Stephane Dion became Liberal Party leader by accident. Polarized between Bob Rae (on the left) and Michael Ignatieff (on the right), the Liberal Party delegates gave the prize to that other guy.
As it turned out, the other guy was Stephane Dion, who had turned his ineffectual time as Environment Minister under Paul Martin into his campaign theme.
The Green Liberal.
But give Stephane Dion some credit. He was serious.
He ripped of sections of a David Suzuki report to write what he called his own environmental platform.
He made a special deal with Green Party leader Elizabeth May to not run against her in Central Nova, disenfranchising local Liberals with the hope they would defect to the Green Party.
He created a carbon tax plan (a concept he was adamantly opposed to) and then spent copious amounts of precious Liberal Party cash in a lawsuit so that he could call it "The Green Shift" instead of simply giving it a different name.
By and large, though, the Liberal Party never embraced the idea.
Leaks from Liberal insiders became a torrent, always aimed at undermining Stephane Dion, and more often than not using the Green Shift as the means of attack.
Complaints from MP representing rural ridings was so overwhelming that on the eve of an election, Stephane Dion allowed the plan to be diluted with a special fund targeting farmers and fisherman.
Many MPs never mentioned the environment in their local campaigning.
Stephane Dion himself lashed out at reporters, after being subjected to weeks of grumbling from his campaign team, and denied that the Green Shift was the central plank of the Liberal Party platform.
And so, thanks to Stephane Dion, an aggressive environmental platform is simply a non-starter in Liberal Party circles.
Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal MP for Beausejour in New Brunswick, makes that explicitly clear:
LeBlanc said he thinks the party needs to reposition itself and become more centrist.
“Perhaps, in recent campaigns, we have drifted from that pragmatic centre of Canadian politics and we haven't given some of the traditional Liberal voting blocs an enthusiastic reason to support us," LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc also said the Green Shift — Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's carbon tax plan — represented "a major challenge for us last time" and will not be part of his campaign.
So according to LeBlanc, the Green Shift (and presumably any other wide-ranging environmental plan, in particular those targeting global warming or climate change) has no place in a pragmatic, centrist party.
But then Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are the living definition of pragmatic centrist politics. Cut the sales tax. Tax credits for kids sports. Employment insurance benefits for the self-employed.
And no grand vision for environmental nirvana.
Funny that.
I'm willing to bet that no serious contender for the Liberal Party leadership will campaign on the notion of a carbon tax, or on the environment in general. Under Stephane Dion, the Liberal Party shifted in that direction, and ended up bleeding votes to the Green Party, while alienating rural voters who have shifted their votes to the Conservatives and the NDP (and may not shift back for a long time).
So there's the new Liberal green shift. Going back to giving environmental issues (and in particular, global warming) lip service. Saying how important these things are, and how the Liberals plan to run commercials on television or to hand out money to recycling operations located in Liberal ridings.
Oh, and excoriating the Conservatives, because everyone knows Conservatives don't care about the environment.
Yeah, everything is going to shift back to normal.
The Green Question: What will the Green Party do as the Liberal shift plays out? In Stephane Dion, Elizabeth May had both a patron and a patsy. The next Liberal leader will be neither, and might even make a concerted effort to publicly repudiate the Liberal-Green linkage that ended up costing the Liberals so much, and gained them so little. By aligning with Stephane Dion, Elizabeth May was able to borrow a measure of legitimacy for the Green Party that translated into a spot in the leaders debate and ultimately into votes. But that appearance in the debate diluted the Stephane Dion's message, and those Green Party votes hurt Liberal candidates and Liberal Party funding. And since those votes still didn't translate into Green Party seats, Elizabeth May can't even offer parliamentary support to the Liberals to make up for the Liberal candidates who lost in part because of the Green Party. I can't see the next Liberal leader maintaining the Dion-May relationship, and if that goes away, Elizabeth May will be vulnerable to Green Party rivals who have been openly critical of the dalliance with the Liberal Party.
