OTTAWA—In a speech that painted the Liberal Party identity in broad strokes, Bob Rae made a fiery defence of his party’s fate during his opening remarks at the Liberal Biennal Convention held in Ottawa from Jan. 13 to 15.
Hoping that his party would be resilient in the aftermath of the May 2, 2011, elections that saw it face its worst defeat in history, capturing only 19 percent of the vote and only 34 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons, he said, “We were knocked down, we were not knocked out.”
Drawing inspiration from Sir Winston Churchill’s famous speech when he paid a visit to Canada’s House of Commons in 1942, he likened pundits and party opponents’ forecast of the Liberals’ future to the fascist powers’ belief that Britain could be held by the neck and whipped like a chicken.
He quipped: “‘Some chicken, some neck!’” leading to laughters and cheers from the crowd.
Despite his enthusiasm, Rae was candid in his party’s current need to debate and find its ground—calling it a Liberal Party strength.
“We have to recognize that the strength of our ideas is our capacity to show that change is something that every Liberal embraces.
“Liberals are not afraid of change; Liberals are not afraid of debates; Liberals are not afraid of discussions about policy,” he claimed, before highlighting in French certain core values that the party has stood for for over a century: tolerance, diversity, and liberty.
He stated that the government’s priority ought to be, on the one hand, to create prosperity for the country, and on the other hand, to know how to distribute prosperity so that all benefit from it.
Despite a glorious political history and a convention turnout that organizers say surpassed the turnouts of Conservative Party and New Democratic Party conventions put together, the party at this point remains short of a clear platform and political ideology, and is rather in a phase of discovery of its electorate’s wishes.
“We don’t have to be something we are not; we don’t have to transform in to something else in order to succeed.
“We have to return to the bedrock of what we need to know about ourselves, what we know about our families, what we know about our neighbours, about the changes we see around us and simply renew that bedrock commitment which led us to say at certain moments in our lives: I’m a Liberal.”
