OTTAWA

Some Liberals aren’t laughing at Jean Chrétien’s barbed joke about a return from the political grave. With another federal election fast approaching and Michael Ignatieff leading the party nowhere, panicking Liberals are looking everywhere except within themselves for a quick fix.

This week’s caucus implosion over support for Conservative immigration change is one of many symptoms of a once dominant party in steep decline and startling disarray. Ignatieff has lost his personal compass and seems physically exhausted. Alf Apps, one of the supplicants who lured Ignatieff back from Harvard, is expected to step down soon from the presidency of a party failing to fill its campaign coffers. Liberals in and out of Parliament are again searching for a messiah, or even an NDP coalition, to lead them from the wasteland back to power.

A measure of the madness here is the seriousness some backroom Liberals are lending to Chrétien’s mischievous remark that he, like Britain’s iconic William Gladstone, might return in old age for a fourth term. Astonishingly, Chrétien’s resurrection as interim leader continues to circulate here along with speculation about the NDP coalition the former Prime Minister is exploring.

Chrétien was arguably his generation’s most shrewdly intuitive politician and at 76 is still impressively vigorous. But retreating to the future would be as risky a Liberal solution as abandoning its brand.

A nostalgic Chrétien honeymoon would soon be cut short by nagging Conservative reminders of his Quebec sponsorship fling. And Liberals seduced by the idea of uniting the political left are forgetting that that their party wins when it controls the policy centre Harper is shifting right.

That’s not all Liberals are forgetting. Their current agony is rooted in expedient leadership decisions that began with letting Paul Martin escape the necessary crucible of a testing campaign. Forgotten, too, is that parties shooting inwards become wounded prey for outside predators.

One thing Liberals are noticing is that the problem isn’t staff around the leader; it is the leader. Dumping Ian Davey for Peter Donolo hasn’t significantly improved Ignatieff’s performance or provided a sustained opinion poll lift.

Liberals who saw in Ignatieff’s public intellectual persona the potential to race up a steep political learning curve now see only a surprisingly empty vessel tossed by uncertainty. They whisper that a summer equivalent of Pierre Trudeau’s pre-resignation walk in the snow would improve party prospects and Ignatieff’s mood.

But what then? Bob Rae might save seats Liberals now consider lost but the former Ontario NDP leader still faces fierce internal resistance. Falling back on the old guard signals desperation and the next leadership generation is far from ready to move the party forward.

There’s no sudden exit from this self-made labyrinth. Fears are real that a listless, often loose-lipped Ignatieff may lead Liberals to disaster in a campaign already framed by Conservatives around Stephen Harper’s leadership advantage and coalition warnings.

Even so, critical self-analysis and restored discipline can still make Liberals and Ignatieff the alternative democracy demands. Public fury over summit security costs is all the hook needed to hang on Harper a history of wild spending that gnawed through an inherited $13-billion surplus and set Canada en route for deficits long before the recession. At the same time, Liberals need to climb off the coalition fence to clearly define who they are.

Ending the current panic begins with recognizing that Chrétien’s return is a flat joke and that restoring the party is slow, hard, serious work.

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