a lack of vision?

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even as a card-carrying member of a political party, it's important not to lose sight of critical and non-partisan perspectives... Jonathan Kay of the National Post rightly sent this wake-up call to the Liberal party:

If there's anything more annoying than the shrill demagoguery and Bush-bashing that marked the Liberal election campaign, it's the sententious navel-gazing that's followed it. Since Jan. 23, countless misty-eyed Liberals -- from name-brand senators to ambitious junior apparatchiks -- have come forward to explain how their party can reclaim its ancient glory. In speeches, on the comment pages of newspapers and in mass-circulated e-mails, the cliché-studded Liberal cri de coeur has become a literary genre unto itself.

But even in a crowded field, Jim de Wilde's op-ed in Friday's Toronto Star stands out. The author is described as a "long-time Liberal and academic who is currently co-teaching an MBA course on Venture Capital Strategies at the Rotman School of Business." By combining the institutionalized sanctimony of the Liberal party with the jargon addiction that pervades biz school, he has succeeded in producing the quintessential post-Martin Liberal manifesto -- a document that at once says virtually nothing, yet also speaks volumes about the state of his party. [O]n and on it goes -- vacant bromide after vacant bromide. Until the reader gets to a sentence so perfectly meaningless that it inspires a perverse sort of awe: Canadian citizens, de Wilde tells us, need to "understand the importance of Canada being a metaphor for global citizenship in the current era of global politics."

[However, de Wilde's] soaring vacuities are in fact merely symptoms of a far larger problem confronting the Liberal party -- a problem that competent editing can't fix. Under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, the Liberal party had no ideology, just a will to power. Now that this amoral approach has been discredited by Adscam, Liberals are casting their minds back through the decades, trying to remember what it is they're supposed to stand for -- an exercise that leads them to such Trudeau-era chestnuts as "multicultural value propositions" and "creating national projects."

But Trudeau, misguided as he was, at least put meat on the bone with real-life policies such as the National Energy Program, bilingualism, the Charter of Rights and cultural nationalism. Whatever we think of them now, they at least were grand ideas that captured the imagination. The problem for Liberals is that this era is long gone. If anything, Canadians now want the federal government rolled back -- most crucially, to give provinces more room to experiment with private health care. With gay marriage yesterday's news, and Martin's Kyoto plan shown up as a sham in Montreal, the Liberals' one hope of kindling Trudeauvian fervour in the last election was a Soviet-style child-care plan -- which voters rejected in favour of Stephen Harper's simple cash-for-kids model.

De Wilde and his fellow Liberal idealists are caught between the party's instinct to dazzle voters with interventionist pan-national programs and the reality that all of the grandiose schemes worth pursuing (along with many others that weren't) are already with us. De Wilde's exhortations reflect the Liberals' awkward effort to square this circle: lofty, faux-inspiring slogans that vaguely summon the spirit of yesterday's champions without actually offering any substantial ideas.

Canadians aren't looking for another left-wing revolution. They're looking for honest, centrist governance. That's what Harper promised. And if he provides it, the Liberals will have all the time in the world to write their tedious manifestos and hone their vision of "21st-century 'liberal cosmopolitanism'."

Whatever that is.

while i don't agree with Kay's anti-social-liberal bent, his comments about the propensity for Liberal idealism to be interpreted as vacuity is a poignant criticism... hence why i'd suggest a policy convention is necessary before a leadership contest, so that the party can figure out its priorities...

then again, i'm neither a name-brand senator nor an ambitious junior apparatchik who has access to newspaper op-ed columns...

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