Have the federal Liberals found the magic of the old glory days?

As Conservative attack ads set Parliament Hill ablaze this week and all four parties began positioning for a snap spring election, a Senate Liberal aide was loading books, files and an unusual piece of furniture into the back of a Dodge Caravan.

The landlocked flotsam and jetsam was the remaining office office personals of retired Liberal Senator Jean Lapointe, recently vacated from the post he had held since Jean Chretien appointed him in 2001. Most conspicuous was a faded white office arm chair, brown oak legs and arms, obviously not part of the red-velvet official furniture adorning the rich Senate spaces.

Lapointe’s assistant said it had belonged to another former Liberal senator, Jacques Hebert, who died four years ago, and was inherited by Lapointe. The chair was bound for Lapointe’s home, though a museum might have been a better destination. As Lapointe’s assistant and her friend loaded it into the van, a thought occurred.

History was passing by.

Hebert was Liberal icon and Pierre Trudeau’s close friend through life, a man who held a 21-day hunger strike in the 1980s to protest funding cuts for a youth work program. Out there, on the Senate freight ramp, his chair was one more fading memory of an era many Liberals desperately long for again.

“Those days are gone,” someone said to Lapointe’s assistant.

“We need them now,” she responded, a tone expressing unquestionable lament.

Is it possible those days, or a reasonable likeness, may return again?

After Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s rocky start two years ago, when he was essentially appointed party chief to succeed Stephane Dion and rescue the party from Dion’s disastrous entente with the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, has he now dug down deep and found what he needs, royal jelly might be an appropriate term, to lead the Liberals out of their banishment, short as it’s been, to the left side of the Speaker?

There is no doubt his unquestionably fiery mid-week speech to Liberal candidates and MPs was a shocker.

It was a packed room, the Old Railway Committee room in Parliament’s Centre Block, and it was standing room only at the back, sweaty there only three days after -40 outside. The first ovation might have seemed a bit orchestrated, but as he literally thumped the podium with his fist, shouting at times, hands pumping the air, true-blue political swipes at his opponent, the second, third and other ovations seemed, to the press gallery pack, a cynical lot if ever there was one, spontaneous.

Most of the spectacle, at least the words, themes, political muscle, was likely the product of Peter Donolo, the political magic genius whose sleeve had so many tricks when he guided Jean Chretien to his rout of the Progressive Conservatives in 1993 it is surprising, in retrospect, that he didn’t add a stroll on Lake Ontario to Chretien’s schedule.

Donolo’s fingerprints are all over the new Ignatieff, the Liberal Express bus tour last summer, Ignatieff in his shirt sleeves mining the crowds, Ignatieff speaking off the cuff, speech tossed aside, just as Chretien did.

But, maybe more importantly, Ignatieff’s overlooked line in the middle of his speech, that the Liberals gave Canada the Charter of Rights, and other lines that did get attention, they won’t attack Stephen Harper’s character, but his ideas, they want to help families, pensioners, students.

The list goes on. There was more than time between the Ignatieff pumping his arms in the Railway Committee Room than the Ignatieff who first faced Harper in the Commons, losing virtually every duel, or the Ignatieff who, for the past year, sometimes looked like he was walking to a funeral home as he came down a narrow flight of stairs to enter his weekly caucus meetings through the Railway Committtee room’s rear door.

“He looks like he’s eaten his Wheaties,” one press gallery wag remarked after the landmark speech, its possible significance highlighted by the Conservative party itself when Conservatives promptly posted two attack ads distorting it and then pulled the ads just as quickly, leaving empty black squares on YouTube, as the offense mounted, even among Conservative supporters.

It was oddly reminiscent of another Conservative mistake, in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives launched an earlier, more crude set of attack ads, no chance then to test them on YouTube, that ridiculed Chretien for his speech and facial appearance, the result, it turned out, of a congenital condition Chretien had coped with through his entire life.

That was the turning point in that campaign.

Progressive Conservative Leader and Prime Minister Kim Campbell went from having the highest ratings ever for a Canadian leader, according to Ekos pollster Frank Graves, to a defeat so overwhelming it left her party with only two seats in the Commons and only a 10-year wait before Harper absorbed the shattered Progressive Conservatives into his bold new party.

Memories locked in old chairs won’t bring it all back for the Liberals, but if they perform like they have over the past two weeks, backing Harper’s rich and powerful machine into defence, something might happen.