Poor Michael Ignatieff. How he must admire Stephen Harper's widely reviled mastery of message management. The Prime Minister is freakishly obsessed with every image, every sound bite, every scrap of information emanating from government. He has an elaborate system to ensure that he, and only he, is in control. He runs his operation with an iron fist and fear.
Iggy could use some of that.
Nobody is afraid of him. He can't make anybody do what he wants, even if he knows what it is. Half the people in his party are busy scheming behind his back, and the other half are scheming in plain sight.
These are desperate times for Liberals. Despite Mr. Harper's deep unlikeability, they know they have about as much chance of winning the next election as I have of dancing the Swan Princess with the National Ballet.
It's no wonder certain Liberals have been seized with coalition fever. Maybe even merger fever. They're giddy at the idea of a "progressive coalition" with the NDP that would vault them back into power. After all, it worked for the Conservatives. Liberal and NDP heavyweights are said to be in top-secret talks that are so hush-hush they've been reported on national TV. Jean Chrétien and Roy Romanow are said to be intrigued. Jack Layton might play ball (but only if he gets to own the bat). Bob Rae is keen because he thinks he could wind up as PM, despite the fact that those who remember Ontario in the early 1990s would rather vote for a red-bottomed baboon.
The only person not caught up in this giddy whirl is Iggy. He insists coalitions are illegitimate, until he decides they aren't.
In fact, a merger of the two parties is just a fantasy. Their DNA is so different that a union of the Liberals and the NDP would be a bizarre act of interspecies mating, not suitable for viewing by adults of any age. Besides, it's hard to see how they could get along when the Liberals can't even get along with themselves.
This is an ancient Liberal problem. They're so busy knifing each other it's amazing they have any energy left to fight the enemy. So far as I can tell, their current strategy is to be against whatever the Conservatives are for, even though they'd normally be for it, and vice versa, unless there's a danger they might trigger an election, in which case they will grudgingly agree. This leads to some peculiar positions. Kind and gentle refugee reform? Forget it! How about sticking around in Afghanistan after 2011? Mr. Harper is against it, so Mr. Rae has discovered that he's for it, even though nearly all Canadians agree with Mr. Harper. Go figure.
The Liberals always think their problems will be fixed if only they could find a charismatic leader. That's what Iggy was supposed to be. Instead, he turned out to be just another academic with poor organizational and people skills - Stéphane Dion without the political experience.
But the Liberals' problems are far worse than weak leadership and a divided left. Everywhere, liberal welfare states are retrenching. All are facing massive public-service layoffs, deep cuts to entitlements, shrunken budgets for health care and education, and inevitable tax hikes. They're too broke for new social programs, or to throw money at climate change. As Britain's David Cameron says, the drastic spending cuts to come "will change British life."
We won't be untouched. If Greece or Hungary go down, we'll feel the pain. Our major trading partner is forever swamped in debt. We too have been living beyond our means, as we shall soon find out. Yet the Liberals don't seem to notice that anything has changed. The great postwar era of nanny states and ever-expanding entitlements is gone for good, but they don't have anything to say about that. They're like Miss Havisham, trapped in her decaying mansion, fixated on the past, where nothing ever changes and the clock stopped 20 years ago. And so they fool around with merger talk, because they have no clue what else to do.