Out in Left-Centre Field

In the aftermath of the stunning upheavals in the 2011 federal election, with the Conservatives finally winning their coveted majority and the NDP doing a bang-up job of demolishing the Bloc Quebecois (and hey, Liz May finally won the Greens a seat in there too!), the federal Liberal Party has lost its most recent failure-of-a-leader and is joining the Maple Leafs and Jays in full "rebuilding mode".

So now, the media and the "blogosphere" (I hate that term but I can't think of anything better) are alive with speculation and advice on who the Liberals should hire and what strategies they should pursue in building themselves back up to their ancestral greatness. In the interest of not being here all day, I will focus on what I think of their leadership prospects, since that is what many Liberal partisans appear to think will bring them the quickest, most immediate benefit.

Personally, I believe that the party has much more in the way of structural and systemic problems, and that their recent defeat resulted not only from an incoherent and overconfident leader but also a tendency to rely on their past actions from 20, 30, 40 years ago and to expect that voters would simply reward them with a new mandate based on tradition, not any good reason in the present. The Liberals "mailed it in" this election, and they paid for it. They have been losing credibility for a long time as they twisted in the wind, trying to be all things to all people. They need to pick something concrete to stand for, and fast. But enough with little tangents ...

In the hunt for a new Liberal leader, many names have surfaced, from young New Brunswick MP and son-of-a-Governor-General Dominic LeBlanc, to the pragmatic Nova Scotian Scott Brison, to Quebec backroom power-broker and ex-lieutenant Denis Coderre, to rocket man Marc Garneau, to second-generation Liberal heir-apparent Justin Trudeau, to defeated Outremont candidate Martin Cauchon, to the Ontario premier's brother David McGuinty, to the locally popular but uninterested Dr. Carolyn Bennett, to the stalwart Western holdout Ralph Goodale. But the most buzz, by far, has centered on Bob Rae, MP for Toronto Centre and runner-up in the recent Liberal leadership ballots that gave us Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. His ambitions are public, and his credentials are impressive.

But ultimately, Rae will not, or at least should not, become the leader of the Liberals. Ever.

Why? Like I said above, his experience and his past credentials are impressive. He is, no doubt, an intelligent man. He consistently wins his riding in downtown Toronto by solid margins. Why shouldn't he win?

Quite apart from the fact his riding has been a safe Liberal stronghold since time immemorial (thanks, Rosedale), electing Bob Rae as leader would be the final nail in the slowly-closing coffin in which the Liberal party is currently interring itself. It would be electoral suicide. As much as he is an intelligent man, Rae had his chance -- a big one, with a majority -- as premier of Ontario, and he blew it. Badly. I won't even make the standard excuse that he governed in the worst recession until the recent (ongoing since 2008) one; any number of people could have gotten through the same lousy situation in better shape. Instead, Rae blew it so badly that he left the Ontario NDP in a coma to the present day and, most likely, for decades to come. His name is dirt in Ontario, once the sweep-prone stronghold of Liberal majorities. With the Liberal brand in tatters both in the west and in Quebec, they need to rebuild their chances in Ontario to have any hope of a comeback.

If rebuilding in Ontario is what the Liberals seek, then electing Rae will do the complete opposite; it will deliver what remains of Ontario right into the Conservatives' hands. As one acquaintance of mine said recently, the Conservatives need only repeat the phrase "Rae Days" enough times to knock the Liberals back down to the basement in the polls. Worse, this tactic would not only slaughter the Liberals but the NDP as well, since the ONDP were the party in power when Rae turned his tenure as premier into an unmitigated train-wreck. Voters have long memories, and only people at my age or younger (i.e. 20s at best) will not recall Rae's government and the myriad bungles thereof.

And if there's anything that the Conservatives' recent campaign taught us, it's that they are very good at repeating the same word (e.g. "coalition") over and over and over and over and over until either (a) we are all utterly sick of it, or (b) we begin to buy it as the truth. Never mind that Ignatieff had no coherent response to the issue while his rivals did, nor that the biggest concern was the worry about appeasing Quebec. The Conservatives have no problem with hammering on a single issue in response to every criticism until we, as voters, tire of it and either walk away in disgust or support them. You saw the glee with which they successfully savaged Ignatieff; is there any doubt they would do the same to Rae? And given Ontario voters' memories of Rae's government, is there any reason to doubt that the Conservatives would succeed again?

The worst part is, much of the Liberals' alternatives to Rae are either not ready (Trudeau, LeBlanc, etc.), uninspiring (Brison, McGuinty, Bennett, etc.), of dubious character (Coderre, Cauchon, etc.), aging (Goodale, etc.), or recently out of a job (Hall Findlay, Dryden, Volpe, etc.). Sadly, Rae might be the best that they can do -- which really speaks to the quality of people whom their party is attracting in their dark hours. If anything, in the past, the Liberal Party has been able to advertise itself as the quickest, easiest route to power for the ambitious. Now, it can't even rely on that bandwagon status anymore, eclipsed by both a united Conservative right and the NDP that they used to belittle and ridicule without end.

The Liberals' troubles are well-deserved, and indeed, it would serve them best to rebuild the hard way, from the ground up, starting with a compelling raison d'etre. But if past experience is any indication, the Liberals will most likely go for what seems the quickest, easiest way back to prominence from which they can posture to have a claim on power. It would be their undoing. For their own good, and for the good of the entire left and centre of Canadian politics, the Liberals need to find lasting solutions to their problems before they can ever contemplate acting for short-term gain.