MONTREAL

Anyone who has ever glanced at surrounding traffic in the side mirror of an automobile is familiar with the warning that objects are closer than they appear.

It may be time for the Liberals to affix that message to their party’s windshield.

Notwithstanding the party’s victories in Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the decline of the Liberal brand in Canada has continued unabated this fall.

With only one provincial election left to go in 2011, the NDP is closer to its goal of overtaking the Liberals as Canada’s dominant progressive party than the latter’s two recent provincial victories make it appear.

The Saskatchewan vote, set for Nov. 7, is unlikely to alter the NDP/Liberal picture. The Liberals were absent from the previous Legislature and the battle for power in Regina is between outgoing premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan party and the New Democrats.

So far, the NDP has made gains in every vote it has competed in this year.

That includes Manitoba, where Premier Greg Selinger is the only incumbent to have added a seat to his take rather than shed part of his caucus on the way to another mandate.

On Tuesday the NDP quintupled its seat score in Newfoundland and Labrador and doubled it in the Yukon.

In Ontario last Thursday, the party almost doubled its seats, moving from 10 to 17 MPPs.

Since the New Year the Liberals have lost a total of 60 seats at the federal, provincial and territorial levels. The NDP has gained 81 seats.

Those numbers amount to more than just a spike in NDP fortunes.

Moving from east to west the NDP has pushed back the frontiers of its territory in every region of the country over the past decade. More often than not it has done so at Liberal expense.

In the early 90s, the NDP had little presence in Atlantic Canada. But today the New Democrats are well on the way to become a force to contend with in every province of the region except P.E.I.

They make up the government in Nova Scotia. On Tuesday they came within one seat of beating the Liberals to the title of official opposition in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Quebec, the federal NDP has gone from one seat to 59 over the span of a single decade.

The Liberals under Jean Chrétien used to sweep Ontario throughout the ’90s. Last May, the NDP elected twice as many MPs as the Liberals in Canada’s largest province.

In the Prairies, the Liberal party is virtually extinct.

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Out of 254 federal and provincial seats in the three provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Liberals currently hold 12.

Only two of those are federal seats and personal popularity has more to do with the survival of a lone federal Liberal flag-bearer in Saskatchewan and Manitoba last May than party brand.

The same is true in Quebec where most of the seven Liberal survivors of the federal election — MPs like Marc Garneau, Stéphane Dion, Denis Coderre, Irwin Cotler and Justin Trudeau — owe their survival to who they are (or who they have been).

Watching the receding Liberal tide, one can reasonably wonder whether the party as a major national presence has reached the point of no return.

The current Liberal establishment — rooted as it is in Ontario and somewhat blinded by its proximity to Queen’s Park — will swear that it is not so.

To shore up their faith in a brighter future for their party, diehard federal Liberals point to the leadership travails of the NDP and the resilience of their provincial cousins in Ontario.

There was a time not so long ago when the federal Tories drank the same bathwater.

They too clung to their party’s hold on provincial capitals such as Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto as proof positive of their own inevitable triumph over the Reform/Alliance.

And they too focused on their rivals’ every growing pain to the exclusion of their own party’s creaking joints.

The problem with a tipping point is that it tends to become more obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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