MONTREAL — One of the best services Paul Martin can do for the Liberal Party after he says farewell at a gala later tonight is to take with him the deep divisions that have ravaged the party and helped wreck its 2006 election campaign.
But Mr. Martin's good turn will all come to naught if the leader who succeeds him can't handle what is fast becoming a series of new schisms spawned by the leadership campaign.
"Once the convention is over, we must think of party unity," Mr. Martin told The Canadian Press on Wednesday as the Liberals began their convention to pick his successor. "Party unity is paramount. And in the eight or nine months that I've been gone [as leader], I've worked on that a lot and I am convinced that party unity is assured but we have to keep working on it."
Aside from the expected absence of Jean Chrétien at tonight's goodbye because of an overseas commitment, there is little evidence in Montreal this week of the old Chrétien-Martin fractures that dominated the party over the past generation. Mr. Chrétien will make a speech at the convention when he gets here Saturday and, if truth be told, the race has actually been helpful in healing Martin-Chrétien wounds, as many former combatants find themselves fighting on the same side of certain candidates.
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But the leadership process that has helped to overcome one set of animosities has also created a new set, which party faithful say must be managed carefully if Liberals are to go into the next election with a fighting chance of knocking off the Tories. The Liberals no longer have the luxury of the 1990s, when they could afford to snipe among themselves because Canada's small-c conservative parties couldn't get their own act together.
"Unity is more than a word," cautioned one senior Liberal when asked what needs to happen after Saturday's vote.
"Unity is a process of reaching out, of including others, of acknowledging that there are a wide variety of talents in this party."
The current disquiet in the party comes from a number of sources, but most especially from the battle between front-runner Michael Ignatieff and the man who is in second place, Bob Rae.
Despite having grown up together, there is no love lost between the two men. Mr. Ignatieff's chief campaign director, Ian Davey, has taken to calling the former Ontario premier "Bob-and-weave Rae," while one of Mr. Ignatieff's chief caucus supporters, Paul Zed, yesterday blamed the Rae crowd for pushing forward the "anybody-but-Ignatieff" movement.
The Rae group, while less public, has been similarly vocal behind the scenes, ridiculing Mr. Ignatieff for rookie mistakes and deriding him for positions they say are too close to those of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
There are other divisions, too.
The decisions of Gerard Kennedy, Ken Dryden and Mr. Volpe to oppose the motion recognizing Quebeckers as a nation has exposed the continuing internal war between those in the party who believe in a strong federal government and those who would devolve more powers to provinces. In an election in which Mr. Harper hopes to capitalize on the Quebec recognition question to win Quebec seats, a Liberal split could be disastrous in that province.
As for the next election, some federal Tories are saying that they might prefer to wait until the fall of 2007 for the next federal vote because they believe the new leader cannot hold the Liberals together. What would former Ontario premier David Peterson do, for example, if his nemesis, Mr. Rae, took the contest? Would Mr. Ignatieff run under Mr. Rae or vice-versa?
The answers to those questions are crucial. "Unity is non-negotiable," the senior Liberal said. "There are no excuses. There must be zero tolerance." If there isn't, then the work of the past eight months will have been wasted. And so will Mr. Martin's parting gift.
