Grits celebrate without Trudeau

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/05/2016 (2884 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s billed as a policy convention, but talk to enough Liberals and you’ll learn the mass gathering of several thousand party members in Winnipeg this weekend is less policy-wonk heaven and more three-day victory celebration.

It is, after all, the first significant gathering of Liberals since October’s federal election win. The party anticipated 2,400 delegates, but walk-ups are expected to push that number much higher. Winning an election is an intoxicating experience best celebrated, it would seem, with several thousand of your closest brothers and sisters in arms.

However, as a hard-news event, the Winnipeg conference leaves a lot to be desired. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was stuck at the G7 summit in Japan and is expected to show up Saturday. His absence took some of the sex appeal out of the event and led to a few frowny faces among the media corps.

(A visiting reporter revealed national news organizations felt the Conservative convention being held concurrently in Vancouver, at which former prime minister Stephen Harper said goodbye, was the sexier event. That will be the only time Harper will be considered sexier than Trudeau.)

Even without Trudeau, there was important party work to be done in Winnipeg. Delegates were able to engage with cabinet ministers on all manner of policies. Elections were held to fill senior party positions. However, the single most important session was held Friday morning on organization and strategy. It was entitled How Four Million Conversations Led to Four Years of Real Change.

Lamentably, this session was not open to the media. Still, the general consensus was this was the opportunity to get the inside poop on exactly how the party won the last election. The Four Million Conversations refers to the total of face-to-face, telephone and digital contacts the Liberals were able to generate during the campaign. Post-election, it has become a rallying cry to start preparing now for the next election. 

The Liberals certainly have a strong base on which to build. The 2015 election campaign was the most technologically advanced and strategically sophisticated in the party’s history. After having been soundly outplayed by the Tories for a decade, the Liberals desperately needed a complete overhaul of fundraising, voter identification, communication and election-day mobilization. 

But according to ground-level Liberal volunteers, many of whom ran or assisted riding campaigns, the innovation did not stop there. Electoral district associations were provided with a package called “campaign in a box,” a comprehensive how-to bundle with best practices for campaigning (both traditional and digital) and fundraising. The central campaign watched and graded each association on metrics to see how closely they were sticking to the master plan. The result, according to volunteers, was a campaign that was more intense, more comprehensive and — perhaps most importantly — more consistent from riding to riding.

The reinvention continues this weekend with the tabling of a new party constitution, a project Trudeau has personally sponsored.

The new constitution is smaller and simpler than the tangle of governing documents upon which the Liberals relied before. The party and its various issue-oriented commissions had given birth to 18 different constitutions. That is an impractical structure that explains, in part, why the Liberals have been so fractious.

However, the new constitution also introduces the radical idea of free party memberships. This would allow anyone who registers as a member to vote in nominations, leadership contests and policy conventions.

No one is entirely sure how this will impact the party. It could make the Liberals the first truly democratic political party, an entity that can engage a new generation of voters. Or it could leave the Grits vulnerable to a hostile takeover by mischief-makers or single-issue activists.

A small cadre of dissidents complains the new constitution is all about consolidating power at the top, forgetting the Liberal party, like all registered parties in this country, has always been a top-down organization. Rank-and-file members can lobby and recommend, but they have never had the power to force policy positions on the leader or elected caucus.

And let’s remember Trudeau and his senior advisers proved in the last election that, in practical terms, a top-down structure can work. Electoral district associations alone could not have mustered the strategy needed to compete toe to toe with the Tories and their advanced capacity for technology and metadata.

Dissidents within the party should remember that, and one other thing: although debating and approving a new constitution may not seem very sexy, winning the next election certainly is.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca