Alright, now that the American election is wrapping up this Tuesday, on Wednesday we might want to start turning our attention back to what’s happening here at home. First, our voter turnout has hit a new low. That should raise some alarms about the direction our democracy is heading towards and I think it has something to do with what’s on the shelf. Our economy is under a lot of pressure from the threat of a global recession. Its also troubling that we aren’t closer to turning back our footprint on the environment, given what we know about Global Warming. From an optimistic point of view, challenges create opportunities and from that perspective, there is certainly lots of opportunity in Canadian politics. 

The opportunity that the Liberal party has now is to pick a leader that will fill the existing leadership gap in Canadian politics. Certainly, inspiration isn’t the first word that you think of when looking at the current slate. This creates an opportunity for more unknown candidates to come out on top from underdog positions, much like Obama did against Clinton. The other school of thought is that these challenging times don’t allow room for error. This actually narrows the race down to the so called “safe choice” candidates, whomever they may be. There is a bit of a kink with that line of thinking. Liberals currently have about half of the number of seats needed to make government and they would need increase their support by at least one-quarter in many ridings to even have a serious shot. Fundraising is obviously a major issue and my guess is that the entire organization is under a lot of strain. In other words, if you are down a couple of goals in a hockey game, you’ve got to start taking more risks in the hopes of winning. Sitting back on defense won’t cut it. I also don’t actually think the Liberal party has any real “safe choice” candidates anyway which means we might see some real surprises in this race. 

So thats the picture I am painting folks, more thoughts to come on which candidates I think got what it takes to win the Liberal leadership race.