Rae The Public Servant

A Trudeau led the Liberal Party when Bob Rae entered the House of Commons. And a Trudeau leads that party as Rae leaves. The Dippers were never sure Rae was one of them. And the Liberals were never sure if he belonged in their camp, either. That is why they never elected him permanent leader of the party.

But there has always been a remarkable consistency to Bob Rae. He believes that government can be a force for good. He believes it has a responsibility to the less fortunate. Like his father, he believes that Canada can be an honest broker on the international stage. And he believes in fair play.

He stands in stark contrast to the present prime minister. The kid who used to deliver Richard Nixon's newspaper learned how not to do politics from Nixon. Stephen Harper used Nixon's politics as a template for governing this country.

We probably will not see Rae run for elected office again. But that does not mean he has abandoned public service. Tom Walkom writes in today's Toronto Star that Rae's decision to negotiate with Ontario on behalf of Canada's First Nations is all of apiece. He has a long record of seeking the just outcome:

If there was a high-profile issue, Rae was involved. The federal government asked him to inquire into whether there should be an inquiry into the 1985 terror bombing of an Air India flight (he said yes).

The Ontario government asked him to inquire into whether university and college tuition should increase (he said yes again).

He investigated softwood lumber exports for the lumber industry and Sri Lanka’s civil war for a non-governmental organization he chaired.

When a scandal over tainted blood erupted, Rae led an investigation into what to do with the Canadian Red Cross. When the Toronto Symphony Orchestra found itself in financial trouble, Rae negotiated a government bailout.

Problems with a native fishery in New Brunswick? Call on Bob Rae.

No one should doubt Bob Rae's ambition. He really wanted to be Prime Minister of Canada. But, in the end, he has done Canada stellar service -- without seizing the brass ring.

A Rae Of Hope

Lawrence Martin  -- who admits being inspired by MacKenzie King -- looks into his crystal ball this morning and predicts that Bob Rae will lead the Liberals in opposition and Mark Carney will lead them back to power. At the moment, both predictions are a bit of a stretch. However, Martin accurately notes that Rae is off to an "impressive start."

Those who believe that the centre has dropped out of Canadian politics will not be impressed. And, truth be told, rehabilitating the centre will not be easy:

Although Stephen Harper is brandishing his ideological stripes in some policy domains, in the area that counts most, the economy, he is showing himself to be adroitly capable of moderation. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s decision last week to put back his deficit-elimination target was an example.

Nor will it be easy for the Grits to make gains on the second-place New Democrats once that party has selected its new leader. It has a strong list of candidates to draw from.

Despite his pronouncements, however, Canadians know that Mr. Harper does not occupy the political centre. His present legislative agenda proves that. Moreover, the last three elections have proved that Mr. Harper, even with his majority, is not where most Canadians are. Regardless of the cheerleaders at The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the facts tell a different story. And whoever leads the NDP will be faced with the problem of holding a restless caucus together.

The Liberal Party of Canada has a long road ahead of it. And, at this stage, it is folly to predict who will eventually lead the party. But Martin is right on one other point: Bob Rae is "probably a big enough improvement on previous leaders to save the Liberal Party."

Grace Under Pressure

The problem with Hemingway's definition of courage -- grace under pressure -- is that, while it's a neat turn of phrase, it's nonetheless shallow. There is so much more to courage than just grace under pressure. Be that as it may, Bob Rae displayed both courage and realism last week when he bowed out of the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

He faced a central political problem. As Jeffrey Simpson noted in The Globe and Mail, "Like Macbeth's 'horrible shadow,' Mr. Rae could not escape the reality and mythologies of his years as the NDP premier of Ontario. They have stuck to him and tormented his political career as a Liberal. Even outside Ontario, where Liberals and others had not experienced those years, the telling of the province's travails, and those of his government, spread across the land, seeping into the common (if potted) wisdom of what actually happened and why."

Some claimed that his insistence on the principle of one person one vote was an obvious attempt by a losing candidate to tip the race in his favour. However, the last time I checked, that principle was at the root of western democracies. Others claimed that his support for the opposition coalition was a loser's game. But again, according to the rules of parliamentary democracy, that principle has been in practice for hundreds of years.

Mr. Rae does not need anyone to lecture him on principles. But, as perhaps the best Canadian politician of his generation, he can read his times; and he understands exactly what Stephen Harper has been trying to do to his political opposition -- and exactly what kind of response it requires. More than that, he has a refreshing sense of perspective. "It's only politics," he says, "it's not the end of the world."

Somehow, one cannot imagine Stephen Harper making that kind of statement. Even if the coalition fails, it has given Canadians confirmation of what they have long suspected -- but which the Prime Minister has sought to soft peddle in a soft blue sweater. Put simply, Mr. Harper believes -- with Vince Lombardi -- that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." The coalition has also given us a glimpse of how Stephen Harper reacts when he is genuinely scared. It is not a flattering portrait.

Harper is reputedly a very bright man. The late David Halberstam, in his book The Best and the Brightest -- the story of how John F. Kennedy and his brain trust blundered into Vietnam -- intended the book's title to be ironic. The title, he wrote, underlined "the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard won, often bitter experience." The prime minister is a bitter man but he is not a wise one.

Mr, Rae, on the other hand, has known -- and, as last week illustrates, continues to know -- bitter experience. But he has emerged from that experience a wiser and a much better man than Stephen Harper. Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The Return of Bob Rae

When I began this venture a year and a half ago, I suggested in one of my first posts that the Liberal Party should choose Bob Rae as its next leader. Obviously, they did not heed my counsel. But, like a lot of Canadians, I was willing to give Stephane Dion a chance to re-create the Liberals. His efforts to date have not been impressive. However, Mr. Rae's arrival on the Opposition front benches may give the party the real world and rhetorical skills Dion lacks -- not to mention a sense of genuine wit.

Rae is not without his faults. As a teacher in Ontario during his time in power, I worked my share of "Rae Days" without pay. And, for that, Rae was despised by a majority of Ontarians. I never felt that way about the man -- although I should confess that I didn't vote for him. Nor did I vote for the man who succeeded him. But I was taken with Rae's idea that it was better to lose pay than a job. And, while the central premise of his approach to the recession of the early nineties was to share the pain, it was not a popular message. Voters want politicians to relieve their pain, not spread it around. Unfortunately, while Rae himself was one of the most gifted politicians of his generation, his cabinet lacked depth. They simply did not inspire public confidence. The combination of an unpopular message and a weak cabinet doomed Rae. He is still one of this country's most able politicians. The difference this time is that he adds considerable strength to the Liberal bench.

Rae will be a target for the Conservatives. Jim Flaherty, the Minister of Finance -- and Ontario's former finance minister -- will remind the public that Rae's tenure coincided with hard times. But Rae did not instigate those times. And, sticking to the playbook he used when he was in charge of this province's finances, Flaherty has chided premier Dalton McGuinty for not cutting taxes on business. He will fulminate, claiming the federal Liberals are as incompetent as their provincial cousins. But he conveniently ignores the fact that the downturn in the United States has dried up demand for Ontario products -- particularly automobiles. Cutting taxes will increase the supply of goods. But, if the public cannot afford to buy what you make, all you will do is stock your warehouses and fill your parking lots.

Mr. Flaherty's panacea comes at a time when the whole supply side experiment has proved to be, literally, bankrupt. E. J. Dionne, in The Washington Post last week, offered an accurate evaluation of the economic policies of the last thirty years: "Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends," he wrote, "about how brilliant capitalists are, and how much they deserve their seven figure-salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy." For now that it has all blown up in their faces, "they are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard."

Mr. Rae will be quite prepared to make that argument; and, when Mr. Flaherty pushes back, Rae will remind Canadians that the man who railed against debt left Ontarians a five and a half billion dollar deficit. Mr. Flaherty's stewardship of the economy was no brief, shining moment. And, as a lawyer, he will be remembered for his proposal to deal with the homeless by sweeping them off the streets and housing them in jail for the night.

I used to work for a man who was fond of saying that "stupidity is its own curse." I have no idea who will win the next election -- it is too soon to tell. But I suspect that, when it comes to stupidity, Mr Rae will draw public attention to it, eloquently and in two languages.

The Right Man

The Liberal Party has chosen the delegates to its convention in Montreal and we are down to four possibilities. To no one's surprise, Micheal Ignatieff is in first place, followed by Bob Rae, Stephane Dion and Gerard Kennedy. The good news is that they will provide the foundation for a strong front bench and creative policy alternatives.

The conventional wisdom is that Ignatieff is the choice of the party's aristocracy. However, past history has shown that receiving their blessing is not necessarily the path of wisdom. John Turner or, of late, Paul Martin offer cautionary tales.

The prime directive of Canadian politics is that, while all political coalitions eventually implode, centre-right coalitions are counter intuitive to the Canadian experience. Over reliance on market solutions and socially consevative public policies do not fit a country whose geography is immense but whose population is the size of some southeast Asian cities. Centre right coalitions did not give us Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan. In fact,they didn't even give us a flag.

Canada's survival as a nation has depended on the kinds of public policies to which the Amerian economist Jered Bernstein has assigned the acronym WITT (We're in this together.)

So the question is, which of the four candidates can build the most geographically diverse and most stable centre-left coalition? The answer is that Bob Rae is the best choice for the Party. His time in the NDP provides him with a track record on social policy. And, while some claim that is his prime weakness, I would argue that it is that background, as well as his attempt to think outside the tradionally socialist box, which indicate his ability to build a viable, stable coalition. He will lose some support in Ontario. Strong unionists, who remember his Rae Days, will reject him for breaking contracts. Committed conservatives will lambast him for simply not downsizing a bloated provincial labour force. In fact, his policy was an attempt to cut expenses in the face of rising costs and shrinking revenues while keeping people at work. He left the NDP because he came to believe that its traditional economic and fiscal policies were increasingly out of joint with the times. And, for that, he carries alot of political baggage. On the other hand, his history indicates a rare kind of courage. While Ontario is admittedly problematic, he will draw support from the prairies, from British Columbia and the Maritimes. He has spent a lot of time on the constituional file, is fluent in French and understands what runs deep in Quebec politics -- qualities Mr. Harper simply doesn't possess.

Add to that wit and a refusal to take himself too seriously and you have an antidote to the "heroic" leader who takes Napolean, or perhaps, more accuately, George Armstong Custer, as his model. He is a man who is suited to the job. And, if the Liberals do not win a majority in the next election -- a distinct possibility -- Rae will be there for the long haul.