Liberal leadership woes

Stéphane Dion continues to demonstrate time and time again that he's not much of a leader. His tenure as the current leader if the Liberal Party of Canada is certainly limited and will likely expire shortly after the next federal election.

But if Liberals think that their party's next leader will fare better after the inevitable replacement of the hapless Dion, they better take a look at their top contenders:

• Bob Rae, the socialist former leader of Ontario's NDP and current Liberal Party candidate recently demonstrated his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs. That might not be so bad except for the fact that "Mr. Rae isn’t just any Liberal candidate: he’s the party’s foreign affairs critic".

• Oh well, the Grits always have Michael "Iggy" Ignatieff, the Harvard human rights professor turned politician and the Party's current Deputy Leader who was once described as the most prominent Liberal supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
  

• Yup, that's the same Iggy who once said, "As a practical matter of politics, nobody knows what Kyoto is or what it commits us to".
  

Both of the above statements clearly put Iggy at odds with the current party leader and the liberal left in general.

The bumbling Stéphane Dion is generally seen as the best asset of Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government. It's Dion's weak leadership that has allowed Harper to govern with a defacto majority for the past two years.

But after taking a look at his two heirs apparent, one must wonder if either of them would be any more effective.