By arthur Weinreb
Monday, December 4, 2006
It's really hard to believe but the Liberal Party of Canada elected a man who posseses these qualities. Not only is Stphane Dion a long time Liberal, he has actually sat in the House of Commons for the past 10 years as a Liberal MP. and to top it off, he's has always been ordinarily resident in the country that he hopes one day to lead.
Up until the 3rd ballot at last weekend's convention, it looked like one of those qualities would be missing in the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The choice seemed to be between Michael Ignatieff, who spent most of the last 30 years outside of Canada and former NDP Ontario premier Bob Rae, who was forced to buy a membership in the Liberal Party in order to run for its leadership.
The delegates made a good selection thanks to candidate Gerard Kennedy whose voluntary withdrawal after the 2nd ballot and his ability to deliver support to Stphane Dion saw Bob Rae eliminated on the 3rd ballot and enabled Dion to beat Iggy on the last ballot to win the brass ring.
One unusual qualification that Dion has is his apparent lack of the arrogance that has practically become a job requirement for the position of leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He lacks the total arrogance of Ignatieff, who in his speeches kept saying such things as "we as Liberals have always believed …” when in fact he was out of the country when the rest of the party was "believing”. and when all his fellow Liberals were believing, Ignatieff was making speeches in Boston where "we” meant americans.
Rae had the arrogance to dismiss his disastrous reign as Ontario's premier by simply saying that he's learned from his mistakes and was therefore qualified to lead the Liberal Party and the country. While statements such as that are good, even mandatory at parole board hearings, Liberals deserve better. and they got it.
a Dion-led Liberal Party will be a good thing. He's an ideal leader to deal with Quebec after the issue of nationhood was raised during the leadership contest. Whatever his faults might be, Stphane Dion is a staunch federalist, and the prime mover behind the Clarity act is best positioned to deal with the inevitable fallout from nationhood, whatever that means, that the province has just been granted.
and Stphane Dion champions the environment. One possibility of his leadership is that many environmentally conscious Canadians may question the usefulness of Jack Layton and the NDP and send the party to oblivion. Not likely, but possible.
If many members of the Liberal Party are pleased with the selection of Stphane Dion as leader, it is hard to imagine that they can possibly be as happy as Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are. Both Ignatieff and Rae have absolute defenses to anything that the Liberals have done in power since 1993 (being out of the country or being a member of the NDP; it doesn't get any better than that). Battling Ignatieff would be like shooting (with a registered gun of course) a moving target. Canada's answer to John Kerry who backed Israel's bombing of Qana before he found the action to be a war crime, would be extremely hard to pin down. The best strategy that the Conservatives could employ against an Ignatieff-led Liberal Party would be to do nothing and hope that he self destructs. Of course it's much better to play offense than defense.
a Bob Rae-led Liberal Party would focus a lot of attention on Ontario, which would raise the specter of the Mike Harris government where current powerful members of Harper's government; John Baird, Tony Clement and Jim Flaherty also played major roles in that government. The next election should focus on present day issues and not on Ontario as it was in the 90s.
The Liberal strategy in the next election will be to criticize the Conservatives for not implementing Kyoto, for depriving Canadians of government daycare spaces and for not eliminating aboriginal poverty. These are all issues that the Liberals have been promising to implement for years but never got around to doing. But they were really going to implement them this time. Really, they were. IF ONLY the dumb Canuck voters hadn't thrown them out of office in January, they would have eliminated all pollution, made all aboriginals millionaires and put a fully funded daycare centre on every block. as a member of the Liberal caucus and as Minister of the Environment for much of that time, Stphane Dion can be held accountable for the fact that greenhouse gas emissions increased during the tenure of the man who named his dog "Kyoto”. The Liberals have given the Harper Conservatives a good target and their best chance to come back with a majority.
One burning issue remains. If Stphane Dion manages to do what all but one of his predecessors has done and follow Steve into 24 Sussex Drive, do we get to call him Steph?
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