As a Liberal leadership candidate, Carolyn Bennett is unremarkable. When the Liberals congregate in Montreal this December to choose Paul Martin's successor, she'll be nowhere near the final ballot.

But even if she does nothing else the rest of the race - if she drops out tomorrow - Liberals owe her a debt of gratitude. Because a week ago, Bennett did something that was genuinely remarkable: She called out a fellow Liberal who richly deserved it.

Writing in The Globe and Mail under the headline "Liberal Leadership Race: There's an Elephant in the Room," Bennett didn't just take a few jabs at Joe Volpe; she floored him with a powerful uppercut.

Volpe made headlines in the spring when it was discovered that thousands of dollars had been contributed to his campaign by the under-age children of pharmaceuticals executives. Then he made matters worse by explaining the donations away with the ludicrous suggestion that the kids had been so enthralled by one of his speeches that they'd gone home and fished out $5,400 apiece from their private piggy banks.

Bennett rightly accused Volpe of compromising "our party's credibility on reform ... by the use of children as fundraising targets." And she took broader aim, implicitly accusing him of "old politics" that involve "paying for memberships or delegate fees" and "signing memberships on behalf of others."

Volpe makes an easy target. And in other parties, such internecine attacks wouldn't be especially newsworthy. Conservatives, from the old PC Party through Reform and the Canadian Alliance to the present incarnation, have long fought their battles in public. New Democrats are forever holding self-righteous debates with their brothers and sisters, which usually involve accusing one another of having sold out to The Man.

But Liberals pride themselves on presenting a united front, even if it means keeping their mouths shut about misdeeds. Even during the Chretien-Martin wars, when everyone knew the Liberals were at each others' throats behind closed doors, they rarely went on the record airing their differences. If anything, they'd take anonymous shots at one another, credited in print only as "a veteran Liberal MP" or "an Ontario riding president" - a cowardly way for dissenters to air their grievances.

Now, with their recently defeated party making a big show of unity, Liberals are supposed to be more deferential toward each other than ever. Even the leadership candidates seem terrified of publicly disagreeing; that's why, from the outside at least, their race has been oppressively boring. And it's why the party is liable to fall into the exact same ethical traps it's fallen into previously.

According to party officials, this leadership race will be cleaner than past ones largely because the candidates are policing each other. That sounds plausible in theory, since the field is unusually large and competitive. But because they're afraid of being branded "bad Liberals," few candidates or their organizers are coming forward with their concerns about other campaigns' behaviour.

Privately, Liberals will gripe about other campaigns' heavy-handed tactics - especially those of Volpe's campaign manager, Jim Karygiannis, an old-school, arm-twisting, machine politician. But because most aren't willing to come forward, all we get for public consumption are puff pieces like the one in last Saturday's Toronto Star, which approvingly cited Karygiannis's "personal touch" even as Liberals quietly suggest he's still in the habit of making heavy-handed phone calls.

It's precisely that sort of complicity - they'd call it loyalty - that got the Liberals in trouble in government. Adscam happened partly because those who could have blown the whistle were busy being "good Liberals." On a smaller scale, Martin's questionable association with Earnscliffe Strategy Group went largely unchecked because even staunch Chretienites didn't want to go on the record criticizing him.

In her Globe piece, Bennett rightly identified the "integrity gap" that the Liberals need to make up after their scandal-plagued final years in government. But merely getting Volpe out of the race, while a good start, wouldn't be enough. It's up to those Liberals with a stronger sense of ethics to start holding each other to account - to refuse to stand idly by while their party falls back into its old habits.

Bennett may not be a "good Liberal," according to the party's misguided honour code. But with her op-ed, she proved herself to be something much better: a Liberal willing to stand up for what's actually good.