Invincible Summer

As a wonderful Bloc MP, she was one of my favourite champions in Parliament. We served on the Status of Women committee together for a couple of years and I was increasingly refined by her advocacy and resolute spirit. When she contacted me on Facebook last week, asking me to be her friend, a wave of positive memories flooded back. A veteran member of parliament who was defeated in this last election, I was interested to see how she was faring. Like many other defeated veterans swept away by events no one could quite understand, she was attempting to discern what happened. Following years of faithful service to her community, she was finding it difficult that she could be tossed aside so easily. She admitted though that her years in Parliament had set her somewhat “off-kilter”. Hers is to be a summer of introspection.Politics can do that to folks – not just to elected representatives but also to party supporters. So much seems left open to fate these days, with a politics that is so divisive and an electorate so mercurial. For those Liberals seeking party renewal one would hope there was a better place to inhabit, and there is. It’s a place where human investment can be cemented in more incremental improvements and isn’t cast off by mere electoral whim. It isn’t in Ottawa this summer season but in our respective home communities or in those areas where we spend our warm weather months.In many ways politics has turned us all a little strange. We put so much stock in our electoral fortunes, or lack of them. We focus on leadership as though it will somehow lead us to the Promised Land. It might, but that is for sometime in the near future. Liberals must discover new ways to instill dynamic life into our institutions and not just our party. Researchers have discovered that average citizens do get interested in policy when it directly affects them. As Liberals we have continually presented such options through a federal lens, through national programming, and over time we have lost touch and relevancy with our local communities as a result. It is time to put people back into policy in the world where they live and work each day.This will likely be my last post for the summer, although the Huffington Post has asked that I keep writing for their web news. Every day last summer I blogged about liberalism and what we would be required to undertake if we were to be true to our roots. My insights didn’t take, likely because I wasn’t a good enough writer, but also partly due to the reality that back then people were focused on the old paradigm of gathering around party central. So I’ve chosen to try to finish the three books this summer that I have been writing for the last couple of years.I’ll be spending time as well getting out into my community, assisting on certain boards, attending festivals, and just basically taking on those things that every citizen should be part of. And, of course, my wife and I will helping at the food bank because while people take their holidays in the summer and donations dip as a result, hunger doesn’t take time off and our job is to be there for those families struggling to make ends meet.For all of us of liberal temperament, the summer gives us time to think differently and to get immersed in our own communities. Liberalism only works when it empowers individuals to not only achieve their goals but when they reach outside of themselves to help others do the same.Remember this above all else that’s been said in this post: there is something seriously wrong with a politics that cuts us off from our neighbours, or one region from another. This is the political reality Canada faces at present. If Liberals desire a meaningful future they must grow it and lead it at the community level, bringing people back together despite the rampant individualism out there.My friend and Toronto Star writer Susan Delacourt stated in her post last week that she would give the Liberal Party a 50/50 chance of survival – troubling, but an honest assessment nonetheless. Let’s better those odds by bettering ourselves as citizens and making ourselves count where we live. Let’s discover in all of our struggles what Albert Camus talked about when he said, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Enjoy it, but please make it count.