The CBC’s At Issue panel nailed it on Thursday.

Andrew Coyne:

“I am not sure anybody knows [what the Liberal party stands for] least of all the Liberals.”

Gordan Gibson:

“They [The Liberal Party] have got to develop policy and they haven’t.”

Rob Russo:

“What the Liberal party has become is a party of nostalgia.”

Chantel Hébert:

“Sometimes a rebirth [the 2006 Liberal leadership convention] is a stillbirth.”

The Liberal Party is a party without a soul, without courage, without direction, and without policy. Above all else, the party is hopelessly conservative.

The center point on the political spectrum is not achieved by splitting the difference between what the NDP say and the Conservatives say. What lies between the two is not fertile ground, but rather a desolate no mans land. The Liberal party brass does not seem to realize this. They love pasting together Conservative and NDP talking points to create a shit mix. Afghanistan is a great case in point. Talking points are not starting points. They are an end points. They must flow from a coherent position

Worse, the Liberals approach is entirely passive when it should be active. They should not seek to occupy the political center but to define what is central to being Canadian and let the Conservatives position themselves on the right of that vision and the NDP on the left. This is a daunting task, but it has done before. What we think of Canada is really the Liberal vision of the country under Trudeau and Pearson.

The Liberals need to again duplicate Trudeau and Pearson approach circa 63 through 68. They have to attract those on the left by proposing universal social programs and they need to bring libertarians under their tent by pursuing socially liberal ends. Finally, they have to tie this too approaches together using pragmatic Red Tory language.

The $64,000 question is what polices to pursue.

Libertarians

• Legalize Euthanasia
• Legalize marijuana
• Long term legalize prostitution

Social Democrats

• Universal Pharmacare program
• 4 weeks vacation for all Canadians
• Universal dental care
• Universal Child care

Long term preconditions for success

• Deal with under representation of the cities in the House of Commons
• Introduce mandatory voting; As long as seniors vote in much greater numbers than young people, Canadian politics will be stuck in the past
• Abandon special interest politics

Harper plans to increase in the number of seats in the House of Commons.  Ontario would get 10 more, BC 7 and Alberta 5.  These changes would only come about following the 2011 census.   According to Harper all provinces, with the notable exception of Ontario, would have an average would have more than the Canadian average of people per riding.  This is both false and misleading.  The average riding in Quebec, and Alberta would also be larger than the national average.   Moreover, such talk of average sized ridings overlooks the fact that the rest of Canada, that only one riding, Selkirk Interlake (90,807) outside of BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec is bigger than 90,000.   The government would have to add a lot more than just 22 seats to insure that no province is overrepresented and no province underrepresented.   

It is becoming clear that there will be showdown over the senate. The NDP want the issue put to a referendum and Conservatives are going to make that a reality. Moreover, the choice will not between abolishing the senate and keeping as is but rather abolishing the senate and “reforming” it. In other words, implicit in the very wording of the question will the current senate’s illegitimacy. Politically, there will be nothing the hapless Liberals to do to overturn this binary logic.

Having established the illegitimacy of current senate in the form of the referendum question, Harper will thereafter argue that he is justified in going ahead with his plan to reform the senate in a piece meal fashion – senate reform being one of two acceptable options.

Just to recall, under the Conservative plan, new senators would be elected and would be limited to serving out an 8 year term. The problem is people already in the senate would be free to serve until the age of 75. The result the of such nonsense should such a bill reach the senate and pass would be either to transform an unelected political body with no power into a largely unelected political body with real political power or commit Canadians to the farcical and expensive act of electing people to office who hold no real power.

So the issue will stand heading into the referendum. The question will be Reform Harper's mess or cut bait and abolish the senate. The obvious reluctance of the provinces to do anything right now will not matter. If Harper wins the next election and there is no reason to believe the hapless Dion will be able to beat him, the Provinces will have no choice but tackle the issue of senate Reform. As Harper likes to say, God bless Canada. We will need all the help we can get.

“conservative parties simply cannot shy away from values questions. On a wide range of public-policy questions, including foreign affairs and defence, criminal justice and corrections, family and child care, and healthcare and social services, social values are increasingly the really big issues. Take taxation, for example. There are real limits to tax-cutting if conservatives cannot dispute anything about how or why a government actually does what it does. If conservatives accept all legislated social liberalism with balanced budgets and corporate grants - as do some in the business community - then there really are no differences between a conservative and a Paul
Martin.

…..

Third, rebalancing means there will be changes to the composition of the conservative coalition. We may not have all the same people we have had in the past. The new liberal corporatist agenda will appeal to some in the business community. We may lose some old "conservatives," ; Red Tories like the David Orchards or the Joe Clarks. This is not all bad. A more coherent coalition can take strong positions it
wouldn't otherwise be able to take - as the Alliance alone was able to do during
the Iraq war.”

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The reason why Harper dumped Warner but has in the past allowed other Red Tories to run in several urban ridings is that they were not running in a high profile by-election campaign and Warner would have been.  Once it become clear that there would be no election this fall, Harper dumped him.  He was not going to have someone run against what he holds near and dear and have public kno w about it. 

"We've had, for a number of months, a series of differences between our campaign and the national campaign, over the degree to which I could run a campaign that would focus on the kind of issues that matter in a downtown urban riding," Warner told the Star.

Conservative officials have been actively resisting Warner's emphasis on housing, health care and cities issues, he said, even blocking him from participating in a Star forum on poverty earlier this year and pointedly removing from his campaign literature a reference to the 2006 international conference on AIDS in Toronto – which Warner attended but Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not.

Don Plett, Conservative party president, signed the letter that was delivered to Warner this week precisely as the government was unveiling its mini-budget on Tuesday afternoon.

Plett said yesterday he didn't want to elaborate on the decision to oust Warner, for privacy reasons. However, Plett didn't argue with Warner's characterization of the dispute.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/2 72579" title="http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/2 72579" target="_blank"http://www.thestar.com/News/C...

As for Warner's processed roots in the Progressive Conservative party, Harper was always quite clear that he regarded the Progressive Conservative party as a “second Liberal Party”.

As to Warner's attempts to address issues relating to social housing, access to education and issues related to poverty, make no mistake Harper has no time for such issues and is not afraid to say so. To wit:

"These [federal government] proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of 'child poverty' and for more business subsidies in the name of 'cultural identity'. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects. ..."

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