What's at stake," said Michael Ignatieff, at the opening of this weekend's landmark policy conference, is whether Canada's political system "can actually address the real problems the country faces."
What is also at stake is whether the Liberal Party can rediscover itself.
Just over 300 people are gathered in Montreal this weekend to discuss what Canada might look like in 2017, 150 years after Confederation. This could be a wistful question, for there is reason to wonder whether Liberals will have any say in the matter.
The party of Laurier and King and Trudeau is weak. Its fortunes have declined in each of the past three elections - from majority government to minority government to opposition to disaster.
Since Edward Blake in the 19th century, no Liberal leader had failed to become prime minister, until Stéphane Dion. The polls suggest Mr. Ignatieff could become Number Three.
The traditional Liberal coalition of French Quebeckers, the Ontario middle class, immigrants and Atlantic Canadians has unravelled. As William Macdonald, the veteran business and political consultant, observed, the party was shut out of Western Canada in 1957 and has never recovered. It lost French Quebec in the 1984 election.
And the Conservatives under Stephen Harper have steadily eroded the Liberals' base in Ontario and among immigrants, who are increasingly attracted to the Tories' agenda of smaller government and mild social conservatism.
Twice before, in sloughs of despond, the former natural governing party held a conference of renewal: in Kingston in 1960, and in Aylmer, Que., in 1991. Mike Pearson and Jean Chrétien went on to become prime minister. Mr. Ignatieff is gambling that history will repeat itself.
But first, the Liberals must confront some hard truths. The party stands for nothing discernible. It is old.
Most of the faces at the conference yesterday were white and middle-aged or older - the consequence, no doubt, of a $700 entrance fee. But the Liberals' inability to spark the imagination of younger voters has contributed to their indifferent support for the party and for steadily declining turnouts at elections.
For those who do vote, the Conservative Party successfully planted in the minds of many the question: Who should mind the store? That is, which party will manage the economy and avoid raising taxes? Voters are more inclined to answer that question in the Conservatives' favour.
The goal of this conference is to get voters asking a different question: Who's watching out for "the damaged middle class?" as John Duffy, a Liberal analyst and consultant, puts it.
That is, who will protect health care, help people save for retirement, create green jobs for the new economy?
Mr. Ignatieff outlined three specific goals for this conference and for the election platform that will ultimately come from it.
First, "a pan-Canadian approach to learning and training," to address the challenge of "people without jobs and jobs without people," he said at a news conference.
Second, "orienting our society to the new realities of power in the world, the rise of India and China."
Third, addressing "energy efficiency and the environment," to make Canadians "leaders in the field of renewables rather than followers."
The Liberals believe the Conservative Party is unconcerned with social policy. If they can persuade Canadians that they have solutions for families whose retirements are in jeopardy, whose younger members can't find jobs, whose older members fear the health-care system will fail them, says Mr. Duffy, then they can again become a governing party. "It's a real need, and it's unmet and the Conservatives don't appear interested in addressing this stuff," he believes.
Yet the conference, perversely, risks failure by the very terms it sets for success. Many of its speakers, though eminent, are familiar. David Dodge, the former governor of the Bank of Canada; Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management; Lucienne Robillard, former Liberal cabinet minister; Janice Stein, the political scientist, and so on. These are leading voices, but we already know what they have to say.
Where were the voices that could startle, that could shake people up? What is the point of hearing the same-old same-olds talking to each other?
The most telling confession of the conference might have been the flawed assumption that lay beneath it: that the Laurentian consensus still holds, that Montreal and Toronto set and guide the agenda.
"Forty-three of 53 of the guest speakers are from Ontario or Quebec," the Conservatives gleefully pointed out in a memo, noting that "the United States and Australia have more representation" than some provinces.
As Mr. Ignatieff himself observed, power is shifting to the West. Every year, Canada becomes more Pacific and less Atlantic. Most of the 250,000 immigrants who flood into Canada each year are from South or East Asia. And they are as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal.
Historically, Liberals have been better than Conservatives at catching the next wave, whether that wave was loosening ties with Great Britain early in the last century, embracing Keynesian economics in the middle decades, championing progressive social policy in the 1960s.
At Kingston, Liberals convinced themselves they must campaign for sweeping reforms to health care and pensions. At Aylmer, the party embraced globalism and fiscal responsibility.
What is the next wave? Will it be discovered in Montreal? That is really what's at stake.
Finally, there is the question of Mr. Ignatieff himself. The leader has, as yet, failed to connect with Canadians, failed to personify the passion that manifested itself in the Olympics, and that political consultant Mr. Macdonald believes was a symptom of an increasingly assertive patriotism.
"Canadians are thirsting for somebody to articulate what they feel about their country, which they feel deeply about," he maintains. That's what Michael Ignatieff insists he's all about. Thus far, polls say Canadians aren't buying it.
Some day, the Conservatives will lose an election. Governments grow tired, and the opposition suddenly finds itself in office, ready or not.
But in the past century, Conservatives gained power rarely, and rarely knew what to do with it. This conference aims to reverse a trend that is turning the Liberals into that kind of party: faction-ridden, ineptly led, whose victories are more by accident than design.
High stakes indeed, for a gaggle of policy wonks talking to each other at a hotel in Montreal.
John Ibbitson