Dion. Ignatieff. How will history remember them?

[Teddy (IDS Legislator)]

2008 and 2011 were the worst elections for the Liberals. While the Liberals did manage 77 seats in 2008, their popular vote was lower than ever (save 2011 of course)

How will history remember them? Will they be seen as the two people who destroyed the party? Will they be remembered as "the failures"? Or will people be "understanding"? Think that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Feel that they were just unable to compete with Harper and Layton? Or worse, will people feel that now was just the time for the death of the Liberal Party? The the leaders mean nothing, it was just time for the Liberals to go?

I'm curious to hear all of your thoughts.

[Хahar 🤔]

I think that the Ignatieff disaster will cause Dion to be remembered much more favorably, but in the end it feels like they'll be seen as small, faceless men clearly unsuited to the tasks given them.

[Smid]

I don't think either will be blamed, I think that historians will point to the Sponsorship Scandal as the beginning of the end of the Liberal Party (assuming their fortunes don't reverse, I think the NDP will become the dominant non-Conservative party, but that's not a foregone conclusion). That may or may not be true, but I think that's how it will be seen in years to come.

[minionofmidas]

Indeed, they may not be remembered at all.

[Thomas D]

If they're remembered at all it will be as noble fighters who went down with a sinking ship.

[Hatman 🍁]

The Liberal decline began with Trudeau

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ignatieff is going to have one hell of an interesting obituary.

[RogueBeaver]

Depends if the Grits recover OO status. So therefore the judgment will depend on how Rae and Kodak will be judged.

[Insula Dei]

I think they'll largely escape blame, even if they'll probably be seen as poor leaders who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ignatieff will probably go down in history as a very poor leader though.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think they'll largely escape blame, even if they'll probably be seen as poor leaders who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ignatieff will probably go down in history as a very poor leader though.

Iggy will go down in history as 'wtflol?'.

If the Liberal Party remains where it is (or worse, declines even further) then 'blame' (not really the right word, of course) will be pinned on Trudeau and also on Chrétien and Martin. The key point, really, isn't that they had a couple of pisspoor leaders. The key point is that the party has (to date) simply rotted away and that there must be reasons for this. It may (who knows) turn out to be an excellent example of such things, but we'll have to wait on that.

[minionofmidas]

If the Liberals magically rebound once Bob Rae has officially taken them into his healing hands and the NDP has self-destructed in the dirty battle for the Layton succession (yeah well, not bloody likely, but bear with me here), history's verdict on Ignatieff will probably be harsher than if they don't.

[DL]

They will be remembered the way Bobby Bend is remembered in Manitoba (check wikipedia).

[Teddy (IDS Legislator)]

The Liberal Party never really recovered from the Constitution TBH. The victories in 1993, 1997, and 2000, as well as 2004 to a lesser degree, were due to both amazing weakness from the NDP, and, a divided rightwing electorate. A united right, and, a stronger NDP would have elected right-wing governments in each of these years.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But you already had right-wing governments through those years...

[RogueBeaver]

The Liberal Party never really recovered from the Constitution TBH. The victories in 1993, 1997, and 2000, as well as 2004 to a lesser degree, were due to both amazing weakness from the NDP, and, a divided rightwing electorate. A united right, and, a stronger NDP would have elected right-wing governments in each of these years.

The PCs never recovered from their Constitution either, and their old populist-Red-Nat coalition is a delayed-fuse IED that always detonates no matter how skilled the PM, as Borden and Dief could attest.

WRT Grit recovery: Scott Reid went to the trouble of writing a blueprint. Implement it, and OO status is well within reach by 2015.

http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/jun11/reid.pdf

[MaxQue]

The Liberal Party never really recovered from the Constitution TBH. The victories in 1993, 1997, and 2000, as well as 2004 to a lesser degree, were due to both amazing weakness from the NDP, and, a divided rightwing electorate. A united right, and, a stronger NDP would have elected right-wing governments in each of these years.

The PCs never recovered from their Constitution either, and their old populist-Red-Nat coalition is a delayed-fuse IED that always detonates no matter how skilled the PM, as Borden and Dief could attest.

WRT Grit recovery: Scott Reid went to the trouble of writing a blueprint. Implement it, and OO status is well within reach by 2015.

http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/jun11/reid.pdf

Why an ultra-conservative MP wrote a blueprint to help Liberals?

[RogueBeaver]

Scott Reid the Liberal strategist, not Scott Reid MP, wrote that.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Ignatieff's skills as a political leader were incredibly inept. He'll be remembered at most as a high-scale loser, who led his party into a third place, possibly permanently.

I like him, he was an intelectual exception in politics, but when compared to Layton and even Harper, he was an amateur.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ignatieff's skills as a political leader were incredibly inept. He'll be remembered at most as a high-scale loser, who led his party into a third place, possibly permanently.

I like him, he was an intelectual exception in politics, but when compared to Layton and even Harper, he was an amateur.

He wasn't an intellectual so much as a man who used to interview intellectuals.

[redcommander]

Two men who destroyed the Liberal Party as a force in Canadian politics. There isn't really anything positive to remember about there tenure. I know that Canada has two main parties competing to win Left-wing support, but why exactly is the Liberal Party so conservative? A lot of its proposals seem quite similar to the Tories. Seriously, the Danish affiliate of Liberal International, which the Canadian Liberal Party is affiliated with is Venstre, and yet it took until 2011 for the Canadian Liberals to be replaced by an actual left-wing party as the main opposition.

[Hatman 🍁]

Two men who destroyed the Liberal Party as a force in Canadian politics. There isn't really anything positive to remember about there tenure. I know that Canada has two main parties competing to win Left-wing support, but why exactly is the Liberal Party so conservative? A lot of its proposals seem quite similar to the Tories. Seriously, the Danish affiliate of Liberal International, which the Canadian Liberal Party is affiliated with is Venstre, and yet it took until 2011 for the Canadian Liberals to be replaced by an actual left-wing party as the main opposition.

Campaign on the left, govern on the right. 140 years of poor politics has finally caught up with them.

[Foucaulf]

I hope historians will expose the veneer of intellectualism that still surrounds the two. Both were academics, but put them to the public and they were anti-Trudeaus, unable to articulate their policy as a function of the greater good. Dion, with his Clarity Act and his carbon tax, was better than Ignatieff, but he let himself be dominated by those two issues.

The Liberal collapse was not entirely their fault; the actual electoral collapse was a consequence of two badly-run campaigns. The Liberals were just plagued with bad timing, choosing to start no-confidence motions instead of fighting back the anti-Iggy ads and the like. It's tempting to trace the collapse back to Trudeau Pt. 2, but save the anemic campaigning and the Liberals might still be Official Opposition in a Harper majority. The difference between powerlessness and collapse is ever so slight.

[Smid]

The weak campaigns were somewhat the result of poor finances made worse by expensive leadership conventions. This made it harder for them to run ads of their own. Of course, the minority parliament prevented Harper from moving Bills that were especially controversial or unpopular, so the old adage of "Oppositions don't win elections - Governments lose them" made it all the harder for them to swing support from the Tories. Ironically, if Harper had gained an extra percent or two and the extra half dozen seats he needed to form a majority following the 2008 election, things might be completely different today and they could have been fighting the election next year instead of in May, and against a less popular government, therefore crystallising support from Liberal-Tory swing voters.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ignatieff's skills as a political leader were incredibly inept. He'll be remembered at most as a high-scale loser, who led his party into a third place, possibly permanently.

I like him, he was an intelectual exception in politics, but when compared to Layton and even Harper, he was an amateur.

He wasn't an intellectual so much as a man who used to interview intellectuals.

Although I suppose he was (is) very much an intellectual in a Gramscian sense. LOL.

[Simfan34]

The last leaders of Canada's Liberal Party.