The Liberals are heading into the summer with their public support as low as it was under former leader Stéphane Dion, and some Grits are worried Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff will lead them to an even worse defeat in the next election, but options to improve the situation are limited.

"There has to be a growing concern about what's going to happen to the Liberal Party if he's at the helm in the next election," said Chris Dodd, who was a riding association president in the riding of Ottawa West-Nepean, but tore up his membership over the way Mr. Ignatieff was crowned leader.

Mr. Dodd, who supported Liberal MP Bob Rae (Toronto Centre, Ont.) for the leadership in 2006, said he'd been a Liberal activist for years and has done his share of campaigning for the party. He said Mr. Ignatieff's people "manufactured a crisis" around the need to put a new leader in place quickly after Mr. Dion was swiftly thrown over after badly losing the 2008 election, and then sending the party's poll numbers plunging to the lowest depths in recent memory by entering into an abortive coalition pact with the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.

An Ekos poll last week had the Liberals' public support at 25.7 per cent, virtually unchanged from the previous week. The lowest the party has sunk, in December of 2008, was 23 per cent. The governing Conservatives were at 33.9 per cent support, last week, with the NDP at 16.4, the Greens at 11.9, and the Bloc at 9.4 per cent nationally.

After losing the last election, the party was supposed to have a leadership convention in May, 2009, and Mr. Ignatieff, as well as Mr. Rae and MP Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour, N.B.) announced they were running to replace Mr. Dion. But following the disastrous attempt at forming a coalition, Mr. Dion's departure was stepped-up. In the end Messrs. Rae and LeBlanc stepped aside, and Mr. Ignatieff was appointed interim leader by caucus and the party's national executive.

Mr. Dodd said he worked hard for the Liberal Party, and the leader ended up being chosen by less than two per cent of its members.

"When you sacrifice your personal time you expect at a minimum you will have a say in who the leader is," he said. "Everybody had an expectation he was going to be the great white hope for the party. ... It's turned out to be just the opposite."

Lately, however, Mr. Dodd said he's been thinking of rejoining the party.

"Ignatieff has to go, and you can't do anything to make that happen from the outside of the party," he said.

Unless Mr. Ignatieff were to step down, however, switching leaders at this time would be difficult. The party's constitution stipulates that a leadership review must be held after an election, but not between elections. The next time the party chooses a leader, it will be under the new one-member-one-vote system that was adopted at the convention last year in B.C. where Mr. Ignatieff was acclaimed leader.

A Liberal veteran, who didn't want to be named, said one of the problems with not electing a leader is that there isn't as much opportunity for them to be tested on the political stage, and also because the party faithful don't feel as invested in the person at the helm if they haven't had a say in choosing him.

The insider said Ignatieff was a "quick fix," but trying to force him out now would send the party into a "tailspin."

"Some of the party's problems are tied to not having a full voting process for leaderships and for [nominations], and that has to be dealt with. In terms of the party leader himself or herself, there is no mechanism to replace a leader in midstream, and a move to force him out or convince him to step down would probably result in splitting the party in the same way that it was split in the latter years of the Chretien-Martin fights," said the source.

But Heather MacIvor, a political science professor at the University of Windsor and an expert on party leadership contests, said the choice of the Liberal elite to have a coronation instead of a convention was understandable in light of the circumstances at the time.

"There was so much upheaval at the time that the leadership transition was planned out. Even though there had been an election recently, it wasn't entirely clear there wouldn't be another one," she said. "If an election did happen you don't want to be left in the lurch without a leader because then that really puts you at the mercy of the government party. There are rumours to the effect that Joe Clark might have been aware that he was going to lose the famous budget vote in December 1979, but didn't worry too much about it because the Liberals didn't have a leader at the time."

Pierre Trudeau had resigned as Liberal leader, and John Turner and Donald Macdonald were vying to replace him. Tory Prime Minister Joe Clark's unexpected defeat led Mr. Trudeau to return as leader, however, and eventually lead the party back to power.

Meanwhile, in addition to Mr. Ignatieff's failure to catch on with the public, the party is showing other signs of strain. La Presse reported last week that the Liberal Party in Quebec, once a pillar of support, is in chaos following a slew of top officials resigning, with some citing the leader and problems with the leader's office as the reasons why.

The Grits' faltering fortunes, and the recent election of a coalition government in the UK has put the possibility of cooperation on the left back in the public conversation.

When former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien was on Parliament Hill last week for the hanging of his official portrait he was asked about the role he and former NDP leader Ed Broadbent played in negotiating the 2008 coalition agreement. He said it "might make sense" for the two parties to cooperate now, and said it may have been "a mistake" that he did not leap at the opportunity to do so when it was presented to him early in his tenure as prime minister.

Later in the week, Mr. Rae put a lengthy post on his personal website commemorating the 25th anniversary of the coalition accord he entered into with former Liberal premier David Peterson, when he was the leader of the Ontario NDP. Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella, who until recently was to be the head of Mr. Ignatieff's election war room, has been voicing his support for a coalition, and lashed out at the leader's office for issuing talking points in which they said the Liberals "aren't interested in coalitions."

hmacleod@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times