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If Liberal support continues to fall and it once again finds itself the third party following the election (likely with fewer seats and no leader, since Trudeau will probably resign), then Canada will have another left-right House of Commons without much need for the Liberals. That might be enough to seal the party’s fate right there. If they are indeed roundly defeated — the way the Progressive Conservatives were in 1993 — it’s unlikely that there will be a way back for them.

If I were a Liberal strategist I’d be very worried. Indeed, if I were a Liberal strategist I would have the party pandering to Canadians by any means necessary: supporting overzealous anti-terror legislation, throwing unpopular Senate colleagues under the bus, offering tax cuts like after-dinner mints, pushing hollow rhetoric about “hope” and “hard work”, kowtowing to the (undefined) middle class, and talking about changing the electoral system in the unlikely event my party was able to eke out an unlikely victory.

In other words, exactly what they have been doing.

I can hear the angry cracking of fingers as Liberal partisans ready themselves to write me some less-than-friendly mail. But my interlocutors should first ask themselves: why do we need the Liberal party? As my colleague Stewart Prest wrote in these pages, the Liberals under Trudeau have largely abandoned the left. And the political right is occupied. The Liberal party is a staunch supporter of the Clarity Act. Other than that? What substantive role does a centre party fill in Canada in 2014 that a right- or left-wing party can’t? Damned if I can tell.

Perhaps I’m mistaken and the Liberals will live on. Maybe they will switch roles with the NDP to become the new permanent third-party, like the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom. We’ll find out soon enough. But I’m confident that the decline of the Liberal party is the new normal. Canadians should get used to a world in which Liberal governments are a thing of the past.

National Post

David Moscrop is a PhD candidate in the department of political science at University of British Columbia.