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Mario Laguë (1958-2010)

Sept. 28, 2010 in 200-WB from 1800-2000.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff held a press conference today (pictured at the right with Cape Breton MP Mark Eyking) as he closed out the Liberal 2010 summer caucus meeting here in Baddeck, N.S.

Now, the Liberals have lost nearly 100 seats since 2000 and have had declining returns at the polls for a decade now. I asked Ignatieff if this was perhaps evidence that Canadians are increasingly comfortable away from the political centre, that, to borrow the metaphor the Liberals have used all week, they are happy in their orange tent, or the blue tent or, in Quebec, their light-blue tent. Is liberalism on the decline in Canada?

Here is Ignatieff's response:

“What I notice is Canadians are tired of a politics of division, a politics of wedges. A politics in which the government says, let’s divide urban and rural Canada on the gun registry. Isn’t that a clever thing to do. In fact, the blue tent is a narrow tent, right? All the other tents are narrow, small tents and what Canadians are looking for is a big tent – I hope it’s a red one – that pulls Canadian regions together, that pulls Canadian people together that says, what can we do together? And that’s the appeal.

“I’m not a hyperpartisan politician. There’s a lot of Progressive Conservatives who are walking around saying I’ve got no home here. I’ve got no room in that narrow dark-blue tent of Mr. Harper. I don’t recognize myself in the values of that party. I’ve got people on the other side coming to our meetings, Greens and NDP saying I just can’t stand another four years of Mr. Harper inaction on the environment. So this is why that big red tent appeals to Canadians. That’s the tent I’m trying to re-build. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I did a 142 events, I must have given more than a 100 speeches. I’m going to be doing ‘Open Mike’ meetings all autumn to get the message out because I passionately believe – and I believe since I was 17 years old – that the big red tent is good for Canada, that the tings that we love about Canada – the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada Pension Plan, medicare, that basic sense of equality of opportunity, no region left behind, no gaps between urban and rural Canada – all those things have been incarnated best by those great people who put up the big red tent and they include Mike Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, everybody. That’s why I’m here. I grew up under that big red tent and I want the whole country to shelter under it again.”

Well then, I continued, last year you were very aggressive with the “Mr. Harper, your time is up” and there certainly were a number of Canadians who said, “Great! Cuz I don’t like that guy Harper and go get ‘em.” And they might have disappointed that you didn’t go to the polls and they may look again that you’ve been talking a bad game about Mr. Harper, why don’t you tell us that you’re going to take him to the polls again this fall?

“You’ve got to this step by step. Trust is earned. People’ve got to shake your hand. You got to talk to them, you got to listen. I think I shook, 11, 12 13 thousand hands this summer. That’s a lot of hands. But when you put that in a population of 35 million people, it’s not so many people. I’ve got a lot of work to do. People come over slowly. People need to be persuaded. People need to feel they’ve got a leader here who wants to lisent who wants to learn, who wants to understand the country in all its complexity and bring Canadians together. It’s not the work of a single day. It’s work that takes time. But I’m absolutely convinced in my heart or hearts, we get into an election whenever it comes and there’s a choice between a broad inclusive compassionate alternative on one side and this narrow low-ceiling alternative on the other, the politics of meanness, the politics of division, Canadians will choose by a large majority to come back into the red tent. But I’ve got to prove it. I’ve got to work it. I’ve got to earn it.

Today in many of our papers, I argued that Michael Ignatieff's summer tour was all about defence, that it was not necessarily about winning votes as it was about finding Liberals who would be ready to volunteer, donate money, and fight for Ignatieff and the party in the next general election. I came to this conclusion after talking to Liberals in Ottawa and in some of the regions Ignatieff visited and after examining the 45-day itinerary.

You can read the column here.

I probably should also have been more explicit in nothing that there is nothing wrong with playing defence and that, in fact, the “defensive” politics of finding your own supporters and re-engaging them seems to me to be a crucial first step before finding independent or uncommitted voters.

Nonetheless, I think some Liberals may have thought I was being critical of the idea of the tour — which I was not: It was smart politics — or that I was advancing the thesis that it stuck to safe ridings where Ignatieff would have an easy ride. I wasn't doing that, either, but, nonetheless, the Liberals have helpfully put together some riding-by-riding data on the tour for anyone who might come to that conclusion:

19 Bloc Quebecois ridings (18% of stops and the BQ hold 16% of House of Commons seats);

50 Conservative ridings (48% of stops, hold 47% of seats);

26 Liberal ridings (25% of stops, hold 25% of seats)

10 NDP ridings (10% of stops, hold 12% of seats);

Overall the Liberal Express tour visited 105 ridings. Of those, 79 or 75 per cent were non-Liberal ridings and 75% of the seats in the House of Commons are not held by Liberals.

While I have the provinces and cities the tour touched down in, I don't have the actual ridings, I will say this: Many of the non-Liberal ridings Ignatieff visited were, as I said in the column, placed like Peterborough, Ont., Kitchener, Ont. or (later this month) Thunder Bay, Ont. — all cities that were Liberal as recently as the 2004 election in Peterborough's case and or 2006 in the case of Kitchener and Thunder Bay. So those would “non-Liberal” ridings right now but were Liberal ridings within the last two or three general elections and are the natural places to look for Liberals if they hope to win enough seats again to form the government. In other words, it looks to me like the tour emphasized areas of the country where Liberals had some electoral success recently and the party and leader need to “re-activate”, if you will, the local grassroots.

While many of my Sun Media colleagues have had the chance this summer to enjoy the hospitality aboard the Liberal Express, I have not — until today. I'm picking up Michael Ignatieff's summer tour on its last days, as it travels from Halifax to Cape Breton and the end-of-summer national Liberal caucus in Baddeck, N.S.

The tour today stops in Elmsdale at 0900, Masstown at 1100, Antigonish at 1330 and Big Pond at 1700.

I and other reporters then head to Baddeck this evening while Ignatieff and the bus overnight in Sydney. Ignatieff will then arrive Monday in Baddeck to begin the caucus.

The bus ride today is full of Liberal candidates, MPs, and Senators including:

• MPs Scott Brison, Maria Minna, Geoff Regan, and Rodger Cuzner
• Senators James Cowan, Terry Mercer, Wilfred Moore