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.

Politics - and that's a photo of a tomatillo

Copyright Ruth Seeley

I’m glad I didn’t watch the entire Liberal leadership convention on Saturday – watching the last half hour was enough of a body blow.

Where to begin the discussion of the horrors of this convention? The startling news that Bob Rae, who was a lifelong NDP member and the guy who led the NDP to their only victory in Ontario provincial politics, was now a Liberal in his unceasing quest not really for power, I don’t think, but for the limelight, was pretty shocking. As a lifelong non-affiliated federal Liberal, I was amazed that the party would take him. Anyone who witnessed Bob Rae’s appearance on Ralph Benmergui’s short-lived TV variety show a decade or so ago (when Rae was premier of Ontario and first revealed he had no principles by introducing anti-labour legislation that seemed designed to smack the unions that had helped elect him), must have realized something about this man: he likes to be the centre of attention and he doesn’t much care what he has to do to stay in the spotlight. Rae’s appearance on that show was a travesty. Claiming that his grandfather had been in vaudeville (implying that he was genetically worth watching as a performer), he persisted in playing the piano. With a sense of rhythm that can only be described as gooey (as opposed to elastic), Rae slowed the song’s tempo repeatedly despite the band’s talented efforts to keep it consistent. It was one long ritardando and had it not been so horrifying I would have switched channels. Swan song, you say? I think swans sing about as well as Rae does.

Then there was the rather crowded field of high profile candidates. Yes, there were a few people I had never heard of or hadn’t heard much about – four years of living in British Columbia has induced a slightly isolationist stance in me. Gerard Kennedy, Ken Dryden, Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, and Stephane Dion were five very high profile contenders for a single spot. And yet none was as high profile as candidates like John Turner and Jean Chretien when they twice duked it out for the leadership of the federal Liberals. Even Marc Lalonde was a higher profile candidate than these guys, in terms of tenure as a high profile cabinet minister and recognition throughout the country.

Joan Bryden’s interesting article (below) on what went on behind the scenes at the convention in terms of momentum and Kennedy’s supporters explains a lot. I wondered why Kennedy would throw his support behind Dion, but I suppose it makes sense given his opposition to the Ignatieff Quebec nation initiative. As for Bob Rae – well – I’d like a more convincing explanation of why he didn’t direct his delegates to vote for Ignatieff in the final ballot. And frankly, Scarlett? I blame Rae for the fact that the Liberals now don’t have a hope in hell of forming a government in the next decade. No offense to Stephane Dion, but he hasn’t been the highest profile cabinet minister in a Liberal government – and he’s been Minister of the Environment at a time when the best you could do in terms of Liberal environmental policy was to damn them with faint praise. Initiatives like the EnerGuide for Houses™ program were pretty feeble attempts to meet our Kyoto commitments – and the fact that the program existed for something like seven years before the Liberals put anything into promoting it speaks volumes. But there’s more to it than that. I don’t think Canada is ready at the moment for yet another Quebecois prime minister. If the candidate in question was Trudeau, maybe. But I think, given the length of time the Liberals have been in power federally in the last half century, the increasing sense of Western alienation, and the fact that Stephen Harper has proved to be less of an embarrassment than many of us anti-Conservatives expected, the polls may well be wrong (Liberals have apparently leapt six points in the polls since Dion became their leader). I certainly don’t expect a Liberal majority government to be elected in the spring of 2007. And I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/061203/national/libs_leader_behind_scenes