Liberals on defence? Offence? Depends how you count 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.