Liberals: a united party? Or unite and party?

Our convention correspondent uncovers under-cover hanky panky, boozing and toking, but no discussions about accountability or (pardon her English) “corruption”

By Lesley Myers –

I attended this weekend’s convention as a delegate for Stéphane Dion, and a reporter for The Bulletin Online, and I’ll say this for the Liberals: they can throw a party. Political folklore has it that you go to Conservative conventions to get drunk, NDP conventions to get stoned, and Liberal conventions to get laid. The truth, as I discovered within an hour of being there, is that at Liberal conventions you can do all three. In fact, a love of partying is one thing that really seems to unite the Liberals. A love of hating Harper is another. A commitment to winning the next election is a third.

Yes, the Liberals are hell-bent on unity, both for Canada and the party. They can’t make a speech without mentioning it. What they don’t talk about is the thing that landed them in opposition in the first place. In all the constitutional amendments and policy revamps, a discussion of corruption and accountability was notably missing. The topic was also conspicuously absent from the leadership candidates’ speeches.

Liberal corruption is not a problem of elections past. It plagued this leadership campaign. Brison was accused of insider trading after his income-trust email. Volpe caused a commotion after accepting campaign donations from children. Rae, Iggy, and Volpe were all under investigation for recruiting members illegitimately at some point in the race. Volpe took the most heat, after it was discovered that some of the supporters he’d signed up were dead. The party fined him $20,000 and there were calls for him to be kicked out of the race. Yet nothing happened. The fine was retracted and Volpe was cleared of any responsibility. Rae and Ignatieff were also cleared of any wrongdoing.

Even the new party leader, Stéphane Dion, did not have a squeaky-clean campaign, despite being lauded as the integrity candidate. In my time volunteering for Team Dion, I spent an afternoon phoning some of the 60-odd Dion delegates running in my riding of Toronto Centre-Rosedale. Of the 18 numbers I phoned, 15 were unassigned, incorrect or unavailable. Two went unanswered. The only person I managed to reach was completely unaware that he was a member of the Liberal party, let alone that he was running as a delegate.

After notifying the Dion camp the appropriate shock and horror was expressed, but nothing was done. To Dion’s credit, he did attempt to reach me to find out the details of the situation, but we never touched bases. The people I did manage to speak to said that illegitimate memberships are an unfortunate but inevitable part of Liberal politics. Everyone does it.

The conservatives have already started trying to link Dion to the sponsorship scandal, and they will continue paint the Liberals as a party that cannot be trusted. If we Liberals continue to hide our skeletons in our closet we will only be proving Harper right. We are content to pay lip service to renewal and cleaning up the party—but we aren’t changing in any meaningful way. Complacency will prove itself to be the Liberals’ biggest enemy, not Harper.

If this weekend taught me anything, it’s that the Liberals are a great party with a wealth of great people. So let’s put down our beers, joints, and/or lovers and take a second to look at our own shortcomings and fix them. Let’s make ourselves accountable and regain the trust of Canadians. Surely that is something worth uniting for.