Past haunts Liberal hopeful

Past haunts Liberal hopeful
Calgary Herald
Friday, November 21, 2008
Page: A8
Section: News
Byline: Don Martin
Column: Calgary's Eye on National Politics
Dateline: OTTAWA
Source: Calgary Herald

The chutzpah of his campaign launch was breathtaking.

The way Liberal MP Bob Rae argues it, his spectacular botching of economic policy as Ontario's premier during the 1990s recession is an asset in his bid to become the next Liberal leader.

Electing someone inexperienced in the ways of worsening a recession, the Toronto MP warns in this odd lemonade-from-lemons squeeze play, would be risky lest they repeat his public-purse spending spree as the fast route to exacerbating the crisis.

In other words, Rae implies, the fact leadership rival Michael Ignatieff was lounging around London writing novels and airing lofty BBC documentaries during the last Ontario slump puts him at a competitive disadvantage.

As bizarre as it sounds, there was really no other survival strategy in a scenario lurching toward hopeless for Bob Rae, the third and likely final candidate for a Liberal leadership that will be decided next May.

This leadership contest is different from the 2006 prosperity-era showdown against Ignatieff. Now the all-consuming focus of debate is on anything economic. As the downturn edges closer to home, it brings Rae's notoriously lousy one-term performance as premier into sharp focus for easy attack by his opponents.

The best Rae can hope for now is that people will accept he publicly lived an ugly economics lesson and will avoid repeating the mistakes that quickly ballooned into a notorious $10-billion annual deficit.

The slightly unnerving angle is that Rae never actually admitted to making mistakes during his campaign launch news conference on Thursday.

When pressed, his bright blue eyes widened for a bit, almost as if he were reliving the horror of those awful days in his head. The speed was the big shock, he admitted. When the collapse came, it hit almost overnight and spiralled government revenue into a free fall.

The best person to appreciate the inconvenient truth of that statement is obviously Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the leader now frozen in wide-eyed surprise at his government's sudden reversal of fortunes.

So unprepared were the Conservatives for the onset of hard times, their own budgetary officer pins the looming deficit on the government's reckless tax cuts and recent spending boosts.

Yet press Rae on a fairly straightforward point -- does he favour or oppose a bailout for the auto sector? -- and you get a five-minute rambling response that ducks a definitive position. Try it again and nouns, verbs and adjectives gush forth in a nice-sounding cascade that still stops short of a coherent answer.

Perhaps that illustrates Rae's reputation as the MP who says nothing better than anybody else.

When long shots from the 2006 race sounded him out to see if he was worth supporting should their candidacies falter, they were struck by his lack of a grand vision for the country and his party. At least one former candidate confided that Rae's chronic evasiveness was their reason for supporting Stephane Dion.

But all is not completely lost for Bob Rae, even though his modest caucus support suggests he's running in second place behind Ignatieff.

He's bang-on in scoping the multitude of problems confronting his adopted party. The Liberals are a mess -- starved of funds, hemorrhaging members, losing youth, shedding entire regions of support and technologically backward.

His idea of giving away memberships, now a token $20 fee, is interesting. I'd argue that's basically what they're worth, so long as the Liberals refuse to adopt a one-member, one-vote process for the party leadership. It also seems bizarre for a party mired in debt to give up the hefty chunk of annual membership cash. But at least it's a new way to recruit Liberals in a sleepy race already in rerun.

Bob Rae concludes he's "very popular in the province of Ontario," noting he's often summoned to raise funds or shake hands at local riding functions.

Yet despite dignified roles presiding over studies in tainted blood, post-secondary education and the merits of the Air India bombing inquiry, he is still best remembered as the man who was in charge when Ontario fell to its knees in the last great downturn.

For a party trying to fresh-face itself, he remains a disturbing optic from an experience people want to forget even as they now prepare to relive it.

dmartin@canwest.com