An open letter to the Liberals

A few weeks ago, on the Bloggers' Hotstove podcast, an audibly frustrated Jason Cherniak said that NDP voters should realize that even if we didn't like either the Liberals or the Conservatives, the Conservatives were still worse. This rhetoric is nothing new, of course--the Liberals have been making that same argument ever since there's been an NDP, and sometimes it's even worked. Unfortunately for you, though, those days are over. Poll after poll has shown that your best-case scenario is that nothing has changed since the election, and several other scenarios have been far grimmer. Perhaps more importantly, there's been nothing at all in the numbers to indicate any significant movement to the Liberals from the NDP, despite all your efforts to paint us as the source of all your problems. Bill Graham and company have failed to get through to the million and a half voters your party lost to the NDP because you've failed to take one important fact into account: when those voters look at the last two parties' records on the things they care most about, they find that both look equally bad.

It's true that the Liberals were marginally better on the environment: greenhouse gas emissions may have skyrocketed on your watch, but hey, at least you managed to come up with a couple of halfway decent programs like EnerGuide, while the Tories have produced a big fat nothing. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have been marginally better on ethics and accountability: while the Liberal government ended up embroiled in a scandal in which millions of taxpayer dollars were stolen, the Tories' own scandal "only" meant taxpayers footing the bill for a single convention, and on the other side of the coin they at least came up with a few decent provisions for the new Accountability Act. Neither party has a good record on willingness to cooperate in a minority government situation: the Conservatives were willing to make some of the suggested NDP amendments to the Accountability Act, but unwilling to compromise at all on child care or the environment, and the Liberals allowed the NDP to play a role in your budget, but only after first trying to govern as if you'd had a majority and getting your backs shoved up against a wall. On childcare, the Conservatives produced nothing but a glorified baby bonus, while the Liberals spent a dozen years promising to come up with a plan that you didn't get around to trying to implement until the final hour. The Liberals couldn't manage to do anything on the softwood lumber file, while the Conservatives could only come up with a lousy deal. Neither party has done anything significant to protect public healthcare, promote democratic and electoral reform, or reduce the cost of higher education. The list goes on.

Now, I realize that this sort of reasoning makes Liberals crazy. What you want is for NDP voters to accept at face value the assertion that Stephen Harper is going to destroy Canada as we know it, and that this should logically lead us to vote for the "only viable alternative" (which happens to be your party). But when we really look at the two parties' actual records, what we see are two governments that have been pretty equally out of synch with what we want to achieve. And here's the rub: no matter how much you disagree with us about that, if you want to win our votes, you need to use arguments that will actually appeal to us rather than recycling the same ones that work on Liberal stalwarts. We're a lot more practical than you think we are, and we actually do realize that we're not going to get our ideal government no matter what happens. Historically, those of us who live in ridings where the Liberal candidate needs our vote to defeat a Conservative have been willing to hold our nose and vote for you when you've made a case we could buy. So in the spirit of the sort of intraparty cooperation I've often preached about, here are five things you could do that might actually sway us.

1. Woo us, don't threaten us. Tell us why your guy would be so great; don't just concentrate on why the other guy is so awful. I realize that this is hard to do when you don't know yet who your guy is, but there are plenty of problems you're going to want to solve regardless of who wins the leadership race, right? Tell us what you stand for, because at this point, we honestly don't know. It may well be that you don't know, either, so work on that first, but then don't forget to come back and tell us about what you figure out. The Liberals aren't the default anymore, and you need to make a case for why your vision is a good one.

2. Distinguish yourselves not just from the current Conservative government, but from the past Liberal governments that did things we didn't like. The two biggies here are government ethics and broken promises. At this point you really can't minimize the lingering aftereffects of either your scandal-ridden past or the fact that you've continually promised things you haven't even tried to deliver, so your best bet is to convince us that the next Liberal government would be entirely different. This will be a tricky political play, since it means taking responsibility for your past while at the same time distancing yourselves from it, but choosing a new leader gives you an unprecedented opportunity to do just that. Don't squander that opportunity by trying to pretend none of it was all that important.

3. Stop painting the NDP as the reason why you guys lost the last election. We're not stupid; we know perfectly well why you guys lost the last election. Trying to pass the buck just makes you look like you're not willing to take responsibility for your own mistakes, which is exactly the image you don't want to be projecting. For that matter, when you talk about how awful the NDP is, then we--the very people whose votes you want to lure away--are the folks that you're painting as the enemy. Don't call the woman you're trying to seduce a bitch to her face. We're sick to death of Liberal vinegar, but we might respond much better to a little bit of honey.

4. Ban anything that smacks of entitlement from your collective vocabulary. It might have been the sponsorship scandal that started your slow decline, but it was your "natural governing party" strutting that slammed the final nail into your coffin. To win the next election, you do need to act confident and united behind your new leader, but at the same time, you can't appear even the slightest bit arrogant. You have to paint your new leader as a regular guy with some uncharacteristic humility, not somebody who thinks the only rational choice is the Liberal Party.

5. This one will be hard, but it might just make or break you: during the next election, send a sign that you'd be willing to work with the NDP in the case of a Liberal minority win. Yes, Jack Layton will be charging at you with all his might, but do it anyway. This may sound counter-intuitive, but think about it: it would look pretty appealing to the voters in those Conservative-Liberal swing ridings who really want to trust the All-New-Liberals, but can't quite bring themselves to do it. You might even want to throw the term 'coalition' around--you know, the word that means "both the Liberals and the NDP get to sit on the government side of the House." Yes, it's an unappealing scenario to a party that used to be able to take a majority government for granted, but times have changed. And believe me, if NDP voters had the impression that casting a vote for a Liberal could produce a cabinet that consisted of members of our team as well as yours, that'd go a long way toward making that option more attractive.

The Liberal assumption has always been that NDP voters would inevitably prefer a Liberal government to a Conservative one. It's a logical one to make, but only if you're looking at nothing but the location on a left-right spectrum of the various parties' proposed policies. The problem for you guys is that we've gotten wiser, and have started taking a lot more into consideration than election promises when casting our votes. In the last election, I actually wanted you to lose, and I certainly wasn't alone in that. But while I won't be voting Liberal myself next time (there's no convincing anybody these days that voting Liberal is the best way to oust the Tory in Edmonton-Strathcona), I genuinely hope that I can go back to hoping that you guys win. Whether or not I do, though--and more importantly for the outcome of the next election, whether or not a million and a half other NDP voters do--depends entirely on you.