Amid all the activity and meetings leading up to their approaching convention, Liberal partisans must be wondering if they've been duped. The Liberal website proudly points out that "For the first time, every registered Liberal will be able to have a say in the policy process," while forgetting that for the first time in nearly a century not a single registered Liberal will be allowed to vote for the party's next leader.
To add insult to injury, the current Liberal delegate selection form for the upcoming convention asks prospective delegates to "Irrevocably declare [their] support for the following Leadership Contestant," for which the helpful form provides a big blank space for the applicant to fill out their choice, as if there were still one to make.
One must keep in mind that - as Michael Ignatieff is surely aware - the first elected Liberal leadership convention took place barely a week after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, when the Liberal party was split by the remnants of the Unionist government, and the conscription crisis had opened deep fissures between English and French Canada. (People died during rioting in Montreal.)
Compared to those times, the "crisis" over a proposal to cut the public funding of the Liberal Party hardly seemed so grave as to jettison an elected leadership process.
It appears all those involved in the political process - and perhaps most importantly, current and aspirant Liberal leaders - need a primer on their role in a political party, and the relationship between the leader and the led. Who better than Dalton Camp to provide it?
In May of 1966, the National President of the Progressive Conservative Party launched a campaign to replace the leader of his party, John Diefenbaker. Mr. Camp, the skilled wordsmith and advertising guru whose life reads like a script from Mad Men, would eventually dethrone The Chief and provide the template for that innovation to Canadian political parties, the leadership review.
And so it falls to Mr. Camp to remind Mr. Ignatieff of his role, responsibilities and purpose, and the hues of legitimacy he has. The following is a list of axioms distilled from Camp's two most famous speeches of 1966, given at the Albany Club of Toronto and the Toronto Board of Trade; they have not been published previously.
1. The leader is responsible to the party
"Leaders are fond of reminding followers of their responsibilities and duties to leadership...What is seldom heard, however, is a statement on the responsibilities of the leader to those he leads. Leaders are fond of saying how arduous their labour, how complex the circumstances and how unfair the press criticism, as though they have been called to their high office by some supreme power rather than those they are addressing."
2. The party must be prepared to guide the leader
"A party willingly submits to the leader's power. In the relationship between the leader and the led, there is a mutuality of interest and, as well, a continuing common experience of discovery, learning and revelation. Where the leader does not know the limits to his power, he must be taught, and when he is indifferent to the interest of his party, he must be reminded."
3. The party is permanent
"The party is not the embodiment of the leader, but rather the other way round; the leader is transient, the Party permanent."
4. The party should not be coerced, but led
"Mackenzie King once said the Canadian nation was built upon the spirit of reconciliation, meaning, of course, the reconciling of diverse interest, race, and outlook. A Canadian political party can be no different. Men who lead cannot demand adherence, they may only be given it, and this is the gift of those who are reconciled in some greater and more impersonal cause, which is the party's role and place in the nation."
