It's not Bob Rae's ability to lead we should be questioning

Reading about the leaked Innovative Research Group survey that found Canadians question Bob Rae's ability to lead during a financial crisis and/or recession brought back a lot of bad memories for me.

I had forgotten all about the 'Rae Days' - forced unpaid leave imposed on Ontario's civil servants as part of his futile attempt and misguided strategy to cope with a deficit he inherited and then proceeded to allow to balloon totally out of control. Someone who actually knew how to run an organization would, instead, have come up with a more creative plan to cut costs through attrition, rationalization, and by investing in technology that would have made it possible for people to work smarter rather than harder.

Rae's election as Ontario Premier was something I thought I'd never live to see. An NDP landslide, it was, after decades of Progressive Conservative rule and then a brief interlude of David Peterson's Liberals. I even recall voting in that election, and that the polling station was incredibly remote and almost impossible to reach via transit. And I voted for him - well, not for him, but for whoever was the NDP in the riding in which I lived in Toronto's Annex.

He had been in power for less than a year when he started to take away the right to strike from those who had supported - and funded - the NDP for decades, the unions. He also enacted legislation that made it legal to hire replacement workers - scabs, they used to be called. My political love affair with the NDP ended before it ever really began.

And then there was his appearance on the Ralph Benmurgui show, Friday Night with Ralph Benmurgui, which I blogged about shortly after the Liberal leadership convention that led to Stephane Dion's victory. Forget that it was a ridiculously bad show (how could it not have been? when CBC launched the new show, instead of giving them a budget for costumes, they apparently suggested the series just use the leftovers from the old Tommy Hunter show - vintage at its most eccentric).

What Canadians in general - and Liberals in particular - need to question is what, exactly, Bob Rae stands for. Given the way he behaved when he finally became premier of Ontario, it's obvious his belief system is elastic at best and totally self-serving at worst. Since then, of course, he's decided he's not an NDP kinda guy at all anymore, he's actually a Liberal. I wonder if that will ultimately turn out to have been a bad move for him. Because if he continues to seek power at the expense of rebuilding the Liberal party, he'll ensure its ruin. And the federal Liberals are already teetering on the brink of financial disaster as it is. Perhaps that's been the master plan all along and he's secretly still an NDP candidate at heart. Somehow I doubt Jack Layton will step aside for him though if he decides to cross the floor yet again.