After Bob Rae, who? Justin Trudeau? Seriously?
by Geoffrey Stevens
The capital may have been astonished, but the people who know Bob Rae well were not surprised by his decision not to seek the permanent leadership of the Liberal party. They knew he was wrestling with a political dilemma — the result of lousy positioning and unhappy timing.
They knew he still dreamed of becoming prime minister, but he could not see how to get to 24 Sussex from the starting point of the leadership of the third party, a party on the skids, a party that had been rejected by progressive voters in favour of the NDP, a Liberal party in urgent need of long-term retooling.
In a column four weeks ago, I discussed some of the arguments against a Rae candidacy, suggesting common sense and political sense might well cause him to stay out of the race.
His best opportunity was in 2006 when the party was choosing a successor to Paul Martin. Unlike his two principal opponents, Rae did not have a seat in the Commons at that time (he returned to Parliament in a by-election later). He finished third behind Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. Back then, the Liberals were the official opposition, facing a minority Harper Conservative government.
In hindsight, most Liberals would agree they would have done better in the 2008 and 2011 elections under Bob Rae than under Dion and Ignatieff.
There's not a Liberal alive who, in hindsight, would not agree that the party would have done better in the 2008 and 2011 elections under Bob Rae than it did under the hapless duo of Dion and Ignatieff. The Grits might not have won, but they also might not be in third place today. With a majority Tory government locked in power, and a surging NDP in opposition, the Liberal leadership is not the prize it once was. It's more a millstone than a gemstone.
That's the positioning problem. The timing problem is one of age and opportunity. As noted in the previous column, Rae will be 64 this summer. He has been in federal and provincial politics for 34 years. The next election is scheduled for October 2015, when Rae will be 67. Assuming the Conservatives do not roll over and play dead in the next three years — and that the Liberals do not magically rise from the ashes — Rae would have to wait until 2019, when he would be 71.
Rae says age is not a factor. Not in his mind, perhaps, but the Liberals, still shell-shocked from their precipitous fall from grace, are struggling with the concept of renewal. For some, renewal means rethinking and rebuilding the party from the ground up. For others, it means finding a charismatic leader who will lead the party back to the promised land without the hard, messy work that rebuilding entails.
Those Liberals who want to take the shortcut look inevitably to Justin Trudeau — because of his name, not because he is ready for leadership, or has leadership tools, or even really wants the job.
The trouble with the Liberals, as David Lewis, used to say is that, like the Bourbon kings of France, "they learn nothing and forget nothing." Liberals-in-a-hurry have learned little from the hard lessons of the decade since Chrétien, but they cannot forget Pierre Trudeau: his dramatic arrival in 1968; Trudeaumania, with its excited youngsters and their swooning mothers; and the great election victory of June 1968.
But they don't remember how quickly everything went sour after that election, how Trudeau barely escaped with a minority government in 1972, how his policies alienated the west where Trudeau is still a four-letter word.
They also forget that when Trudeau became leader, the Liberals were in office. With the leadership came the prime ministry. He, and the Liberals of the day, had it easy.
It is unrealistic and unfair to expect Justin Trudeau, who seems have little of his father's magnetism, to replicate Pierre's success and to lead Liberals to victory from a starting point in third place with a party that may have forgotten the fundamentals of political success. Build first, win later.
About Geoffrey Stevens
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at the address below. This article appeared in the Waterloo Region Record and the Guelph Mercury.
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