Michael Ignatieff can be frustrating to watch as a Liberal leader. He's currently doing his year-end interviews. Radio-Canada's interview is fairly generic stuff really, stuff you'd expect Iggy to just nail. Then why in the name of all that's holy are we getting this stupid answer to "why he wants to be Prime Minister." Basically, his answer was that he wants to be Prime Minister in the future because he wants to lead Canada into the future. He then went on to describe some future challenges and says that the Liberals will be the party to think about those challenges. We don't need to think about how to overcome those challenges in office. If you want to think about those challenges, you should have stayed in academics. Politicians act. They do things to overcome challenges. You've had four years to think about how to do that. Enough thinking.
I appreciate that the party is a little gun-shy after The Green Shift but you didn't have to be specific. Say, "we're going to invest in education and research" instead of "we're going to think about what we're going to do about investing in education and research". Stop treating politics as an academic exercise and maybe, just maybe, people will stop thinking of you as an academic and start thinking of you as prime minister.
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.
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And whose idea was it to have a "thinkers conference"?
Why not have an Action Conference or a Doers Conference??
The idea of having a thinkers conference at this point, after watching the last year and a half is laughable (and I'm a Liberal), I can't wait to see how the Conservatives frame this exercise.
Hey, let's just sit and think our way through the next election.
No, no, hang on, let's just ponder what it means to be Canadian.
With only a couple of exceptions, (Gerard Kennedy and Bob Rae) I have seen no coordinated action plan by the Liberals to make a case for the Liberal Party, or against the Conservatives.
If you need to wait for over 3 years and call a conference to formulate a general action plan, you are in the wrong business.
What was the purpose of having over a thousand Liberals go to the trouble and incur the expense of traveling to Vancouver in May?
Why couldn't we have used that opportunity to put together a plan?
We have wasted opportunity after opportunity to build a meaningful plan and put together an effective opposition.
Instead, we have wasted more than three years only to have a Thinkers Conference that has only token grassroots involvement.
The leadership of the Party have been complete failures in engaging the grassroots.
Instead of putting forward a process that would rebuild a connection between the Party and its core supporters, volunteeers and campaigners, the Party Braintrust has arranged for an exclusive meeting of "thinkers".
If the only subject on the table at the conference is on how to re-engage Canadians and disaffected Liberals, then this exercise may bare some fruit.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
Another great post. That is a great question MI is the alleged smartest guy in the room why has he kept taking bad advice on how to lead his party.
Did he follow in the footsteps of Dion and attack 100% in the past twelve months?
Donalo thinks the LPOC need to give the voters a reason to vote for the party.
Many of us have said that for years. If the government steals your ideas it demostrates merit.
Witholding good ideas in opposition makes little sense. Championing a good idea and getting it implemented from the cheap seats in NOT a negative. The idea of restoring fiscal discipline has been noted by some as a Preston Manning principle. The Liberals were able to accelerate the cost cutting to balance the books because the opposition was interested in a similar return to fiscal prudence.
Preston may have wanted deeper cuts in different programs etc.
The idea of co-opting ideas from the opposition has a very long tradition in politics.
GST, Free Trade have been co-opted by the Liberals after promising to eliminate and renegotiate.
The LPOC should be NOT be sitting back refusing to offer constructive areas to cuts waste. Why not get ahead of the cuts being proposed by the CPC and offer them first?
OR
Join in the chorus of special interest, NDP, Bloc who will yell deficit but refuse to offer concrete idea or cuts.
In all fairness to Michael Ignatieff, the Conservatives don't think about anything and look how that's turning out. I'm in favour of anything that can end the rampant ignorance of the House of Commons.
That said, if the LPC comes out of the Thinker's Conference with no plan, no platform and no direction or if the conference fails to consider the input of grassroots Liberals in any significant manner or if the "experts" are selected so they can just regurgitate whatever the caucus wants to hear instead of bringing in new ideas, I will have no problem cancelling my donations to the LPC and throwing my vote away to the NDP in the next election.
I don't want to back a horse that has no hope of winning, but I absolutely refuse to back a horse that won't even try to win.
For now, it's just wait and see.
Brent,
I am not sure in your wisdom of accusing the CPC for 'not' thinking in 2009.
The recovery and dominance of 2009 by the minority government in parliament is something I have not seen before. Have you?
The thinkers, media had written the CPC off. The LPOC cancelled the democratic leadership race because their was 'no time' in December 2008.
In a few months the CPC were going to be held accountable for Economic Update 2008, prorogue, deficit, recession, isotopes etc.
The Polls were very close for the first half of 2009 (honeymoon) and when the LPOC finally declared Sept09 'Time was up' did the gap widened to 7-14pts for the balance of the year.
Brent, if the CPC were NOT thinking what heck were the LPOC busy doing?
Stephen Harper went to Copenhagen with absolutely no plan and humiliated Canada on the international stage. He even demanded that the provinces support the federal government without even consulting them first.
Jim Flaherty promised that there would be no deficit and repeatedly underestimated the decifit when he finally admitted to it.
Then there's Gerald Keddy's comments about homeless people, which clearly showed that he knows absolutely nothing about homelessness.
There's also the Conservative party's inability to come up with a plan to solve the isotopes shortage.
The issue of torture went from "There was nothing wrong" to "There was something wrong and we fixed it" to "It's not the Canadian government's problem."
Conservative MPs only vomit whatever lines they're fed by the PMO whenever anyone asks them a question.
To top all that off, Stephen Harper's attempt to cut public funding to political parties was quite probably the single greatest display of stupidity in the history of Canada.
The LPC's many, many failures over the past year don't change the fact that the CPC is made up of idiots. The incompetence of one party is unrelated to the incompetence of the others.
Brent,
It appears you have confused SPIN with FACTS
The CPC led government inherited a deeply flawed signed agreement that was ignored by the Liberals. Christine Stewart exLib on CBC stated they would not injure their economy to implement Kyoto. (Sound familiar?)
The current government requires EVERYONE to meet their obligations based on their emmissions. Nothing has changed and they have not been bullied. China and the US (40%)and growing are being held accountable by most of the newspapers articles and enviroMENTALists. Canada is not a major player in this matter.
Only the Liberal media and those groups who are trying to change the federal government, deflect blame for their own problems are SPINNING -blame Canada.
Brent Chalk River is 52 years old and was to be shut down in 2000. The Libs failed to tell the provinces they were going to not continue the supply. Try google and read how much was spent on the failed reactors Maple 1,2,3. This is another Liberal boondoggle in the hundreds of millions.
Are taxpayers interested in subsidizing exports in isotopes for our Americans? We export them and don't break even.
It would be easy to keep correcting your SPIN point by point vs facts but you appear more interested in laying blame than holding both governments to account.
Best of luck Brent.
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