falling party.

Cold facts, hot debate

A record storm buried Whistler in early-season snow, and set a chilly backdrop for a provincial convention that marked several low points in the federal party's fortunes.

Nationally, the Liberals fell to 24 per cent in an Ipsos-Reid poll released on Saturday, the lowest point since Ignatieff became leader last December. Those poll numbers reinforced the party's dismal third-place finishes in four byelections only two weeks ago.

In B.C., membership in the federal party fell last year to about 9,000 souls, from a high of more than 70,000 earlier this decade. And B.C. voters returned only five Liberal MPs to Ottawa in last fall's national election. Two of those squeaked back into office by razor-thin margins: Ujjal Dosanjh by 22 votes, and Keith Martin by only 68 votes in Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca.

These facts cast a chill over the Whistler gathering, and fueled heated debates that raged through the barrooms and hospitality suites of the Westin Resort and Spa.

For while party leaders maintained stiff upper lips and spoke of winning back three or four seats in the next federal election -- ridings in Burnaby, Surrey and the North Shore were named among those most likely to return to Grit control -- riding executives and campaign strategists worried privately that the party would be lucky to return even three MPs next time around.

Dosanjh's Fraser River riding, where Chinese-Canadians comprise 45 per cent of the population and Indo-Canadians another 13 per cent, was viewed by many as particularly vulnerable. The Conservative Party has been aggressively courting immigrant voters for the past few years, and those efforts appear to be paying off.

"A lot of Chinese-Canadian voters have left the Liberal Party," said one strategist with experience in Vancouver South. "And they're never coming back."

http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/11/23/IggyBeIggy/

Harper writes the rules, wins the game

Harper's ample manoeuvring room is measured by Ignatieff's fumble of this week's other hot potato, the harmonized sales tax. Forced to choose between good economics and bad politics, Ignatieff opted for both by supporting the Conservative plan and then failing to score beckoning points.

While risking voter wrath by supporting B.C. and Ontario Liberal premiers, Ignatieff wasted an opportunity to shape a clear, compelling narrative. He could have told Canadians that Conservatives have so mismanaged federal finances that Liberals must again face up to the realities they confronted in the '90s when balancing budgets. Ignatieff could have said that Harper is now using the HST to raise taxes because he ignored economists by twice cutting the GST.

Instead, Ignatieff failed to control the microphone or manage the clock. His rationale left voters guessing and his caucus divided. Rather than begin the mantra that will carry the party through the next campaign, Ignatieff pushed the mute button on the core message that Liberals, not Conservatives, have the experience, discipline and determination to better manage tough economic times.

For Liberals, comparing Ignatieff's performance to Harper's is rapidly becoming an exercise in despair. They can see that the Prime Minister is dominating national debate, essentially uncontested. They know that, with Parliament just days away from a long winter nap, Harper is running down the clock on troubling questions about stimulus spending and what politicians knew about Afghan prisoner abuse.

Destructive as it is to what remains of democracy, that's how politics is now played and won

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/734849--travers-harper-writes-the-rules-wins-the-game?bn=1

Now here's a classy guy.

Ignatieff is refusing to apologise for the Oswald/Harper assassination photos on the Liberal website.

What an absolute moron.

The federal Conservatives are calling on Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to personally apologize to the prime minister for some pictures that appeared on the Grits' website.

http://www.cfra.com/?cat=3&nid=70024

Will Ignatieff last the summer - I have my doubts.

Is this Michael Ignatieff's last stand?

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was accused of 'just visiting' after he returned to Canada after 30 years. Photograph: Chris Wattie/Reuters/Corbis

It's hard to think of a figure in public life even roughly comparable in stature to Michael Ignatieff. British people often know him as the Booker prize-nominated novelist, academic-celebrity and host of the highbrow-ish Late Show. His contentious theories on nationalism and democracy feature on politics students' required reading lists. And, for a brief period just over a year ago, he was the man hailed as "Canada's Obama", an impossibly charismatic and heavyweight political leader, set to recreate Canada's 1968 golden era of Trudeau-mania, his gravitas and glamour blasting away Stephen Harper's gloomy and John Major-ish reign over a minority Conservative government.

Now, it looks like he may not last the year as Liberal party leader, and speculation in the Canadian press has implied that even the Liberal party - one of the two, historic national parties - may disappear itself. Earlier this month, a former aide to Ignatieff revealed that the party had held talks to merge with the NDP, the other main progressive party in opposition to Harper's Conservatives. More than simply a coalition to oust the Tories, this would entail the disappearance of the Liberal party itself.

And while one of the preconditions of the merger talks was apparently that Ignatieff remain leader of any new Liberal-NDP party, Ignatieff's grip seems to be slipping on his old, existing party. To much embarrassment, a recent poll revealed that Ignatieff currently ranks third among voters' choices for Liberal party leader. It seems that perhaps, among his many guises and achievements, Ignatieff has failed to be something meaningful for Canadians themselves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jun/24/michael-i...