Having a variety of voices in the Liberal leadership race will be good for the party, but whoever wins will have to borrow heavily from the others to win back voters

As most predicted, the Liberal leadership contest has turned into a packed race. The absence of an obvious front-runner has excited the aspirations, ambitions and, in some cases, the delusions of contenders who otherwise might have stayed in the starting gate.

Listening to their early declarations, it is apparent that the regional, gender and generational diversity of the candidates is going to be matched by the strategies they hope to employ — first to win the contest and presumably, thereafter, the country.
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Today’s cynical voters actually care more about issues than yesterday’s partisans, so a campaign of ideas for the Liberal leadership could win some back

Scant weeks before Auditor General Sheila Fraser transferred her “outrage” over the sponsorship scandal to the Canadian electorate, private polling suggested that Paul Martin and his Liberal party were headed toward the largest electoral majority on record. Twenty-six months later, his term in government has been relegated to a modest footnote in Canadian history books, Stephen Harper occupies his office in the Langevin block and, as his former followers set out to elect his successor, the very future of the Liberal party has become a question mark.

Without doubt, this massive change in fortune underscores the incendiary impact of the Gomery inquiry. In no small measure it probably also reflects tactical and strategic errors that Mr. Martin’s Liberals made while in government and over the course of two federal campaigns. Much more telling however, Mr. Martin’s descent reflects a political culture where attachment to partisan choice is so tenuous that no political party’s fortunes can be guaranteed beyond the next calendar year.
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Originally appeared in March 2006 Walrus Magazine

Under the cover of normalcy, on July 7, 2005, the heart of London was bombed and dozens of people were killed by young Muslim men who had grown up in the same environment as their victims. The process of acculturation – at British schools, and, one presumed, local pubs or Soho restaurants – had failed, and Britons were left to wonder how a cluster of radicals dedicated to terrorism and to distant ideologies could grow out of the soil we all share.

In another sign that all is not well in our diverse cities, four months later the outskirts of Paris erupted in spontaneous violence. On the night of October 27th, French police chased a group of teenagers who had ventured out of their Arab neighbourhood into the leafy suburbs of Livey-Garzan. Two of them were electrocuted while attempting to hide in a power generation facility, and within twenty-four hours this tragic accident turned the streets of Clichy-sous-Bois (and adjacent communities) into a cauldron of violence. In a scene reminiscent of Detroit or Los Angeles during the 1960s race riots, over 9,000 cars and 200 buildings were torched and France has been on edge ever since. An orchestrated attack by a terrorist cabal had besieged London, but in France something equally ominous had occurred: entire neighbourhoods comprised of poor and alienated immigrants protested their sense of isolation through wanton destruction.

Then, six weeks after the French riots, half-way around the world roughly 5,000 white Australians took to the beaches of Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney, to attack people of Middle-Eastern origin locally referred to as “sand niggers.” Organized through text messaging and the Internet, this was a planned assault by aggrieved whites demanding, essentially, a return to Australia’s “whites only” immigration policy. The country had abandoned this openly racist approach to immigration in 1973 and today, together with Canada, Australia has the most aggressive per capita immigration targets in the world. Indeed, prior to last November’s outbreak of sectarian violence it also had a growing international reputation for peaceful integration. The thugs who descended on Cronulla, obviously, did not endorse this national self-image.
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