Ex-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff invoked the great Liberal prime minister of days long past, Wilfrid Laurier, several times while campaigning. And, indeed, Laurier was a great liberal (with a small ‘l’), but today’s Liberal Party has very little in common with its former incarnation.

The crying shame in all this is that Mr. Ignatieff actually is a small-l liberal in the Laurier mould, but he failed to sell himself as such to voters, mostly because he “poured too much water in his wine” (another one of his favourite platitudes) by adopting too many ideas from the left.

But even if he had campaigned as a small-l liberal, and anyone who’s read any of Mr. Ignatieff”s books, articles or lectures he had penned before his return to Canada would know that that’s what he is, most of that territory had already been occupied by the Conservatives.

That hallowed centre or middle ground in Canadian politics, which parties must claim for themselves in order to have a shot at winning elections, or call it the “small-l liberal territory”, now belongs to the Conservatives (which should really change its name to Liberal Party as soon as the other guys have gone out of business and lost the trademarked name):

Liberals who wonder what went wrong on Monday should note that the Conservative Party has now successfully transformed itself into a great liberal party (as the term “liberal” was understood by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the greatest of the Liberal prime ministers). The final step in this transformation was the Conservative breakthrough in Greater Toronto. The fact is, the country doesn’t need two liberal parties – which explains why Canadians got rid of one of them on Monday.

This is the real reason why Liberals lost, and lost so big, because the political landscape is crowded enough as it is; there’s no room for duplicate entries. Besides, there’s no need for a centrist party, as both parties on the right and left will invariably veer towards the centre at election time.

As for the Liberals and their search for a new leader, there’s one colossal mistake they are best advised to avoid: Justin Trudeau. It’s tempting for them, of course, to bring back the Trudeau name, in a futile attempt to re-live their past glory, but crowning Mr. Trudeau party leader would be wrong for several reasons.

Who came up with the idea that the son must be just as skilled and good at leadership as his father was? If there is any passing on of genes, they are known to usually skip a generation, so the Liberals would have to wait for Pierre Trudeau’s grandchildren to grow up. This concept, that Mr. Trudeau will be a good leader because his father was one, is absolute nonsense – if your father was an engineer, you may still become a poet; it doesn’t automatically qualify you as an engineer, does it?

Mr. Trudeau has also been lampooned as an airhead along the lines of the usual types who enter a Miss World pageant. Clearly, he would not command much respect as party leader outside the ever-dwindling circle of party members.

Finally, just as Bob Rae as leader would reduce the party’s chances to nil in Ontario, so would Mr. Trudeau’s leadership ensure that the Liberal Party would never win another seat west of the Ontario/Manitoba border, nor would they score too many points in Québec.

The fact is that the Liberals have had five years to figure out who and what they are, and they still haven’t come up with an answer. Another four or five years in the purgatory reserved for has-beens won’t make any difference, especially now that the party’s finances will dry up completely. And judging from the initial brainstorming done by Liberals, they don’t really seem prepared to rethink their general approach. It all seems more like a “paint job”, where instead of building a new car, they merely spray-paint a fresh coat on the old jalopy.

Perhaps, it’s time for Liberals to admit defeat and concede that their party is now six feet under.