MONTREAL - B y showing up at the opening of Michael Ignatieff's thinkers' conference, his predecessors almost stole the show. But the well-publicized attendance of John Turner, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stéphane Dion served a larger purpose. Their show of support for the conference helped put a firm lid on the issue with the most potential to derail the Liberal gathering: that of the leadership of the party.

But the Montreal conference may have set up the Liberals for even more divisive debates than the personality-driven exercise of yet another leadership campaign.

If the next platform is going to measure up to the policy yardstick of the weekend's deliberations, the party and its caucus have a lot of soul-searching to do and some of it could be gut-wrenching.

To challenge their collective minds, the Liberals relied on a host of speakers whose careers have been devoted to speaking the truth to power and, on that score, Ignatieff may have got a bit more than he bargained for.

If there was a thread between the presentations, it is that the Liberals will not be able to address tomorrow's challenges with yesterday's recipes. On the contrary, the notion that the party's recent spell in power was a policy golden age was rather systematically debunked.

On health care for instance, the point was repeatedly made that the failure of recent Liberal governments to tackle the structural defects of the medicare financing model had left the system unequipped to deal with the upcoming double challenge of shrinking government revenues and a demographic shift to an older society.

The disconnect between the party's green rhetoric on the environment in opposition and the reality of its inaction over the bulk of its governing decade was described as part and parcel of Canada's ongoing failure to seriously address climate change.

On that score, the party's decision to put its proposed carbon tax on the back burner after its last election loss was described by independent insiders of the energy/environment debate as politically expedient but short-sighted.

A lack of Liberal political fortitude emerged as a recurring theme of the proceedings. It was most starkly described by former ambassador Robert Fowler. He tracked the decline of Canada's international influence to an unprincipled foreign policy that had its roots in the recent Liberal regimes and warned the party that it was in the process of losing its soul to opportunistic retail politics.

If the Montreal conference is to result in a resetting of the Liberal agenda, the operation would almost certainly have to involve casting aside some of the party's long-held tenets.

Chrétien did just that when he embraced free trade and fiscal discipline in the '90s. But he was already in power when he set out to reverse a decade of Liberal opposition rhetoric on both issues.

In opposition, Turner tried and failed to change the channel of the party's conversation with francophone Quebec at great cost to his leadership.

More recently, Dion's success in bringing his party around to biting the bullet of the fight against climate change through a carbon tax was as short-lived as his leadership.

Their respective demises speak to the perils of rattling the Liberal cage from the vulnerable position of Leader of the Official Opposition.

And that may account for why Ignatieff's initial response to the conference – featuring a corporate tax freeze that could be past its sell-by date by the time the next election comes around, and a proposal to shift the institutional care of aging baby boomers onto their families to help control spiralling medicare costs – was so underwhelming.

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Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.