It started with the fight between two people: Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien.
The question now, however, is not whose reputation is on the line, but how far this fight will go. One thing is deadly certain, this fight is beyond the personal and nasty dispute between two political titans and now involves the entire political organization and perhaps the entire democratic system of which our country is based upon.

The question now is: Will the Liberal Party survive this mess? I¹m not optimistic.

Canadians are a very tolerant lot, but also they¹re also focused and pragmatic. They know that democracy works only if you have an honest government and a healthy opposition. For 10 years, we have proven to the world that you can have a democracy even without an opposition. Now we are going to take this experiment to a different high: we are going to show the world that a democracy can exist also without a government.

This is a dangerous game. If our country is still sound and safe after 10 years of a democratic dictatorship, it¹s only because Canadian people are responsible and did not take advantage of the vacuum at the top. If Liberals were able to govern for 10 year, it¹s only because Canadian people parked their confidence in the only spot available, hoping that the other organizations would act responsibly.

What we see today, is a replay of what we saw after Brian Mulroney's government.

The Conservative Party was not destroyed by Canadian people. Yes, it¹s true, they would have delivered a sound defeat to them, like the one suffered by the Liberals in 1984. But after a couple terms in the purgatory, they would have been back in government. In fact, Canadian people started wondering about Liberals already in 1997; definitely they were ready to dump the Liberals in the 2000 elections. It was the litigious, personal revenge, petty politics of the Conservatives that allowed Jean Chrétien to be returned to power.

Now, four years later, the disease has spread into the federal Liberal Party.

So back to the original question: can the Liberal Party survive? The answer is not in the hands of the Canadian people: they cannot, and they do not want to destroy the only national organization available to make democracy survive. The Liberal Party is being destroyed by Liberals, just like the Conservatives destroyed their organization.

It took 10 years for them to understand that the problem could have been solved from within. It is not a coincidence that the real dialogue started when Preston Manning and Joe Clark were dismissed.

So back to the Liberal Party.

Jean Chrétien is gone. Paul Martin doesn¹t have to go, as long as he doesn¹t behave like Joe Clark did. Nobody questioned the integrity of the former Conservative leader, however, Joe Clark was unable to overcome the struggle and look beyond. Mr. Martin and his closest advisers have made a huge mistake by failing to understand that they couldn¹t win the country with half of the Liberal Party rowing in the opposite direction.

The Liberal Party is divided just like the Conservative Party was in 1993.

Will Mr. Martin face the electorate, like the Titanic sailing towards the iceberg, or stop the engine, check the maps and the crew, tune them up and wait for the iceberg to melt? Both are tough nuts to crack.

The Liberal Party is now led by people who, for 10 years, believed the enemy was not Preston Manning, but Jean Chrétien and his team. Bringing all Grits together will be hard, much harder than before, especially since there is now the stench coming from the sponsorship program. Up until a few weeks ago they were fighting the leadership war, now they are disputing on whose laps the excrement of an ill-conceived program will fall. It might be that one team is trying to avoid electoral defeat, while some of the others want to avoid jail. They might both fail.

Is then the only choice an early election?

Paul Martin seems to have made up his mind: put everything on the table, clean the stable, and hoping that Canadians will reward his honesty and forgive his naïveté. It might be a dangerous gamble; it might also be the only one available.

It both cases, it is not going to be an easy ride. George Bush did not find the weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. Paul Martin, without even searching, might have found a WMD in the Public Works Department.