Everything Dion said and did fit perfectly with the Conservative caricature of him. They played him like a fiddle. The Conservatives painted Dion as an indecisive wimp in their ads. The worst thing Dion could do once the Conservatives started making everything into a confidence motion was to talk tough and then abstain. That is what a wimp would do. The worst thing Dion and Liberals could have done when the Conservatives started playing bully boy was to get high and mighty and self righteous, but that is exactly what the Liberals did every single time. In the hopes of getting a rise, the Conservatives literally shit on him.  The way to handle Conservative bullying is to roll your eyes and mock them. Think of the fun Trudeau would have had with an – intellectual-- lightweight like Peter Van Loan. Tell John Baird that he looks like he is going to stroke and that putting Harper in a sweater is about as strange a sight as Paris Hilton carrying around a dressed up pit bull instead of one of those puntable breeds. Do not demand an apology. An apology is what a wimp would ask for.

Then there is election itself. Dion said he was going to take the highroad and like any wimp he did. He wanted to show that if he could not beat Harper in the trenches at least he would show that he held the moral high ground. So instead of doing the smart thing and rolling out one hard hitting negative ad after another, Dion gave us the odd negative ad and a lot of sunshine, butterflies, flags and happy people. In other words, the Liberals rolled out just the kind of useless ads wimps would roll out.

What happened in the English debate was even worse. Dion needed to have some zingers reader. He needed to be brief and not verbose. He needed to hit Harper hard, the way big sister Elizabeth May did. Instead, Dion was hopelessly cheerful when not filled with righteous indignation. His accent was strong throughout, revealing why a bully might have taken notice of him in the first place. I thought I was watching a Conservative ad every time he spoke and “Do you think it is easy to make priorities?” stuck in my head the rest of the night.

So it is only fitting that Dion signs off by talking about the successful smear campaign against him and promising that he will do everything in his power to make to sure this does not happen to next Liberal leader. That is exactly what a wimp would do.  

While the Liberal share of the popular vote in other provinces has gone up and down over the years, the Liberal share of the popular vote in BC remained steady between 1993 to 2006 at between 27.6% to 28.8%. That all changed for the worse with Dion. The Liberal share of the popular vote in BC collapsed and the Liberals finished with 19% of the vote in 2008. The sooner Dion leaves, the better for the Liberals in BC. Oh yeah, he can take Mark Marissen with him.

 The “good” news is that the number of people that voted for Harper was down even though his share of the popular vote went up. In 2006 5,374,071 Canadians voted for the Conservatives. In 2008 that number went down 168,737. Now here is the bad news for Liberals. Not only was the Liberal share of the popular vote at a historic low, the number of Canadians that voted Liberal was the lowest since 1984. And if you throw out 1984, you have to go back to 1965 to see so few ballots cast for the Liberals. The Liberal vote went down by 849,425. Between 2004 and 2006, the number of people casting the vote for the Liberals went down by 471,692.

This is this is the second worst election performance for the Liberals in modern era.

 So long as Dion is leader, the Liberals remain irrelevant and their base uninspired.  So long as he remains leader fundraising numbers will remain pitifully low.  Dion needs to go now. The longer the Liberals wait the more their brand will continue to wither and die.  Anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional. 

However, given the number of shots he took on the economy, Harper came out relatively well on that account.  The other parties where not able to articulate any sure fire plan for how to deal with the economy in the short term.  What did stick was Harper’s lack of a plan of action.  Layton quipped, “Where is your platform?  Underneath your sweater?”