"Defeat Concentrates the Mind"

OH - How damn refreshing it is to hear this from a senior member of the Liberal party:

The man the Liberals have assigned to assemble their blueprint for party renewal says the defeated government's national daycare program was "a deathbed repentance," the gun registry was "an administrative disaster" and the response to the sponsorship scandal was "bizarre."

The blunt-talking Tom Axworthy, a former aide to Pierre Trudeau who teaches at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., also says the former government's Kyoto policy was not only difficult to understand, "it wasn't real anyway."

"On file after file, we haven't had bad ideas, but the implementation process has been abysmal," he [Tom Axworhty] said in an interview with CanWest News Service. "A press release is not a policy."

Absolutely right. That's been the complaints and concerns here pretty much since Ahab began. Regardless of how Harper's tenure as Prime Minister turns out, the turfing of the Liberals from the PMO in 2006 will prove exceedingly beneficial not only for the Liberal party, but for Canadian democracy as a whole.

Frankly, I am shocked and pleasantly surprised at the speed with which elements of the natural governing party is admitting the deficiencies and errors of Paul Martin's time at the head of the government. The magnitude of the paradigm shift in conventional wisdom circles - commentators who claimed Stephen Harper could never win now claiming just as certainly that he is sure to be around as PM for a minimum of 6 years, for example - is surely contributing to it.

How many, as recently as December 1, 2005, would have predicted that the subsequent events of a few months would bring us so completely to this point? And, more ridiculous, all because about 6.6% of those who turned out to vote (about 975,000 Canadians) were convinced to change their mind over the course of 18 months!? Amazing how the cumbersome mechanism that is our modern electoral democracy manages to get it about right. Against all the odds.