[LINK] "Will the Liberals have a brand outside Green Gables?"

[rfmcdonald]

I've often asked friends what will happen when the teetering Liberal Party becomes an ethnic party of rural Anglo-Celtic Canada and select urban enclaves. John Ibbitson in The Globe and Mail goes straight to the point: it's not inconceivable that in a year's time, outside of Prince Edward Island there won't be a Liberal Party government in power in any of the Canadian provinces. As the Conservatives and the NDP jointly collaborate in carving up the Canadian vote, will there be any space for the Liberals?

(Thanks to suitablyemoname for pointing the article out.)

At the national level, not only are the Liberals leaderless and struggling to attract the support of even one voter in five. The ongoing gradual elimination of public subsidies threatens the party’s ability to function.

In Quebec, Jean Charest’s Liberals trail in the polls. If they are defeated on Sept. 4, revelations of corruption from the Charbonneau Inquiry could render the brand toxic, opening the door to the CAQ or a provincial NDP as the default federalist alternative to the Parti Québécois.

In British Columbia, a new Conservative Party, led by John Cummins, threatens Liberal Premier Christy Clark from the right, even as Adrian Dix’s NDP dominates in the polls. If the Liberals lose next year’s election, the party could go the way of Social Credit, the previous conservative-in-all-but-name alternative to the NDP in B.C.

In Ontario, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty pulled a rabbit out of the electoral hat last year, but he now heads a minority government, challenged both by Tim Hudak’s Conservatives and Andrea Horwath’s NDP.

In other provinces … actually, there are no other provinces where Liberals are in government, outside the Ghiz administration in PEI. Conservative parties of one stripe or another govern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick. The NDP holds sway in Manitoba and Nova Scotia.

The national and provincial wings of political parties are, of course, almost completely unaffiliated. But they do share the same brand name, and that matters hugely.

Seven years ago, the Liberal brand dominated federally and in the three largest provinces. A year from now, it could be associated with power nowhere outside Green Gables. With virtually no affiliation between brand and government, how does the idea of Liberal survive?

[. . . A]bout four voters in 10 agree with this statement: Government policies usually do more harm than good. About six in 10 believe government can help. This is what pollsters and analysts mean when they say the Canadian electorate is polarizing.

Those 4-in-10 pessimists generally vote Conservative. The other six vote Liberal, NDP, PQ, BQ or Green. Increasingly, they appear to be inclining to the NDP as an unambiguous alternative to the laissez-faire Conservatives. This is what is killing the Liberal brand. It doesn’t identify strongly with either side of the debate. This could prove fatal.