Oxymoron of the day: Liberal strategy

Don Martin
Canwest News Service

Liberal leader Stephane Dion and his wife Janine Krieber board their election campaign plane. (Andy Clark/Reuters)

WALKERTON -There's a dizzy falling-down-the-rabbit-hole sensation to riding with Liberal leader Stephane Dion as his four-day-old tour finally defied gravity aboard a generation-old jet heading into Atlantic Canada.

It's almost as if the leader is a liability the campaign is trying to hide as the buses move from ridings that are impossible to win to safe seats where he makes announcements that simply don't make strategic sense.

His good days, er, hours have been limited to Conservative back-room hiccups that had nothing to do with invigorated Liberal ideas or his new macho image as a floor-hockey and fishing enthusiast. And that pooping puffin attack ad is now being seen as a one-time gift that risks becoming a memory-sticking defining Dion image.

The unveiling of the Liberals' meat safety policy in a Walkerton high school is a classic example of an outbreak of vertigo, which suggests the U2-borrowed campaign theme song of the same name is appropriate and shouldn't be scrubbed as planned.

It was a great crowd of 1,000, unfortunately non-voting teens, that was arguably larger than the combined turnout of Mr. Dion's entire rally and riding office pit stop tour so far.

But a teacher pulled me aside after Mr. Dion's talk to confide that Walkerton students are sick of being poster children for poison products in the aftermath of the killer E. coli contaminated water disaster of 2000.

That's why local reporters, who had been told Mr. Dion would limit his speech to his Green Shift carbon tax plan, winced when told it was a product safety announcement. Walkerton's water supply is a tragedy children and parents alike would rather forget and Mr. Dion's media parade merely refreshed the stigma for national consumption.

The infamous blue Walkerton water tower, visible from the school's front steps, might have been an appropriate photo-op backdrop, but I'm sure one student spoke for the many when all she wanted to know from Mr. Dion was how the Liberals would help a struggling single-parent family pay for her tuition next year.

Wait, the leader said, that announcement is scheduled for today in Saint John. Not in a high school? Huh? But that wasn't the only missed opportunity yesterday.

In what could've been a triumph of political brinkmanship over the bully antics of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had blocked Green Party leader Elizabeth May's obvious right to participate in the leaders' debate, Mr. Dion had meekly refused to boycott the event, even though he argued her vetoed participation was an affront to democracy.

Had he done so, Mr. Harper's capitulation yesterday could have framed Mr. Dion as a hero to women and advocate of free-speech. But without a defiant principled Liberal position, the flip-flop is merely a political bow to public pressure.

Speaking of women, yesterday also featured a round table to celebrate the Liberals' very strong team of articulate Toronto-area women, including two would-be leaders of the future. It was a golden opportunity to attack a Conservative Cabinet that marginalizes women and a party lineup lacking quality candidates.

But instead of attacking that record or listening to his candidates, Mr. Dion hogged the microphone to deliver a pandering talk on women in the home and raising children while insisting enforced gender parity should apply to the Senate, Crown corporations and throughout government. Yes, he deserves credit for delivering a key promise to have one-third of his national team be women.

Equal Voice, an action group dedicated to electing more women, notes approvingly that 36% of the Liberal candidates are women, 26% of them in ridings considered winnable in this election.

But behind every defeated female candidate will be a failed national leader, so Mr. Dion had best pull up his campaign socks and get people excited about his mission or his candidate quota won't matter one iota.

Trouble is obviously afoot on other fronts. In the Greater Toronto Area fortress for the Liberal party, a major rally that MPs were told would happen this week was inexplicably scrubbed. Thus, Mr. Dion left the city without a sendoff hug from his star candidates.

Behind the scenes, sources say the Liberal party will quietly cancel its December convention in Vancouver, clearing the decks for a leadership convention next year if this tour continues evolving into a funeral procession. The Liberal leader's strategy so far is the classic sign of a party coasting on a lead.

Someone should let Mr. Dion know that some polls have him a distant second place to the Conservatives and flirting dangerously close to New Democrat Jack Layton for the right to be runner-up. The Liberal right-to-life campaign to make this election relevant had better start soon.