Maybe there is hope for the Liberals yet. Liberal pollster Michael Marzolini gives the party some sensible advice.

1) Some Liberals have been touting recent economic turbulence as a potential opportunity to remind voters of their record as the party that tamed the national deficit and presided over almost 10 years of uninterrupted economic prosperity. But Marzolini said the Tory economic record is viewed favourably as well. And House Leader Ralph Goodale said deficit busting "was for the era of the last 10 or 15 years and what's really important is what's going to happen in the next 10 or 15 years."

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/251775" title="http://www.thestar.com/News/article/251775" target="_blank"http://www.thestar.com/News/a...

 I said the same awhile back.

The Liberal Party is not going to get back into power promising to be same old good economic managers minus the corruption associated with the sponsorship program. Indeed, the economy is not tanking. So the solid Economic stewardship card does not even have superficial appeal.

 http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

 2) He told them Canadians want fresh faces and creative, new ideas from the Liberals, not a rehash of past triumphs from former ministers left over from the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin eras.

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/251775" title="http://www.thestar.com/News/article/251775" target="_blank"http://www.thestar.com/News/a...

 I have made the same point.

The Liberal brass seeks continuity with the past. Only in Canada would a supposedly liberal party stress tradition as much as this one. What the Liberals should be looking to do is to break with their past (their most recent past anyway) and not embrace it.

http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

 3) The Party must rebrand itself The Liberals meanwhile, have yet to create an impression in opposition

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibs0830/BNStory/Nationa l/home" title="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibs0830/BNStory/Nationa l/home" target="_blank"http://www.theglobeandmail.co...

I have made this point repeatedly. It desperately needs to rebrand itself. The sponsorship scandal and years of political compromise have stained the once bright gloss.

“What is does mean to be a Liberal?” has become as intractable as “what does it mean to be a Canadian?”.

http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-am-not-conv inced-it-is-in-best.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-am-not-conv inced-it-is-in-best.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

 4) However, Mr. Marzolini also told the Liberals that two of their key attack points, Afghanistan and the environment, are less effective because their stand is not clear. MPs said Mr. Marzolini told them that Canada's role in Afghanistan has the potential to move voters, especially in Quebec, but the Liberal position is vague in the minds of most voters – who also see the Conservatives as being for the mission, and the NDP against.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibs0830/BNStory/Nationa l/home" title="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibs0830/BNStory/Nationa l/home" target="_blank"http://www.theglobeandmail.co...

I have made this point too.

Dion says Canada, having committed ourselves to the mission, should sit there and take our lumps until 2009; anything less would be “dishonourable&rdqu o;. Nobody has thought to expose the shallowness of Dion’s position by asking him this: If the Conservatives were to extend the mission to 2011, say, would removing Canadian troops in 2010, say, also be “dishonourable&rdqu o;? The Liberal party’s position can not be dictated by what the governing Conservatives stupidly commit Canada to as part of their three M foreign policy, viz., moronic, moralistic and macho. Dion can not afford to continue hiding the sins of the father; Liberal Afghan policy must flow from what the party’s assessment of the mission’s merits.

 http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/04/electioneerin g-afghanistan-kyoto-and.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/04/electioneerin g-afghanistan-kyoto-and.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

Rather than blasting ahead with the pull out option, some of the initial criticism got to Layton and he started back tracking before finding his backbone again. I commented on this.

After showing signs original thinking on Afghanistan, Layton’s inner child lost confidence in his own views and has subsequently backtracked; the NDP’s Afghan policy is becoming more muddled by the day and in the process more and more Liberal.

 http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/01/ndp-need-to-b e-punished.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/01/ndp-need-to-b e-punished.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

5) Among other things, he said, the Liberals need to offer fresh faces and a fresh agenda to Canadians and start laying out policy alternatives easily understood by voters.

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibcaucus0830/BNStory/Fr ont" title="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070830.wlibcaucus0830/BNStory/Fr ont" target="_blank"http://www.theglobeandmail.co...

Yep I have been harping on this for years.

the Liberals need to introduce policies that will get people talking. This means fist of all proposing policies that the public has the facility to talk about, I have also offered some suggestions

1)Propose scrapping the monarchy

2)Propose mandating 4 weeks vacation a year

3)Propose free dental care

4)Propose Legalizing euthanasia

5)Propose Legalizing marijuana

6)Propose abolishing the senate

7) Again propose banning hand guns

8) Mandatory voting.

http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" title="http://themaplethree.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-liberal-l iberals-need-to-break-wit h.html" target="_blank"http://themaplethree.blogspot...

Wente is at it again.  http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/P Estory/LAC/20070823/COWEN T23/Columnists/columnists /columnistsNational/2/2/3 /" title="http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/P Estory/LAC/20070823/COWEN T23/Columnists/columnists /columnistsNational/2/2/3 /" target="_blank"http://www.rbcinvest.theglobe...   
So I fried off another letter. 

 I wrote a letter to Wente in response to this.  http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/P Estory/LAC/20070626/COWEN TE26/Headlines/headdex/he addexHealth/6/6/14/" title="http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/P Estory/LAC/20070626/COWEN TE26/Headlines/headdex/he addexHealth/6/6/14/" target="_blank"http://www.rbcinvest.theglobe...%3Cbr/%3E

 "It is not your father's” beer. It is “chemically supercharged” beer, every bit the equal of cocaine or heroin.

"[Marijauna is] much stronger than it was years ago and, in some cases, marijuana may be laced with more dangerous chemicals,"

"There is also evidence it may lead to experimentation with other drugs. It's not something we want to encourage."

For example, Gordan Gibson explained Trudeau’s reaction the the Le Dain Commission thus: “The report was released as we were touring a bull-semen facility in Guelph, Ont. (I am not making this up.) The press cared not at all about productive agriculture and totally about weed. At an end-of-tour press conference, the prime minister was asked if he favoured decriminalization. We were in the semen facility's boardroom and it had a blackboard with a permanent picture of Elsie the cow painted on, perhaps in recognition of the customer base. Mr. Trudeau was very quick. Saying not a word, he went to the blackboard, took the chalk and drew a cartoonist's balloon out of the cow's mouth. Inside he slowly wrote, "I like grass!" The room dissolved in laughter.” http://www.cannabisculture.com/forums/printthread.php?Board=current&" title="http://www.cannabisculture.com/forums/printthread.php?Board=current&" target="_blank"http://www.cannabisculture.co...;main=1130356&type=po st

Finally, Tommy Douglas famously likened Canada to a cow. “Canada is like an old cow. The West feeds it. Ontario and Quebec milk it. And you can well imagine what it's doing in the Maritimes.”

Margaret Somerville asks in the Globe and Mail “If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy.”

The Globe and Mail

Somerville, the great social conservative hope, argued that by allowing people of the same sex to marry each other, marriage would go from being a "child centered institution" to something based on love and that change would violate the natural order of things for reasons only most doctrine scholastic would appreciate. Now, I will not discuss the ridiculous metaphysic she raps around her arguments to obscure their superficiality. What I want to point out is that when it comes to the nature of marriage Somerville got things hopelessly ass backwardness. SSM did not open the door to marriage being based on romantic love. On contrary, it is because marriage is an institution based on romantic love that opened the door to same sex marriage.

In the Globe and Mail article, she again makes this same mistake again. Believing that SSM is a transformative change and not an outflow from what marriage has evolved into being, she mistaking believes that there is a straight line from SSM to polygamy. As she sees it, if marriage is based on romantic love, as she thinks was established with the passage of C 38, there is nothing to say why one person, at least in principle, can not be married to two or more people at the same time. (What matters is that they love each other and with regard to traditional polygamist marriages that it flows from their partners religious beliefs.

“Gay marriage advocates successfully argued that the primary function of marriage is to publicly recognize two adults' mutual love and commitment. But why shouldn't three or more adults, just as much as two, have their love and commitment publicly recognized and whether they are in same-sex relationships or opposite sex ones?”

There is no reason to deny this kind of living arrangement so long as it produces no social ills. “PC” opposition to polygamy is rooted in a dislike of religion.

“And, as to use of the Charter's "notwithstanding clause" to continue to prohibit polygamy, it seems those who decried employing it to veto same-sex marriage (indeed, its very existence) would approve its use to prohibit polygamy were the courts to find that the present prohibition is a breach of the Charter right of freedom of religion. In short, politically correct people would use the clause to suppress an institution they find abhorrent (polygamy) the prohibition of which transgresses a right they think is of limited importance (freedom of religion), but not an institution they approve (same-sex marriage) which they see as required to condemn discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

The problem with such an argument is that not only is it historically wrong, it skips over virtually all current debate about polygamy. Most educated people think the institution of polygamy does produce a whole host of social ills and Somerville can make the voluminous literature on the subject go away with following bit of hand waving dressed up in the language of as careful analysis.

“Also, we need to be careful to distinguish under-age sex, forced marriage, spousal abuse and child abuse from polygamy, itself. These horrible crimes do occur in polygamous marriages - and monogamous ones - and must be dealt with severely. But are we being fair and just in retaining one alternative form of marriage, polygamy, as a crime, when we have legalized another alternative form, gay marriage?”

She can also not pretend, as she does below, that no research exists on same sex parenting and polygamous parenting and thus both share the same flaw, viz., they are both “experimental&rdquo ;.

“Same-sex marriage, polygamous marriage and opposite-sex monogamous marriage are three different family structures. Family structure has a major impact on children. Gay marriage supporters argue that "genderless parenting" is just as good for children as opposite-sex parenting. With gay marriage, we are experimenting to see if that's correct. Should we try a parallel experiment with polygamy and study its impact on children as compared with both gay marriage and opposite-sex monogamous marriage?”

Plenty of research has been done on both and needless to say, the former has been favorably reviewed assessed and the later negatively assessed.  Hell, her Conservative budies even suppressed a government commisssioned review of the literature on gay parenting when the results were not what they had hoped for.  http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/stor y.html?id=38cc20ce-7f14-44e a-b4d9-d4cd16d7a269&" title="http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/stor y.html?id=38cc20ce-7f14-44e a-b4d9-d4cd16d7a269&" target="_blank"http://www.canada.com/theprov...;k=9378

As for Somerville herself, perhaps it is because I am a consequentialist and so do not have the time of day for “natural law”, but I think the press is far too deferential and I think that at best she is an average thinker.

“Zammit's group, led by Dr. Glyn Lewis of the University of Bristol, analyzed 35 published cannabis studies and controlled for confounding effects, such as personality traits that might be more of a determinant of psychosis than pot.”

“In fact they identified 175 studies which might have been relevant, but on reading them, it turned out that there were just 11 relevant papers, describing seven actual datasets.”

“Today most of what's smoked in the United States is grown domestically or in Canada”.

“Overall marijuana production in Mexico--the principal source of foreign-produced marijuana to U.S. drug markets appears to be increasing.”

Despite a thorough review the authors admit that there is no conclusive evidence that cannabis use causes psychotic illness. Their prediction that 14 per cent of psychotic outcomes in young adults in the UK may be due to cannabis use is not supported by the fact that the incidence of schizophrenia has not shown any significant change in the past 30 years.”

“Dr Iddon, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on drugs misuse, said the study did not convince him it was time to return cannabis to class B. "I don't think the causal link has been proved. I think cannabis might - possibly for genetic reasons - trigger psychosis at an earlier age." The MP, who is also a member of the science and technology select committee, said there was a danger of criminalising "hundreds of thousands of young people" if the status of the drug was changed. "If Gordon Brown changes the class of the drug, it won't be evidence-based but for political reasons," he said.

“According to NIDA, marijuana seized in drug arrests during the late 1990s was twice as potent as that seized in the late 1980s and nearly four times as potent as that seized in the 1970s. The active ingredient in pot is THC. On average, the pot on the streets 30 years ago was about 1 percent THC; today the average is about 4 percent.”

“Comparing marijuana strength through the years is ‘absurd,’ according to Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus professor at Harvard Medical School, who consults patients, many of them elderly, on using marijuana to relieve pain and nausea. ‘The whole issue on potency is a red herring,’ he said. ‘The more potent the pot, the less you use.’Grinspoon said that studies have shown -- and his patients' experiences confirm -- that marijuana users smoke until they feel high -- or, as he prefers to say, ‘achieve symptom relief,’ -- and then stop, whether it took two hits or an entire joint. In this regard, today's higher-potency pot is no more ‘dangerous’ than the bunk weed of yesteryear, he said.”