A time for renewal

An excerpt from The Star reports (link)

Last week's electoral bloodbath has led to an existential crisis for the Liberals, who were once known as Canada's "natural governing party."

They find themselves being squeezed by the NDP on the left and the Conservatives on the right, with many suggesting it's time for the two parties to consider merging.

Both current MPs and former MPs are brushing aside merger talk and are calling for a period of renewal, saying that Canada needs a strong centralist party.

Part of that renewal is figuring out what exactly went wrong on Election Day.

Former Liberal MP Gerard Kennedy said the party is "humbled by the election . . . and the parties that did better.

"There's a yearning there we didn't capture and the NDP did for the present moment," he told CTV's Power Play.

He suggested the party did not put enough "solutions out there for specific issues" during the campaign.

Brison, a Nova Scotia MP, said the party needs a hard look at policy, something it didn't do after the last leadership race in 2006.

He said the Liberals need to re-engage with the grassroots of their party.

But Brison said that the two-year Conservative attack-ad campaign on Ignatieff can't be overlooked.

"The die was cast by two years of negative ads . . . they were very successful," he said. "He was effectively torpedoed before the campaign even began."

He said while on the campaign trail he heard many Canadians repeating some of the Conservatives attacks on Ignatieff.

Another Liberal heavyweight MP who lost his job, Mark Holland, said the party must look beyond its leader.

"It's not about quick fixes, it's not about one person who is going to paint over everything and make it OK," he told Power Play. "The Liberal Party has a choice; it either makes reforms and it changes . . . or we've got even darker days ahead of us."

John Manley, a former Liberal finance and foreign affairs minister, said the party has to get away from the "natural governing party" attitude.

"There was an attitude and voters can smell that sense of entitlement a mile away and I think the party failed to really tackle that," Manley told Power Play.

"You have to have some core beliefs and know what they are. I happen to believe there's a big piece of the centre of Canadian politics that is up for grabs and I define that centre as being economically prudent . . . but socially progressive."