Prairie Fire

Liberal Change Commission - Someone Finally Gets It!

Today I have been digging through the backlog of e-mails from the past few weeks while I have been in academic seclusion from the rest of my life and finally had a chance to read through the report of the Liberal Party of Canada "Change Commission" that was released last week. My first thought upon reading the Forward was "Wow - someone finally gets it!"; that thought did not go away as I went through the rest of the report.

Below are some key passages worth sharing from those opening pages that lay out the problems facing the Liberal Party better than I think I have seen anywhere else:

There may have been some members of our party who thought that as the ‘national governing party’ we could just carry on as ‘we’ve always done it’. They thought we could just wait for the people of Canada to decide that Stephen Harper was bad for Canada and would return the Liberal Party of Canada to government soon enough. We were not of that view.

Einstein defined insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We are big believers in Charles Darwin’s observation: “It is not the strongest of the
species that survives, not the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change.”

Three leadership races in five years and three disappointing elections have taken a toll. If we are to win back the respect of former Liberal Party members and supporters, and of enough
Canadians to form a government, we are going to have to improve our performance. We believe that the Liberal Party has remained one of the strongest brands in Canada because it has steadfastly represented the core Canadian values of fairness and respect and has been always able to ‘s’adapter’ to changing needs and the evolving understanding of what is fair. It is time for change.

The recent success of the U.S. Democratic Party did not happen overnight. After their terrible
showing in the 2002 mid-term elections they made a conscious decision to effect a radical shift in their approach. Governor Dean enhanced the process with his presidential candidacy in 2004 and the innovative two-way accountability of his online campaign. He then continued his commitment to ‘bottom up’ renewal as Chair of the Democratic National Committee. At the Liberal convention in 2006, he described the ‘50 State Solution’ – his theory that focusing on the democratic ‘blue shoulders’ of New England, Washington, Oregon and California would never bring them a moral authority to govern America. Since then, Barack Obama combined an inspirational message of hope with an authentic community development model to actively turn every Democratic Party supporter into a worker, a policy resource, and a donor. The result: a genuine motivation to go out and vote! After six long years of genuine renewal, the Democratic Party won over the hearts and minds of the American people and won the Presidency and a majority in both houses.

We must show that we have both the capacity and the genuine, effective mechanisms to listen to the real problems facing Canadians in these challenging times, and that we are prepared to harvest solutions from the knowledgeable people on the ground.

Jane Jacobs said that: “Good public policy comes when the policy makers can see in their mind’s eye the people affected.”

We believe, as you do, that the Liberal Party of Canada needs to rebuild from the ‘bottom up.’ It is clear that we must ensure the culture of the Liberal Party of Canada is not ‘top down’ but has a genuine respect for the values, ideas, and the contributions of time and energy of its members and supporters in the trenches. Liberal Party members and candidates in all 308 ridings in this country must feel that they are valued and can play a role in winning back the Canadian people’s confidence of in our party. But it is also clear that culture change has to be more than reassuring rhetoric. As Commissioners, we hope you will see in our report the concrete ‘deliverables’ and timelines that will embed the necessary changes into the DNA of our organization.

------------------------------------------

As for those deliverables, Calgary Grit had a good run down of the major areas explored by the Change Commission and a list of the 47 specific recommendations.

All I can say on this one is great job to all involved and now let's get it done!

posted by Prairie Fire @ 4:21 PM