The Liberal Party of Canada can’t even raise a decent revolt against its wildly unpopular prime minister — another sign of drop-dead decay.
Polls show that the only way the Liberals can win another election, or even hope to be the official Opposition, is to get rid of Justin Trudeau.
But where is the grand old Liberal machine, that ruthless, brutal guardian of party power?
We hear little about organized party or caucus pressure on Trudeau to quit. The only successors whose names come up — Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and money guy Mark Carney — are either silent or weirdly timorous.
They’d both be awful choices anyway. Freeland is too linked to Trudeau and Carney would be the Michael Ignatieff of our time, another doomed duck out of water.
Faced with Trudeau’s refusal to quit, the Liberals desperately need to force him out and put forward someone credible.
Time’s running short. The PM who waits too long to leave, like Brian Mulroney in 1993, invites not just defeat but collapse of the party.
The Liberals of old, convinced of their immortality, had no patience for even the thought of losing, let alone disappearing.
Liberal Jean Chretien was the most successful prime minister since Pierre Trudeau. He won three majorities in a row between 1993 to 2003.
No prime minister had done that for any party since Liberal Wilfrid Laurier captured four-straight majorities from 1896 to 1908.
But as time went on, the party figured Chretien was getting stale. Polls were weakening. Paul Martin, Chretien’s great rival, had been angling for months.
The torch had to pass. Ambitions, fundraising numbers and internal politics combined in a giant flushing mechanism.
Martin took over as prime minister and won a three-year minority that ended in defeat by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2006.
It happens in provinces, too. In the early 2000s, polls showed that Alberta’s Ralph Klein was the most popular premier in Canada.
He had won four provincial majorities. But his party forced him out with a weak leadership vote that followed his own prevaricating about retirement.
Even with King Ralph, the immensely powerful Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta bowed to the first rule of politics — self-preservation.
Replacement part Ed Stelmach then won a very large electoral majority. But he was vulnerable to regional rivalries. The party forced him out before the end of his first term.
The Alberta Tories were so powerful in those days they believed that they could change leaders like yesterday’s socks. Ultimately, they did it once too often.
But there are moments when a party that neglects essential housecleaning is destined to go down with its leader.
For the federal Liberals, this is the moment.
The latest Leger poll for Postmedia shows that 64 per cent of Canadians disapprove of Trudeau’s performance. Only 28 per cent approve (and seven per cent of respondents said they don’t know.)
Sixty-two per cent said the Liberal party should get a new leader. Even among devoted Liberals, only one-third want him to stay on.
Yet, Liberals have no idea who they want in his place. A modest 18 per cent prefer Freeland; 13 per cent like Carney.
In the rest of the potential field, only Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly gets as high as five per cent.
Interest is even weaker in the general population; eight per cent each for Freeland and Carney, three per cent for Joly.
Trudeau has been the whole Liberal show for so long that there’s no bench strength.
The party is forced to conclude, it seems, that Trudeau himself is right — he’s still the best hope for victory, or at least survival.
And so, the once-mighty Liberal power generator just lies there unplugged, awaiting its trip to the recycling depot.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
X: @DonBraid