Category Archives: Liberal

They just spent the best part of a decade governing Western Australia together, but relations between the Liberal and National parties have spent years flicking between detente and open hostility.

Over the eight and a half years of the Barnett Government, the two conservative parties often publicly squabbled over core policies even while three Nationals were key cabinet ministers.

And that was nothing compared to the bitter fights at election time, where the Liberals and Nationals would scrap fiercely for the same seats a use of money and resources that has long frustrated figures from both parties, who feel efforts would be best used on the main goal of defeating Labor.

Now the two opposition parties are firmly at loggerheads again, just two months out from an election the bookmakers consider Labor unbackable favourites for.

The Liberals are now fundamentally at odds with what the National Party considers its most defining policy.

And the rift could call into question whether the two parties would be able to form a stable and united government, if the opportunity were to arise.

The latest quarrel centres on Royalties for Regions, the fund the National Party convinced the Liberals to introduce on coming to government in 2008.

For the Nationals, Royalties for Regions is a crowning achievement a billion-dollar-a-year fund they argue has transformed life in regional WA.

For a Liberal Party trying to rebuild its economic credentials, the legacy is much more complicated.

By the end of the Barnett Government's days, the state budget was in an ugly state, with deficits worth billions and eye-watering debt totals.

According to a subsequent review of the spending of those years, Royalties for Regions was a key reason why finances hit the skids.

"We identified the Royalties for Regions program as probably the main factor that caused difficulties for the government," former under-treasurer John Langoulant said of his official review.

"The need to spend the annual allocations made to the fund, rather than govern the achievement of well-targeted and managed projects and programs over considered time frames, was a major mistake."

Did you know we offer a local version of the ABC News homepage? Watch below to see how you can set yours, and get more WA stories.

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With that in mind, the Liberals now say Royalties for Regions needs major surgery.

The party's policy, unveiled this week, calls for much tighter spending controls over the program.

And it warns that any new spending the Nationals want to initiate must be accompanied by savings elsewhere.

"It can no longer be used as a slush fund by any party," Liberal finance spokesman Steve Thomas said.

"The rules around this program have been too loose."

Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup argues it is a vital step to ensuring Royalties for Regions is sustainable into the future, with the Liberals arguing it is a plan to "save" the fund.

The Nationals see it very differently and have not been shy in attacking the Liberals since that announcement.

The party's leader, Mia Davies, has declared the Liberals to be "no better" than Labor, warning the Nationals would refuse to enter government with their conservative peers unless Mr Kirkup backed down.

"It will be a condition of government absolutely non-negotiable," Ms Davies said.

"Our support for Royalties for Regions is unwavering".

Rather than any suggestion of reining-in spending, the Nationals have spent years saying they will "reverse the cuts" to Royalties for Regions.

That refers to ongoing regional expenditure that used to sit in the regular budget but now comes out of the fund, meaning less money is available for other projects.

But the Liberals are scathing of that idea, arguing it would cost $2.8 billion to do that.

"No government with economic management credentials that it wants to keep would be doing that," Mr Thomas said.

As such, the policy divergence between the two is about as wide as it gets.

As much as it annoys plenty of them, the Liberals and Nationals need each other.

The Nationals cannot govern in their own right and the Liberals still would not have the numbers to do that even if they doubled the size of their parliamentary team.

And if circumstances fall the right way for them, they would surely find common ground and reach some sort of agreement to govern together.

But with fundamental disagreements over core policy within weeks of an election, they will have serious work to do convincing voters they offer a viable alternative to Labor in a time of crisis.

Originally posted here:

Major rift between Liberals, Nationals over royalties fund may hurt election prospects - ABC News

We watched demonstrations organized by liberal groups turn violent time and time again in recent years: Looting, arson, broken windows, graffiti, chants of death to the police, police officers assaulted and assassinated, precincts under siege, statues torn down, etc.

We all witnessed it. The violence demonstrated last summer by organizations supported by liberal politicians and editors was pervasive and relentless. The violence was reported with little condemnation by liberal politicians and editors. Most of the violent destructive conduct was portrayed as an important movement for change. Elected officials excused it. Justified it. Pandered to the mob.

The erroneous message sent to the people of our country was, if you have a grievance, the way to have your voice heard is to riot.

Cuomo is the leader of the Democratic Party in New York state. He did little to denounce violence at every occurrence. He has demonstrated his immense power on behalf of liberal causes, used little of it to stop the violence.

The mayor downplayed the violence and property damage. Allowed it. Actually justified violating social distancing requirements for causes he exploited for his own personal political gain.

What was the Advance doing last summer? Did the Advance condemn the rioting, looting, arson, assaults on police officers each time it occurred? Did the Advance hold the governor and mayor accountable for the violence? The Advance pandered to it.

Democrats support the organizations that perpetuated last summers violence and those organizations support Democrats. Theyre not voting Republican. Those organizations are a significant portion of the Democratic Party base. The liberal media failed to call out the Democratic Party for giving a nod and wink to the violence.

The Democratic Party, the liberal media, the editors of this nation, including Brian Laline, are responsible for the violence we saw in our capital. You transmitted the false narrative that violence is justified if ones cause is worthy. Stop throwing stones and look in the mirror.

Violence is not free speech. Violence is never acceptable unless it is to end an imminent threat. Violence breeds more violence.

My voice carries only so far. I wont waste my time calling for change at CNN, MSNBC, The NY Times, etc. My home is Staten Island. Our only local newspaper is the Staten Island Advance. I demand Brian Laline resign as executive editor of the Advance. Its not the first time Im calling for his resignation and it wont be the last.

I call on the Advance to stop making and printing verbal attacks on Republican and conservative leaders. You have no right to assign blame to anyone other than yourself. The media caused the violence by failing to condemn last summers violence. You stoked the fire.

Condemn all violence. Every instance of violence. Consistently.

(Christopher Altieri is a Great Kills resident.)

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The media, liberals stoked this fire (letter to the editor) - SILive.com

In the recent senatorial elections in Georgia, the city voted Democratic, the countryside voted Republican. We saw the same demarcations during the presidential elections, and during the referendum on Brexit in the United Kingdom. In the 2018 Quebec elections, Montreal and part of Quebec City voted Liberal and Qubec Solidaire, while the rest of Quebec voted CAQ (most ridings) or PQ (a few).

Premier Franois Legault has been able to channel popular anger and identity anxiety for the past two years. The glue still holds, thanks to his impressive management of communication in times of pandemic. But what will happen once COVID-19 becomes a bad memory?

In Ontario, in front of a dismayed intellectual elite, Conservative Doug Ford won the most recent election with 40 per cent of the vote. Like Legault and like Britains Boris Johnson and Albertas Jason Kenney Ford is a populist. It would be incorrect, unfair and demagogic to call them Trump emulators. What they have in common, however, is they have managed to harness the frustration felt by an angry population, eaten away at by anxiety and incomprehension.

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Opinion: Anger is everywhere; are liberals paying attention? - Montreal Gazette

The BC Liberals are urging the NDP government to use its stockpile of COVID-19 rapid tests to give more protection to those living and working in long-term care homes (LTC) and assisted living facilities.

The B.C. government needs to follow the lead of other provinces which pre-emptively screen and test asymptomatic LTC staff to help prevent outbreaks before they can endanger our seniors," says Interim BC Liberal Leader and Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond.

"We must do everything we can to protect those most at risk of COVID-19."

The requestcomes as a result of the recent rise in COVID-19 outbreaks in British Columbia's long-term care homes and assisted living facilities.

It was reported that1,364 residents and 669 staff having been infected with the virus in the province.

Despite receiving a stockpile of COVID-19 rapid tests in November, the Health Canada-approved rapid tests have seen limited use in care homes.

"While a systematic rapid testing program isnt a silver bullet to stop all deaths in long-term care we need Premier Horgan to ensure that adequate resources are provided to put this additional layer of protection in place for the most vulnerable British Columbians, Bond said.

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Monday (Jan. 11) the province is "looking at"using the rapid tests in care homes.

She previously said they were not being used because the tests "have faults and limitations."

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Shirley Bond, BC Liberals appeal for use of extra COVID-19 rapid tests - Vancouver Is Awesome

We were all told that 2021 would be a better year for the country, but the first two weeks could hardly have been worse. The left is out to discredit not just President Donald Trump and his indefensible behavior since the election but also his ideas. They are triumphantly saying that free market conservatism is dead and that the era of big government is back with a vengeance. Not so fast.

Ive lived through two major Democratic takeovers of Washington in my 35 years inside the capital beltway. The first was in 1993, when Bill Clinton and the new Democrats seized complete control of power, and the second was in 2009, with the Barack Obama hope and change liberal agenda. In both cases, Democrats and their liberal allies outran their mandate from voters with Hillarycare and then Obamacare, obscenely obese spending bills, and a regulatory vice grip on American businesses large and small.

In both cases, within two years of unchecked liberal mischief, voters had had it and pummeled the Democrats with massive Republican victories from coast to coast from local dogcatcher races to congressional seats and governorships.

My prediction is this is precisely what Democrats will do. The dominant far-left wing of the party will feel uncaged. The squad in the House, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will be demanding a take-no-prisoners rush to socialist policies on health care, education, student loans and climate change. President-elect Joe Biden has already announced that, right out of the gate, the Democrats will ram through a $2 to $3 trillion stimulus bill with the debt careening past the $30 trillion mark.

Yes, they will try to jerry-rig the rules in Washington to sidestep every check and balance that was installed by our Founding Fathers and nearly 230 years of speed bumps to protect the rights of the minority. This means adios to the Senate filibuster and hello to court-packing schemes. The House Democrats have already canceled the pay as you go budget rules requiring new spending to be offset with other deficit-reduction measures.

This whole leftist power agenda has a name: the Great Reset, which is a repudiation of capitalism and free markets and a grand tilt toward re-empowering the elites and the ruling class. The globalists are all for it. So is the pope. Putting America first is to be replaced with globalism.

As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Americans will be repulsed by this anti-freedom agenda. The nation voted against Trumps antics and his bombastic personality, not his policies which were a spectacular success, particularly on the economy. Lets not forget that right before the November elections, almost 6 of 10 Americans said the country was better off today than four years ago i.e., the end of the Obama-Biden regime. Biden promised that the agenda of Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders would be kicked to the side of the road, but thats not where the party in Washington is. Thats not where last years most liberal senator, Kamala Harris, is at. Democrats will concentrate power in Washington and refill the swamp. Most voters still want it drained.

To save the country from socialism which voters in 2020 said they clearly do not want Republicans need to do what former Rep. Newt Gingrich did in 1993 and 1994 and the young guns in the House did in 2009 and 2010: play defense like its fourth down on the 1-yard line and lay out an alternative vision for America based on opportunity, freedom, free markets, choices and, yes, making America great again.

Conservatives may have lost the reins of power in Washington, but they won nearly everywhere else coast to coast in November. Meanwhile, the GOPs corps of superstar governors, from Ron DeSantis, of Florida, to Pete Ricketts, of Nebraska, to Kristi Noem, in South Dakota, among others, must show to the country the alternative and superior vision to progressivism.

The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer juggernaut is going to be like tanks streaming over the border. Of course, the victims of progressivism and redistributionism, as always, will be the very people who benefited the most from Trump policies: the poor, the working class and minorities.

Liberalism has been unleashed, but it has also been put on trial in 2021 and 2022. Id bet high odds that voters will convict it two years from now.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy.

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Stephen Moore: Liberalism will rise and fall again - Kankakee Daily Journal

January13, 20216 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Whole Foods, whose 500 stores employ over 91,000 people, made waves in 2017 when Amazon acquired the company for $13.7 billion. Workplace messaging powerhouse Slack was acquired by Salesforce recently for a whopping $27.7 billion. And YouTube, the third most-popular website on the internet, has over 5 billion videos on its platform watched every single day.

What do these business success stories all have in common? Their CEOs leaders at the forefront of their industries have degrees in the liberal arts.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcickis original plan after studying history and literature at Harvard was to pursue a PhD and go into academia. A piqued interest in technology one summer led her to add a computer science elective in her senior year.

In 1998, she rented out her garage to two dudes named Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who during that time built the search engine that would become Google. Wojcicki later became Google employee no. 16, eventually persuaded the founders to acquire YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion an acquisition lauded as one of the best buys of the 21st century and eight years later was tapped for the CEO role.

Related: This One Video Convinced Google to Buy YouTube in 2006

Its an unusual twist for a literature major. But is it really? Liberal arts thinkers have used their smarts to get to the top of the business food chain more often than you might think:

Former Avon CEO Andrea Jung has a degree in English from Princeton;

Chipotle founder and former CEO Steve Ells studied art history at the University of Colorado;

Former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault was a history major before becoming the third African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

This topic of career reinvention is a personal one for me. What I do now as a content marketing consultant couldnt be further from what I studied in school; with not one but two degrees in classical French Horn, I was an aspiring orchestra musician with big dreams and very little business acumen at first.

For years, I looked down at my music school experience as a waste of money and opportunity. But over time, Ive come to realize that the skills I honed creative thinking, tenacityand performing under pressure have become some of my greatest entrepreneurial weapons.

If youre a thinker or a performer, entrepreneurship mightbe a perfect fit for you. Here are three ways to leverage your liberal or fine arts background and get a running start.

Product development requires rigorous testing and a willingness to work through your logic all the way down to the bone. If you ever studied classics, you know that the trivium grammar, logicand rhetoric was taught first to pupils of the past because its fluency ensured the comprehension of all other studies.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield credits his passion for working through argument to his college degree in philosophy. According to the serial entrepreneur, studying the great thinkers taught him to write well and showed him how to effectively run and lead meetings.

Related: The Co-Founder Behind Slack Shares What He Did 140 Times Last Year Alone -- and How It Helped Prevent Burnout

Additionally, research from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation debunked the notion that studying the arts or humanities is a career death wish. Althougha liberal arts degree mightnot have you earning the same amount as engineers in your twenties, graduates achieve economic mobility more often than mainstream advice would have you believe.

What you will have in your twenties is a propensity for good ideas. Your value proposition is like a term paper or thesis, except that its more fun because it will potentially make you money. A lot of money. Be relentless with revisions and frequently test your value proposition in the market.

Markets and technology are constantly shifting, and as these tectonic plates move, new opportunities open up that have sudden and massive unmet demand. Before Whole Foods CEO John Mackey co-founded the health food giant in 1980, he and his girlfriend had a standalone grocery store, SaferWay, that was a market on the first floor and a restaurant on the second to capture multiple emerging markets.

Related: How Whole Foods CEO John Mackey Is Leading a Revolution in Health and Business

When you act fast and are first to market, youll get a head start on capturing market share. Liberal arts graduates are fantastic at these kinds of positioning puzzles; if you have a complex problem or need to blend together multiple industries, consider getting a liberal arts brain on it to generate winning ideas. Youll thank yourself later.

Sally Hogshead, author of the New York Times bestseller Fascinate: How To Make Your Brand Impossible To Resist, points out that different is better than better.Being the best usually requires extensive research, many product iterations over many yearsand huge expenses.

Instead of trying to become the best, be different instead. Youll need some creative thinking to find your way, so here are a few tips to jumpstart your left brain:

Capture ideas in the moment. Set up a way to quickly jot down the strikes of lightning that pop into your head throughout the day. Voice memos or a separate page in a note taking app on your phone are great options.

Practice finding an uninterrupted flow state. Im still haunted by that 2016 study on worker behavior that found employees are distracted an average of once every 40 seconds. To develop your focusing muscles, make your environment more conducive to concentration.

Read news outside your industry. Knowing your beat is important, but observing other industries can give you insights you wont find within your own echo chamber.

Its never too late to tweak your career trajectory or experiment with something new. Keep yourself in the know, lean in to past experiencesand you might find that critical thinking gives you a winning edge in business.

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The CEOs of YouTube, Slack and Whole Foods All Have Liberal Arts Degrees. Here's Why That Matters - Entrepreneur

Breyer, who before becoming a judge was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows better than most how last week's surprise Georgia election has transformed the prospects for Biden to fulfill a progressive agenda related to the judiciary.

Still, a Biden choice would enhance the diversity and youth of the bench and open a new chapter for justices who have the last word on issues from abortion and LGBTQ rights, religious liberties and racial remedies, to federal power and corporate regulation.

President-elect Biden has vowed to name the first Black woman to the bench. When he initially made the pledge during a February 2020 debate in Charleston, he said, "I'm looking forward to making sure there's a Black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we in fact get every representation."

Among such candidates could be US district court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 50, in Washington, DC, a former law clerk of Justice Breyer. Another possibility would be California Supreme Court justice Leondra Kruger, 44. Other Black women of varying backgrounds would no doubt be in the mix if a vacancy arises.

Breyer, named by President Bill Clinton in 1994, declined to respond to questions related to any retirement plans.

Breyer is known for many off-bench pursuits, including an enthusiasm for architecture, and he has authored several books related to law and regulation. Such outside interests, along with the new Democrat dynamic in the nation's capital, might induce him to leave the bench, perhaps as soon as this summer when the current 2020-21 session ends.

His new book to be published this year, "Against Segregation in America's Schools," could be his valedictory. It explores retrenchment on school integration today and is tied to one of Breyer's leading opinions for justices on the left.

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Stephen Breyer gifted the chance for a liberal successor -- when will he take it? - CNN

Josh Hawley speaks during a Senate debate session to ratify the 2020 presidential election at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

Handout/Getty Images

Wednesday will be remembered as the day the United States became a liberal and Democratic country again. And, as the Republican Party self-immolated in a nadir of violence, factional infighting and impotent extremism, its worth asking if its going to be that way for a long time.

The days most lasting milestone was the Democratic Party winning back control of the executive and both legislative houses for the first time in a decade. The congressional certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harriss Nov. 3 presidential and vice-presidential victories occurred only hours after the electoral victories of two senators in Georgia gave the Democrats a controlling majority in the Senate to match their existing majority in the House of Representatives.

Those Georgia victories signalled the larger change behind this milestone. For the past couple of decades, a majority of adult Americans have held liberal views and expressed a preference for the Democratic Party; Republicans have only been able to win by corralling the votes of less populated and more rural states. Georgia is no longer such a state; its urban, educated, high-tech, darker-skinned majority will only expand. The United States is growing away from the Republicans, unless they can find a form of conservatism that appeals to parts of this new majority.

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The other events of Wednesday the shocking insurrectionary violence in the Capitol unleashed by President Donald Trump, and the embarrassing attempt by eight Senators and 139 Representatives to block the certification of Mr. Bidens victory on the basis of discredited fictions showed how fast the Republicans corner is shrinking.

This is the larger problem facing the Republicans: They have been able to eke out narrow victories in the past 20 years by being the party of geography in a still quite rural country. That formula only really works when Republicans are able to find a leader and a message that pulls together two very contradictory sets of beliefs and impulses held by groups of Americans.

The first is a dislike and a distrust of government and taxation, either out of belief or opportunism an essentially libertarian, minimal-state impulse. The second is a yearning for the paternalistic family, the racially homogenous town and a sense of social and military order which implies a larger, more controlling state.

Uniting these impulses is no small task. It was accomplished by Ronald Reagan in 1980, then by George W. Bush in 2000 and, surprisingly, by Donald Trump in 2016. All three managed to peel off wavering Democrats by combining promises of tax cuts with fearful messages about hot-button liberal topics such as immigration, transgender rights or Black activism.

This strategy has suffered from diminishing returns Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump both lost the popular vote. The share of Americans open to these messages fell. Polls show Republicans appeal most consistently and strongly to low-education Americans a disappearing group. Between 2016 and 2020 alone, the share of voters without a college degree fell by five million, enough to account for all of Mr. Trumps 2016 Electoral College margin.

What has filled the late-Trump-era ideological vacuum has been a new politics whose intellectual guru is junior Senator Josh Hawley, the leader of the congressional effort to overturn Mr. Bidens certification. If Mr. Trumps message was fundamentally a negative reaction to liberalism it was literally reactionary Mr. Hawley and his cohort have turned that into a positive vision of an ideal of a society without liberalism.

In their books and speeches, Mr. Hawley and his colleagues describe an America liberated from cosmopolitans (he appears to be aware of the anti-Semitic implication of the term), where social media is strictly censored and laws force a return to what Mr. Hawley calls the genuine and personal love of family and church.

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The Hawley Republicans describe this ideology as post-liberalism, and its attracted a strong following among right-wing and religious Americans who want to find some moral justification behind their otherwise hypocritical backing of Mr. Trump.

Its better described as post-fusionist that is, it rejects the union of economic liberalism and moral authoritarianism that defined the post-Reagan party, siding only with the latter. Americans who are okay with globalization, technology and diversity (not to mention gays) are relegated to the fast-expanding Democrats. If Mr. Trump was the Robespierre of post-Tea Party Republicanism, these are his Jacobins, out to purify the party at any cost.

That this battle for the soul of the party had its most visible moment on the day of Mr. Trumps violent disgrace, the day Democrats returned to power in an America increasingly defined by cosmopolitanism that suggests that the Republicans will be spending a long time in the woods, struggling to reconnect with an America that outgrew them.

Theres a significant number of Congressional Republicans who still back President Trump after the storming of the Capitol by a mob of his supporters Wednesday. Political scientist Stephen Farnsworth says some of these Republicans are utilizing Trump supporters to fuel their own ambitions, which will make deal-making by the Biden administration more challenging. The Globe and Mail

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Opinion: On Wednesday the U.S. turned liberal, and Republicans got lost in the woods - The Globe and Mail

Jan. 12, 2021 5:04 pm ET

Kudos to Andrew Delbanco and The Wall Street Journal for highlighting his work promoting the humanities (Weekend Confidential: Andrew Delbanco, Review, Dec. 19). Eighteen years ago at Millsaps College in Mississippi, I spent half my freshman coursework in what was then called the Heritage program, exploring all of human civilization through history, literature and the arts. It was taught by a team of faculty from the departments of classics, history, English and religious studies. I subsequently pursued a scientific career in medicine, but that course I took as a freshman remains the most formative educational experience of my life. The small-group discussions taught valuable listening skills while the coursework helped me see our current challenges through a larger historical lens. I know that early dive into the humanities has made me a more compassionate physician and given me a knowledge base to find historical precedents for these times, which are so commonly called unprecedented.

Mark Trahan, M.D.

Lake Charles, La.

Original post:

The Liberal Arts Inspire the Spirit and Enrich the Soul - The Wall Street Journal

The 905 is a key political battleground. And just as questions about a coming federal election grow louder in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said goodbye to a top political lieutenant with strong roots and a solid track record in the crucial suburban region around Canadas biggest city.

Navdeep Bains is leaving electoral politics after an almost 17-year run. He left his post as Trudeaus Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, prompting a surprise cabinet shuffle on Tuesday as the prime minister fielded questions about his appetite for a federal election in the coming months. (Trudeau didnt rule it out, but said his preference is to hold off until the pandemic crisis is over.)

But while Bains said Tuesday that he will be there to help the Liberals whenever that campaign comes, his decision to step out of the spotlight brought his stature as a key political figure of the Trudeau era into high relief.

Hes been hard at work for quite a while, and at the centre of certainly the rebuild of the party, said Anna Gainey, the Liberal party president from 2014 to 2018.

I dont think you can (overstate Bainss) voice and his leadership and his contribution to this party, she said.

Scott Reid, a longtime Liberal strategist who was director of communications to prime minister Paul Martin, similarly described Bains as a powerhouse organizer who played a central role in the Liberal partys turnaround after the devastation of 2011, when Bains lost his seat as the Liberals were trounced and fell to third place in the House of Commons. Bains was part of the team that helped Trudeau take over and lead the party back to power with a majority government in 2015.

He was tapped as co-chair of the Liberal campaign in Ontario that year, and was one of five campaign co-chairs for the national campaign in 2019, when the party fell to minority status but maintained its grip on ridings across the Toronto area including all of Brampton and Mississauga, where Bains has spent his political career.

But Reid said Bains influence transcends the 905 region, describing him as the person who stood at the centre of the organizational, structural, political operation. And it delivered quite a startling victory in 2015, coming from third place.

For former Liberal strategist John Duffy, the loss of Bains will be felt less in the effort to attract votes during an election and more in his touch for organizing the machine around such efforts: fundraising, recruiting volunteers, and clinching good candidates to run under the Liberal banner.

A discussion with Nav about what life in politics was like and what the party could do to support a good candidate thats nominated thats been a big part of making everything happen, said Duffy.

Omar Alghabra, the Mississauga Centre MP promoted to transport minister on Tuesday, said the gap left by Bains is huge.

I dont think anybody is going to be able to fill that hole, he said. Navdeep had a massive impact on my life, on the Liberal party and I would say even in support of the prime minister over so many years. And nowhere do I think or I imagine Ill be able to fill that hole. I will hopefully play a part, I dont know what it is, but I dont expect nor do I think that I can fill that hole.

Bains himself said the Liberals were able to recruit some top-tier talent in 2015 that will help the party when he steps back.

Its not a new team. We have incumbency, we have experience, we have people that have done a couple of campaigns, and so thats why I have enormous confidence in the team, he said.

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Bains also said Tuesday that he will play a part in the next campaign, something Reid welcomed as a Liberal partisan with high praise for the outgoing minister.

He was the guy responsible for the political machine, Reid said. The federal Liberals would be very worried if he wasnt around on the next go around.

With files from Tonda MacCharles

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Liberal insiders say Navdeep Bains leaves a big hole in Justin Trudeau's electoral machine. Who will replace him? - Toronto Star