Prime Ministerial Pipe Dream
The Liberal Party of Canada has granted 30% of its leadership convention delegates to candidate Michael Ignatieff. The delegates are heading to the party’s leadership convention this December.
This is nothing close to a victory, and it probably says little about Iggy as a political leader. What does this number tell us? For starters, it tells us that 30% of Liberals just don’t get it.
Iggy may win a Liberal leadership convention, but he will not win the next federal election. You can swoon all you want about his intellect, his worldliness, his looks, and his shoe size. It does not make a difference. He will not win.
The fact that Iggy has lived most of his life somewhere other than Canada is a big deal. Some Liberal insiders, drunk by the prospect of his candidacy, are willing to tell you otherwise, but they are wrong. It will be a very big deal for many Canadians. What’s worse is that Iggy’s supporters have to try and create an answer to this little problem.
A friend of mine is supporting Iggy. She knows some of the spin-doctors and Liberal champs in Iggy’s backroom. I told her what I thought: “Many Canadians won’t vote for a Prime Minister who has lived most of his life outside of Canada.”
She answered, “Yes, but I also think many Canadians realize that, if you want to be successful, you have to leave Canada at some point in your life.”
Wow. This rebuttal has absolutely no appeal to me. It is as cynical as it is ironic. Could you imagine a candidate for Prime Minster campaigning, even vaguely, on that notion? If that’s what Iggy’s supporters have come up with, then they are in more trouble than I thought.
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This post was written by alevo.
[tags]politics, Canada, liberals, liberal leadership, ignatieff[/tags]
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:40 pm
This essay, Lesser Evils, is not just interesting because of his stance on the war on terror: “To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.” (Note that his views in this essay, particularly on torture, are not so clear-cut as some on the left would have you believe). It’s also interesting because of the way he talks about Americans: as if he is one of them.
For example: “A succession of large-scale attacks would pull at the already-fragile tissue of trust that binds us to our leadership and destroy the trust we have in one another”, “[w]e have a history of lynching in this country”, “[w]e have the A.C.L.U. today because patriotic liberals after World War I were ashamed that the Russian Revolution of 1917 had terrified us into the Red Scare”, etc.
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Ignatieff has long been a medium-sized fish in a big pond, and now he wants to be a big fish in a small pond.
I think living so long outside the country would not hurt him as much if he were not so obviously a parachute candidate. After all, if *you* were offered a tenured professorship at Harvard, wouldn’t you take it? Being an internationalist is sort of par for the course for academics, and Ignatieff should play up this aspect of his long absence.
Further, attempts to portray him as a furriner sell-out could backfire among Canadians who regard themselves as cosmopolitan. The Conservatives tried to make some hay out of Pierre Trudeau’s travels overseas as well, and Trudeau slammed them for thinking it was bad to leave one’s country.
Now that I think of it, if he plays it right Ignatieff could do especially well with immigrants, who traditionally tend to support the Liberals anyway.
Harder to beat is the odour of privilege that hangs over him. He’s an untried MP who was handed a safe riding, and has never had to work his way up. His political instincts are untested and his cloistered academic background may not have prepared him for the rough-and-tumble fishbowl (to mix metaphors) of public life.
Further, the Liberal Party campaign machine hasn’t exactly been firing on all cylinders lately, so it’s hard to say whether the spinmeisters will be able to turn Ignatieff’s unique situation into an asset.
Finally, his liberal war-hawkishness will dog him relentlessly, no matter how nuanced his apologetics for torture may be. Just like the Republicans did with John Kerry south of the Border, the Conservatives will cream Ignatieff over the fact that his foreign policy toward the War on Terror mirrors their own.
Why opt for a hypocritical butch-lite, they will ask, when you can have the real thing?
October 3rd, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Who, then, should lead the Liberal Party, out of the leading candidates? Rae is an interesting choice – popular among NDPers but his government in Ontario is still unfondly remembered here. So what about Dion?
I don’t know a thing about him. What I have heard, however, is that he is quite popular in Quebec, which bodes well for ensuring Harper does not achieve a majority government (faint praise, I know). I also hear he is environmentally friendly.
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Dion seems a reasonable choice. I don’t know enough about him but I’ve also heard he’s reasonably green. Unfortunately for him the climate might not be right to return to “yet another” Quebecois prime minister. I’m not a fan of his Afghanistan position either (supports the mission and argued against a House vote, last I checked).
That said, Rae will never move in Ontario, and Ignatieff is a terrible choice for all the reasons previously mentioned. I’m not feeling any of the current candidates for Grit leadership, much less for the top dog spot. Probably why I’ll likely be voting NDP.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:23 pm
The inside scoop from alevo: Dion is actually highly unpopular in Quebec (I was wrong). Tim’s observation regarding another Quebecois PM is accurate. Dion is really, really boring. And Rae would pull in a lot of NDP votes.
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Rae would pull in NDP votes but to win Canada you have to win Ontario, and Ontario does not think of Bob Rae in terms of sunshine and flowers. I expect he’d poll well in the Maritimes and BC, but I can’t see Quebec going for him either. If Quebec wouldn’t back Dion, that leaves Ignatieff, who would do well in Quebec if it weren’t for the fact that he’s only nominally Canadian. Not that Quebecois are big on Canadians in general, but they certainly aren’t fans of Americans (granted, a gross generalization).
October 4th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Bernard Landry once commented that Stephan Dion was so hated in Quebec he even managed to get booed at a funeral. He was refering to the Maurice Richard memorial. Dion has been pied in the face in Montreal, and had Quebecers refuse to shake his hand. That said, he is a nationalist, environment-conscious, and deeply committed to improving Canada – has been all his life. He has a bland media persona, but, by and large, English-speaking Canadians appreciate his thoughtful approach to national unity. Dion would be the third Liberal leader from Quebec in a row, but this fact, and Dion’s unpopularity in Quebec, may be a better gamble for most Liberals than an unpopular former NDP premier or a cerebral ex-patriot who supports the American invasion of Iraq.
Bob Rae is considered a failed provincial leader. Some say, why make him a two-time loser? He is unpopular amongst the Ontario chattering classes, but he may be an alluring prospect to Canadians (and Ontarians) who feel Jack Layton’s version of the NDP is an uninspiring choice at the ballot-box. In this repsect, he is an attractive choice for improving liberal fortunes in teh many Ontario swing-ridings that went NDP (Hamilton East, Stoney Creek, Sault Ste. Marie, Trinity-Spadina, to name a few) It is rumoured that, at the upcoming leadership convention, the Liberal party’s Ontario contingency may try to orchestrate an “anybody but Rae” movement on the convention floor, prefering a Dion vs. Ignatieff showdown. However, these folks may be over-estimating the residual distaste for Rae in Ontario. He has a powerful camera presence, and a great speaking style – he has wooed many Liberals already with his “I’m here for one reason – to beat Stephen Harper” speech. He knows his potential role for the party, and he is well-acquainted with the political persona required of leadership.
Iggy is a parachute candidate through and through. He is popular for his psuedo-celebrity status as a Harvard professor and media personality, but he was unknown to many Canadians before 2005. Liberals became excited about Iggy primarily after his semi-rousing appearance as guest speaker during the federal party’s 2005 policy convention in Ottawa. In his speech, he launched thinly-veiled attacks at the state of the Liberal party under leader Paul Martin, describing the importance of a principled Liberal philosophy in the 21st century, he managed to inspire many Liberals at a time when the Party was perhaps in it’s most uninspiring state. People high up in the party ranks became open to the idea that he may be a compelling advocate for the Liberal brand – some going so far as to call him a latter-day Pierre Trudeau: bold, intellectual, prinicpled. However, his star-candidacy glow faded somewhat when Iggy fumbled onto the scene in a “gongshow” of a riding election in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. He has since ostricized many Liberals, and potential extra-party supporters across Canada, with his stance on the invasion of Iraq, as well as torture for the purpose of military intelligence. Iggy would be a joy to hear in a policy debate against Stephen Harper, his french is tolerable, he has a good chance of claiming some Quebec seat given his recognition of Quebec nation-status. For some, he represents the safest of three distinct gambles.
October 9th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
It’s too bad Rae is so vilified in Ontario, because a) he made a damn good Liberal Premier, and b) he’d make a damn good Liberal Prime Minister.
Everyone remembers how awful the Rae government was, but if you actually go back and look at the record, it’s quite impressive.
Rae inherited a government that was plunging into masive deficits, thanks to the homemade recession the Bank of Canda imposed by jacking the prime rate six points above the US prime rate, ostensibly to fight inflation (it was running around 4-5 percent in 1990, which was very low compared to the previous decade and a half), but actually as part of a side deal made with the US Congress to get them to accept the Free Trade Agreement.
Congress had worried during the ’80s that a weak Canadian dollar would give Canadian imports an unfair advantage in US markets, and the BoC interest rate hike attracted so much speculative investment that it drove the value of the Canadian dollar way up just as the last of the tarriffs between Canada and the US were lifted. Predictably, it smashed industry in Canada, destroying over a million jobs and derailing Ontario’s industrial economy just as the NDP took over.
The deficit ballooned into the ten billions, and the Rae government tried some Keynesian counter-cyclical spending to soften the blow for families being thrown out of work, which of course made the deficit worse, but what else could they have done?
Then, they set about reducing the deficit, albeit without eliminating public sector jobs. Rae went to the unions and asked them to agree to renegotiate their contracts to save money. He called it a “social contract”. The unions flat-out refused to bargain, so the Rae government unilaterally implemented the changes they were hoping to make. No one lost their jobs, but the dreaded “Rae Days” came into effect.
At the same time, the economy was recovering and the deficit was falling. In 1995, when the NDP lost to the Mike Harris Tories and their “Common Sense Revolution”, the deficit was down to $5 billion and falling.
Harris, an economic conservative and therefore “fiscally responsible”, immediately reversed the downward trend in Ontario’s deficit by implementing a series of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich. Over the next years, a period of non-stop economic growth, the Tories managed to balance the books exactly twice: the first time by selling off a chunk of Ontario Hydro, and thet second time by selling off the 407 ETR.
Now, any economist will tell you that if you have to sell off capital assets to balance your budget, you’re not running a sustainable operation. By the time the Tories handed power to the McGuinty Liberals, Ontario’s deficit stood at … $5 billion, right where it was eight years earlier, when the NDP were trying to bring Ontario out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.
It’s a shame that the story of the Rae government has been so hijacked by the business-friendly newsmedia that Ontarians can’t see just how good a choice Bob Rae would make as Prime Minister. He’s smart, savvy, experienced, extremely pragmatic, socially conscious, and has a very good track record. History has been quite unfair to him.
October 9th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Correction: I wrote above that the Rae government handed a $5 billion deficit to the Harris government. In fact, the deficit was only $2 billion when Harris took over.
That’s right: over eight solid years of growth, the Tories actually managed to increase the deficit from $2 billion to $5 billion. Even if you take inflation into account (which averaged three percent), the Tories still managed to double the deficit.