That being said, I do have a healthy respect for Mr. Rae. I do think that he's a decent and honourable man. More importantly, he recognized when he was wrong and sacrificed his political career in order to make it right.
As premier, Rae ran up a truly impressive debt, although nothing of the scope and size that Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill and Dalton McGuinty at Queen's Park have managed to create. It should be remembered that in 1990, we were in a fairly bad recession and Rae figured that he could spend his way out of it, which is precisely what Harper and McGuinty subsequently did and what federal Conservatives and anti-Rae Liberal partisans - some of whom also work for McGuinty - now slam him for. After all, nobody said that intellectual honesty was required, or even desirable, in politics.
However, unlike Harper and McGuinty, Premier Rae attempted an economic course correction on the deficits he created that primarily impacted his own political base, the civil service unions. He knew that he was likely immolating his own career i doing so, but he went forward anyway because it was the right thing to do.
No one else in modern politics that I'm aware of has shown that kind of courage. After all, it's pretty easy for weapons-grade morons, like Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak or Tea Party shitheels like Scott Walker to take on public sector unions. For Rae it was political suicide and he did it anyway. I'd never actually vote for him, but he's earned my deep respect as a man of principle. If more politicians were willing to attack their own constituencies to reduce deficits, we wouldn't be as fucked as we are.
When both the federal and provincial NDP became too anti-Zionist for his liking, Rae publicly broke with them and joined the federal Liberals. Again, this was a matter of principle and not something that made his life any more comfortable. He could have just retired from public life entirely and devoted himself to making assloads of money in the private sector. Dippers despised him and far too many Liberal hacks described him as a "tourist."
Oddly enough, Bob stayed through the worst of it and the guy that those hacks supported, Michael Ignatieff, hasn't had anything to do with the party since.
Not only did the Liberal Party spend the last year doing a terrible wrong to Bob Rae, I'm pretty sure that they blew their own heads off in the process.
The Liberals love of situational ethics is storied, but never has it been so egregious as it has been over the last thirteen months. To explain, we have to go all the way back to the winter of 2008-'09, when Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff did their level best to make the Liberal Party of Canada virtually unelectable.
Dion had managed to throw away a perfectly good election that the Tories were actually born to lose. The Harper government had managed to piss away a healthy surplus that was left to them by Paul Martin, just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world started ending. Then Harper and his dickhead of a finance minister lied about there being a problem at all and suggested that it was an ideal time to get into the markets, which had lost half their value in a single day. If you followed Stephen Harper's financial planning advice, you'd be broke today because the markets continued bleeding money for months afterward.
Monsieur Dion took the reality of his loss the way only a Liberal can be expected to: He attempted a coalition coup with the NDP and supported by the treasonous Bloc Quebecois, which destroyed his leadership in less than a week. Michael Ignatieff was named interim leader by the party executive - none of whom are elected by the people - who also expressly allowed him to run for the permanent leadership from that post.
I think we all know how well Ignatieff's leadership worked out. He managed to do something that Dion - or any other Liberal leader since William Lyon Mackenzie King - couldn't pull off. He lost his own seat. And at least King twice lost his seat (in North York, Ontario and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) while winning majority governments. Ignatieff did it as he lost over half of his party's seats. Ignatieff resigned as leader and fled to the safety his Yorkville condo before he could be butchered alive by his fellow Liberals.
The Liberal parliamentary caucus unanimously nominated Bob Rae as their leader. Unfortunately, the party's national executive board - which, again, hadn't been elected by the people - remained staffed by Ignatieff flunkies that hated Rae for having the temerity for having twice challenged their guy for the leadership. They made him pledge that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership if he was interim leader, thus denying Rae exactly the same situation that Ignatieff enjoyed and virtually nobody bitched about. If you want to know why I hate the Liberals so much, that's as good an example as any.
Of course, everybody knew that the fix was in and, when the terms of Ignatieff's devious scumbags expired, the reality of Bob Rae's pledge would change. But that didn't stop the anti-Rae faction of the party, who didn't at all object to the constant and conscious lying of Jean Chretien, Dion (who pledged that he would never enter into a coalition) and Ignatieff, from holding him to a politically engineered promise that was expressly designed to hobble him.
Here's the sleaziest thing of all. If Rae had refused to serve as interim leader, despite the unanimous nomination of the caucus, because he wanted to be permanent leader, he would have been shithammered by his detractors for that. These people are just pathologically dishonest. Once they get kicked out of politics forever, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them running professional boxing.
There's just no winning in that goddamed party, which is why I think that being a federal Liberal is a genetic defect, sort of like Down Syndrome. Or a physcriatric disorder, like self-mutilation. Liberals are like teenage girls who cut themselves because no one wants to be their boyfriend, but don't understand that guys are even more a-scared of cutters.
If those assholes would act like halfway normal human beings, they might actually be able to resurrect themselves enough to form a government someday. I believe that Bob Rae was the clearest shot they had of doing that, and his record in Ontario was a plus, rather than the minus that chronic shitheads think it is.
He's uniquely positioned to respond to Conservative attacks. All he need do is respond with an ad that says "Did Stephen Harper engage in wild spending during a recession, yes or no? Is Stephen Harper now targeting the civil service to contain the deficits he himself created, yes or no? Yes, Bob Rae did both, but he did so against his political interest rather than to further it."
Rae could have easily called the Tories on their own bullshit talking points and used his own experience to do it. There isn't another single Liberal that can do that. Not one. Does anyone think that someone named McGuinty can pull that trick off?
If you want an election about the character of the leaders, Bob Rae would've been the guy who was born to make Harper sweat. Why in the fuck do you think that the Tories launched an attack ad against an interim Liberal leader? Has that ever happened before?
Notice how a giant "Not a leader - Just visiting" campaign hasn't been fired at Thomas Muclair? Why do you think that is? But they did shoot one across Bob Rae's bow because I think that Harper was fucking spooked at facing Rae. And the Liberals, being galatically dumb, fell for it. Again.
The one guy who could've fought the Conservatives on their own ground was taken out today because the Grits are too scared and too stupid to do anything but count on The Next Big Thing.
Would Rae have become prime minister? Probably not. The kamikaze factions in the party (which is to say all of them) wouldn't allow it. To a person, Liberals hate each other with a much greater intensity than they hate even Stephen Harper.
But I do think that Bob Rae would at least hold what the Liberals have now, and maybe even pick up a few seats. He's the only Liberal with a record capable of bringing the fight against the Harper Tories. Rae could define the Tories just as easily as the Tories define him.
So what happens now?
Well, I suppose that Justin Trudeau has no other choice but to renege on his pledge not to run for the leadership, his family be damned. And every other biological loser in the party that knew that Rae was the prohibitive favorite is now free to get in, all of whom are going to concentrate their energies and resources on killing Trudeau, which I'm pretty sure they will.
My guess is that we're going to see a re-run of the 2006 leadership convention. Ignatieff, the last leadership candidate without a political resume to speak of, was the frontrunner until he wasn't. Having suffered a death by a thousand cuts during the campaign, Iggy couldn't win on the first ballot and lost on the fourth, giving the leadership to someone no one previously thought possible. And that long-shot was beaten before he even got the furniture into his new office.
There's an extreme long-shot chance that the Grits give the leadership to a Quebec pro, like Denis Coderre, who could at least build a party base for the future. But the Iggy faction will almost certainly kill him, too.
The difference between 2006 and now is that there was a Liberal Party left for Ignatieff to inherit three years later. Chances are that there won't be one for Justin to inherit three years from now.
The Liberal Party of Canada saw their Last Best Chance for Survival and they raped it to death. I really shouldn't be surprised that they did it, but I sort of am. They sure picked an odd time to stand on principle.
I hope that Bob retires from politics before he loses his seat. The vengeful incompetents in his own party won't be happy until he's disgraced and defeated once and for all and use that to prove that he could't win, despite whatever misfit they finally wind up with as their leader. As a good and honourable public servant and a deeply honest man, he deserves better than that.
The party's over. It might be a few years before the autopsy is conducted, but they're done. With the political mugging of Bob Rae, the Liberals have created a perfect storm where no Liberal can win. They can't trust the caucus or the party executive anymore because they seem to be in conlflict with one another in the leadership wars. The entire infrastructure of the party is, at best, dyslexic and incapable of being rebuilt. At worst, they're committed to killing their own in favour of cheap stunts.
For the record, I should point out - yet again - that I'm not a Conservative Party voter, nor do I work for them, nor would I. I doubt that I can say that about some anti-Martin, Dion or Ignatieff Liberals.
The last time I voted "Conservative" was for Joe Clark in 2000. Since 2000, I voted for the Progressive Canadian Party, the Greens and finally, the NDP in 2011 because I hoped to destroy the Liberals without voting for Stephen Harper.
I'd be thrilled to vote for a conservative party that doesn't insist on pissing away all of the fucking money on stupid shit. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party doesn't run in my riding.
I'm terrified that without some competition, Harper will complete his life-long mission of turning the Conservative Party into the Liberals, a "natural governing party" that doesn't have to bother with being all that conservative. Frankly, I'd prefer the NDP, who are at least honest about wanting to ruin everything in their sight without caring about conservatism.
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