| It was an exciting race in which there was little to get excited about.
At last Saturday’s Liberal party leadership convention, it soon became clear that the contest to succeed Paul Martin would go the full distance of four ballots. After the first round of voting the support for each of the four principal candidates was too close to predict a clear winner.
Michael Ignatieff led, as he had for much of the past year, with 29 per cent of delegate support. Bob Rae was second, with 20 per cent, followed by Stéphane Dion and Gerard Kennedy, each with roughly 18 per cent. The next round saw Ignatieff increase his support slightly to almost 32 per cent, but both Rae (24 per cent) and Dion (21 per cent) were beginning to catch up. Kennedy dropped out and, in what proved to be the key moment of the day, declared his personal support for Dion.
The third ballot made clear the significance of this move. Ignatieff stalled at 34.5 per cent, and could only look on with gloom as Dion’s share of 37 per cent was announced. With Rae now out, the two former dons were left to duke it out. There was no contest. On the final vote, Dion outscored Ignatieff by nearly 10 full percentage points, providing the Liberal party with a new leader whom few would have expected even just six months ago.
Then why no excitement?
First, in hindsight the omens were in Dion’s favour all along. The federal Liberal party has a long custom — unofficial, but widely acknowledged all the same — of alternating between French-Canadians and Anglo-Canadians in their choice of leader. Thus, in reverse order and not counting interim leader Bill Graham, we have a pattern of Martin-Chrétien-Turner-Trudeau-Pearson-St. Laurent-Mackenzie King-Laurier-Blake that stretches back over more than 120 years. As the sole French-Canadian among the top four candidates, Dion thus had history on his side. Dion was also the only candidate with cabinet experience at the federal level under both Chretien and Martin. It is another quirk of history that since 1948 every Liberal leader has served as a minister under his own predecessor.
Second, for all the talk of Michael Ignatieff being the long-sought-for Trudeau Mk. II that the party has coveted for the past two decades, the long leadership campaign served only to underline what a pale imitation Ignatieff in fact was. Stilted if not quite stiff as a public campaigner, perhaps a little too boastful of his outstanding academic credentials, and never quite able to communicate in the vernacular (Mackenzie King was crap at this too, but at least he admitted it), Ignatieff just never seemed quite right.
Several commentators have also pointed to Ignatieff’s absence from Canada for much of the past three decades, but I’m less certain that was necessarily a liability. Whatever the case, it was evident in the weeks leading up to the convention that Ignatieff was unlikely to build substantially on his rock-solid base of 30 per cent support, that few delegates would make him their second choice. At the convention itself, there developed an almost "Anyone But Iggy" mentality among rival delegates that, once Kennedy had made his move, all but ensured the eventual outcome.
Third, hopes that Bob Rae might act as spoiler, developing sufficient momentum to overcome criticism of his reign as NDP premier of Ontario in the 1990s, were always misplaced. Rae’s failings are not those of Ignatieff’s, but he too was never likely to attract soft support from other candidates’ delegates. And the sight of rival contender and ex-goalie Ken Dryden lumbering over to embrace Rae early on in the contest (he dropped out after scoring 5 per cent on the first ballot) can only have served to underline how weak the ex-socialist’s candidacy really was.
Finally, let’s dispense with all the rubbish about how Dion’s victory was a triumph of delegate power over the party machinery. Ignatieff and Rae were both frequently described as the inner party’s preferred candidates, which may or may not be true, but neither man has deep roots within the modern Liberal party, despite each being a student member back in the pre-Trudeau days.
By the same token, Dion is hardly an outsider. As mentioned, he has served as a minister under both Chrétien and Martin and over the past decade has built up some deep loyalties within the Liberal organization. Indeed, if anything, Dion’s win was a surrogate victory for Jean Chrétien, who looked noticeably more pleased on Saturday night than did Paul Martin. After all, it was Chrétien who hand-picked and promoted Dion in the first place, a fact that led Martin to dump him ceremoniously as soon as he took office in early 2004. For Chrétien, this was payback.
But where does Dion’s triumph leave the Liberals. He has some dirty baggage, to be sure, notably his failure to clean up Canada during his time as environment minister, his authorship of the hopelessly vague and constitutionally untested Clarity Bill, and his proximity to the sponsorship scandal under Chrétien (though to be fair, the Gomery Inquiry cleared Dion of any responsibility). He’s also been accused of lacking charisma, but the same can be said pretty much of all Liberal leaders since Trudeau (whatever Chrétien might have had, it wasn’t charisma). And in any case, in the likely spring ’07 battle against Prime Minister Stephen Harper, charisma is unlikely to be a key issue I suspect.
In the end, Dion’s biggest problem may be exactly what landed him his new job in the first place. Going into the leadership fight, Dion could count on just 18 per cent of delegate support. By the fourth vote, that support was up to almost 55 per cent. But that means that Dion’s "second-preference" backing is more than twice his core "first-preference" support. Or put it another way, more than 80 per cent of delegates went into the convention unconvinced that Dion was the right man for the job.
That’s the nature of politics, of course, as new Alberta premier Ed Stelmach discovered later that same evening. It’s winning that counts, not how you win. But winning is also the easy part. For Dion and the federal Liberals the real challenge now lies ahead. |
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