Thu Jan 12, 2006 By David Ljunggren
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's once mighty Liberal Party is in serious trouble in the final run-up to the January 23 election, beset by a stumbling campaign, internal divisions and a series of embarrassing gaffes.
The party, in power since 1993, has dominated Canadian politics for a century. It is famed for its professionalism and long ago earned the nickname "The Big Red Machine".
But the Liberals never really recovered from a kickback scandal in 2004, which badly undermined Prime Minister Paul Martin in the eyes of voters already seeking change.
Senior Liberals privately admit the party stands virtually no chance of beating the Conservatives of Stephen Harper, who have moved past the Liberals to take a comfortable lead in recent opinion polls.
"We're done," confided a prominent Liberal legislator. "It's all over," said one well-placed official. Some fret they could be out of power for up to a decade.
"The talk inside senior Liberal circles is already focussing on the succession and rebuilding the party. Defeat on January 23 is pretty much taken for granted," said one person with access to the top ranks of the party.
But Scott Reid, the chief spokesman for Martin, dismissed any talk of defeat.
"The mood is good -- very good. We've got time and we've got advantages. We'll make ample use of them both," he said.
Martin, who took over from Liberal predecessor Jean Chretien in December 2003, has long been criticised for his indecisiveness and heavy reliance on a small group of relatively inexperienced advisers.
He let the Conservatives set the election campaign agenda early on but ran into trouble when he began to present his own policies, some of which differed little from ones he used in the June 2004 campaign. Others were clearly thought up at the last moment.
"The campaign is in a bizarre state ... There's no policy they won't change overnight if a focus group says it's not popular," said one senior Liberal. "This has been a lousy government and frankly they deserve to lose."
Signs of disarray are easy to find. Unhappy officials talk openly to the press. Local party workers complain about a lack of volunteers. One frustrated party analyst swore on live television during a discussion.
The Liberal policy document was leaked before its official launch and when the party unveiled a series of attack ads against Harper, it was forced to scrap one spot which suggested the Conservatives would impose martial law if elected.
Martin was peppered with so many questions from reporters about that ad on Thursday that it largely obscured the policy announcement he was trying to put across.
The media have been more critical in this campaign and many commentators mocked Martin's surprise announcement this week that he would focus on scrapping an obscure clause in the constitution.
"It's time for Paul Martin to fire his chief strategist. The trouble is, I suspect his chief strategist is him," wrote columnist Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail newspaper, saying he was "seriously out of touch" with Canadians.
To add to Martin's woes there are deep splits between his team and supporters of Chretien, who feel the former prime minister was forced out of power by arch-rival Martin.
As a result, few of the experienced backroom operators who engineered three successive victories for Chretien are helping Martin.
Some Martin backers are muttering about dirty tricks but few in the party take this suggestion seriously.
"Why would Chretien sabotage the campaign? The Martin people are doing a perfectly good job of sabotaging it themselves," said one Liberal.
In a bid to clear the Liberals' name, Martin called an official inquiry into the kickback scandal in 2004, but all this did was fill the news with endless lurid tales of how party members had illegally funnelled money to allies.
This, critics say, badly tarnished the Liberal brand and made it very hard to recover from the revelation a few weeks ago that police were probing a possible leak of sensitive tax policy information from the finance minister's office.
"That is the danger that was always there and that was probably the single biggest catalyst that brought everything back," said one veteran party member.
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