In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley,  (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Their Own Worst Enemies

When the Liberal Party of Canada was stomped almost to death in May of last year, the smarter of their partisans started making noises that indicated that they were at least self-aware enough to know what their continued survival would require. At the top of their list were two self-evident items: "stop the civil war" and "no more stunt leaders."

It is my considered opinion that the Grits made a fatal mistake when they essentially browbeat Bob Rae from seeking the permanent leadership. He is easily the most formidable figure in the party today. He has more and more varied political experience than all of the other federal leaders combined.  Not only has he run two political parties, he's been an opposition leader, he's headed a majority government and, most importantly, he negotiated an accord to unseat a minority Conservative government, which is something that could come in handy at some point in the near future.

Most Tory partisans around the country suggested that Rae would be the easiest Liberal to beat. This is because most Tory partisans never think things through and always think that their guy is going to win. This is utterly academic at this point, but I think that if Rae won the permanent leadership (and it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have,) Stephen Harper would have declined to run for another term. And Harper is the Conservative Party of Canada. There is no groomed or natural successor, just a machine hack, like Jason Kenney.

As I've said before, Rae's perceived greatest weakness - his term as the NDP premier of Ontario - is actually his greatest strength. Yes, Rae ran staggeringly high deficits at Queen's Park, but they barely compare to the deficits that Harper himself created after blowing his way through a $13 billion dollar surplus with political stunts.

Imagine Harper bringing Rae's deficits in a televised debate. All Rae would have to do is turn to Harper and say, "I was a socialist back then, and socialism tends to create deficits. What's your excuse?" I've gamed such an exchange out for years now, and I can't think of a way that Harper could reply to that without looking foolish.

Stephen Harper is not an idiot. If I can envision that exchange, chances are that he can, too. And it would be the most devastating moment in a debate since the "You had an option, sir" debacle in the 1984 debates.

After Rae was effectively forced out of contention, the LPC immediately did what they always do, and what is partially responsible for putting them where they are now, they started looking for a stunt leader-messiah figure. Luckily, they didn't have to look very far. After all, they have Justin Trudeau.

If I were a Conservative strategist (and it's important to remember that Harper was a strategist before he was a candidate,) I'd be licking my chops for the opportunity to run against Trudeau the Younger.

Trudeau has run nothing larger than a classroom, teaching teenagers the one thing they require absolutely no help with, drama. Even though he has served in Parliament longer than his late father did when he won the leadership, Pierre was also a high-level Cabinet minister when he won the prize. So far as I know, young Justin hasn't sponsored or introduced any legislation. His father introduced revolutionary changes to the Criminal Code of Canada before assuming the leadership.

More importantly, Pierre was cool where Justin is hot. The elder Trudeau was unflappable, especially on television, whereas the son is a hothead with a pretty formidable temper. When Justin gets angry, he says and does remarkably stupid things.

Aside from being pretty, his genealogy and his ability to beat the tits off of an Indian senator that smokes more than even I do, Justin is known for exactly two things; an interview where he suggested that Stephen Harper might force him to become a Quebec separatist, and screaming that Environment Minister Peter Kent is a "piece of shit" in the House of Commons.

We're only now learning the depth of the opposition research that the Tories have on Trudeau and their skill in deploying it.

The riding of Calgary Centre is the, well, center of the Conservative universe. There's a surprisingly close by-election there tomorrow. Last week, Trudeau supporter (and the brother of Ontario's disgraced soon-to-be ex-premier) David McGuinty said that Alberta Conservatives should "go back to Alberta," causing an immediate appearance problem in a riding that the Grits might actually win for the first time in nearly 40 years.

The very next day, remarks by Trudeau from a 2010 interview were put out by Sun Media, almost certainly leaked to them by the Tory war room.

“Canada isn’t doing well right now because it’s Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn’t work,” Trudeau said.

When Lagace asked whether Trudeau believed Canada was better off “when there are more Quebecers in charge than Albertans,” Trudeau replied in the affirmative.

“I’m a Liberal, so of course I think so, yes. Certainly when we look at the great prime ministers of the 20th century, those that really stood the test of time, they were MPs from Quebec ... This country — Canada — it belongs to us.”

Oh. That can't be good for the party's prospects in Alberta, and therefore the country, can it?

Look, I don't know why any right-thinking person would run for the Liberal leadership. The party is broke, demoralized and without their traditional place in Canadian politics. Anyone that has read Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada knows that rebuilding the party is going to be a near impossible task. The next Liberal leader is very probably going to be the last.

Please don't tell me about polls that show a Trudeau majority government restoration for the Grits. Polling about hypothetical elections with hypothetical leaders are nothing more than, well, hypothetical. And that's doubly true when you're talking about a candidate that the public knows little more about than that's hawt and has a cool last name.

As I mentioned earlier, whenever Justin opens his mouth, there's a really good chance that something crazy and stupid is going to pop out. The odds of it happening grow exponentially when he's pissed off.

Yet even with a party whose wheels have fallen off to the point that they've lost over a 100 seats in three elections, some of their more flamboyant commentators are trying to impose a litmus test. Specifically, contenders are being told that if you've lost a previous election or even your seat in Parliament, you needn't apply for the leadership. Unsurprisingly, that excludes every candidate but Trudeau and the still undeclared Marc Garneau.

That thinking goes beyond stupid and veers into the insane.

I should note that I'm not a Liberal supporter. I'm on the record as saying that the party's physical existence sickens me and that the world will finally be a better place when they're finally buried.

But, as you would assume by his nom de plume, Calgary Grit doesn't share my views. In fact, he's on the record as saying that this "only sitting members need apply" standard is wildly silly.

John Diefenbaker: This guy could put together losing campaigns more consistently than the Toronto Maple Leafs. Before being elected, he lost twice federally, twice provincially, and once for Mayor. Despite being a five-time loser, the Tories went with Dief in ’56, and he rewarded them with the largest majority in Canadian history.

Mackenzie King: Even though he lost his seat in both the 1911 and 1917 elections, the Liberals put their faith in King at Canada’s first leadership convention in 1919. King would go on to become the longest serving PM in Commonwealth history…losing his own seat twice more along the way.

Jack Layton: Jack beat out three candidates with seats at the 2003 NDP leadership convention, even though he’d never been elected to any position higher than Councillor. He’d lost in his bid for Mayor, finished fourth in the 1993 federal election, and lost by over 7,000 votes in the 1997 federal election. Despite this track record of defeat, the Dippers went with Jack and he rewarded them by becoming the NDP’s most successful leader ever.

Brian Mulroney: Brian hadn’t even won a City Council election when he became PC leader, and had lost in his previous leadership bid. In his first ever election, he won over 200 seats.

Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, John Turner: Although they had perfect records in their own ridings, all three lost a leadership race before becoming Liberal leader. Losers.

Stephen Harper: Harper did not hold a seat when he ran for Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002. At that time, he had a rather uninspiring “1 win and 1 loss” record when it came to local elections – and remember, that’s a .500 record from a Calgary conservative. 

If you love history the way I do, you might start to see a pattern developing here.

The fact is that Liberals, being Liberals, haven't asked themselves what happens if Trudeau doesn't win the leadership, which is entirely possible. We're still a long way from April 14, 2013. And who can say what landmine statements are in Trudeau's past and future, waiting to go off? If Justin manages to blow his own legs off, who takes over? If he assumes the leadership mortally wounded, what happens to the party before the 2015 election puts it out of Canada's misery forever?

All things being equal, it would probably be better if the next leader wasn't a sitting MP. The biggest tasks that the next leader is going to have are raising a boatload of money and recruiting candidates that aren't laughingstocks, which often happens to third parties. Just ask the NDP.

The single most devastating attack on Micheal Ignatieff didn't come from Stephen Harper. It was launched by then-NDP leader Jack Layton, who tagged Iggy for almost never being in the House. Do they really want to face that in the next leader's debate?

Moreover, who exactly going to pay attention to the third party leader in Parliament? It's not like the NDP's Audrey McLaughlin and Alexa McDonough set the world on fire with their parliamentary performances. Progressive Conservative Joe Clark was a former prime minister who managed to remain "Joe Who?" and Peter MacKay abolished the party entirely without anyone noticing. Ed Broadbent and the aforementioned Mr. Layton were only paid attention when they were significant risks to displace the Liberals.

The LPC is so damaged that the new leader can't be in the House of Commons if he or she wants a halfway credible election machine. But a leader who is also an MP will be savaged for not being there.

Any reasonable analysis suggests that it's better for them to not have a leader sitting in the House, who everyone will ignore, anyway. If nothing else, a sitting Liberal leader will get all kinds of local news coverage when he or she visits, which is the kind that an upstart should want! When exactly was the last time the Parliamentary Press Gallery elected a prime minister, anyway? Oh, right ...

There's an (albeit outside) chance that Teenage Jesus won't win his stunt leadership bid. And if he wins, I don't see a scenario where a murderous cyborg like Stephen Harper doesn't annihilate him in an election. And who builds the party if Trudeau wins and is chained to Parliament Hill?

The LPC's guru-making consultant class is not just wrong, but stunningly so. And that shouldn't surprise anyone. They've been the driving forces behind the Grit's Forty Years Civil War and the party's steadily diminishing electoral returns over the last decade.

Keep listening to them, and you won't exist at all in 2016.

The party's over

I had the distinct pleasure of voting against Bob Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP. He was a socialist (albeit a very soft one) and I was not. I instead voted for Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives in 1990 and '95 (and again in '99, those votes also turned out to be problematic for various reasons.) My loathing of the Liberal parties of both Ontario and Canada is world-renowned.

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.  

.

Ballad of the Teenage Jesus: Justin Trudeau and the Great Leap of Faith

Over the last week there's been much ado about whether or not Justin Trudeau, the scion of our Home and Native Land's deceased Sun King, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, will run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. It could be considered a frenzy, if only because Canadians are an especially boring people.

And why wouldn't Canada be excited by the ascension to power by the offspring of a former leader? The United States did so well under the most recent incarnation of the House of Bush, did it not? If Justin wins he can always start a club with George W. and Bashar Assad, two other dynastic products that weren't as smart as their fathers.

Much has been made of young Justin over the last several months. He's pretty! He has a cool name! He has a hipster beard sometimes! He beat the shit out of a guy who smokes two packs a day! He has fabulous hair! He flirts with treason sometimes! He equates government ministers with feces on the floor of the House of Commons! He is, as a partisan a Grit as BigCityLib calls him, "Teenage Jesus"!

All of those things more than qualify Justin Trudeau to be a Hollywood star, but I'm not aware of them ever having qualified someone to run a major political party - or a modern industrialized nation - before. But here we are. When a murderous, unprincipled cyborg like Stephen Harper can be elected three times, I suppose that anything's possible.

I'm of the opinion that this shithead media-blogosphere tizzy is just that, a shithead media-blogosphere tizzy. If you pay enough attention to predictions that are made during the summertime news cycle, you very quickly notice that they rarely come true. For example, everyone in North America didn't wind up either getting fucked to death by Gary Condit or eaten by sharks, as was predicted in the summer of 2001. Instead, we wound up with Arabs riding jet liners into buildings, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

Justin has repeatedly said that he isn't going to be a candidate for the leadership, as he is unwilling to abandon his children for a cynical quest for power. And as inadvisable as taking the word of someone named Trudeau can be, I'm inclined to believe him. Not because of his kids, for chrissakes (every doomed politician uses his or her family as an excuse), but for several other good reasons, which I laid out for your friend and mine, the great Tiger on Politics, over the weekend. I thought that I'd also put them down here and expand upon them.

1) He’s got anger management issues to work on. Having him muse about becoming a traitor to his county every time he gets miffed at long-disproven "hidden agendas" or calling Cabinet ministers “a piece of shit” in the House is fine for a backbencher. However, it’s a lot more problematic for a party leader.

Christ, I don’t think that even Justin has ruled out the possibility that he could have an epic meltdown during the leadership debates, which would be fatal. If I were Rae, I’d be thinking of ways to goad the boy into a public tantrum even before he declares his intentions.

Trudeau's partisan-inspired comments regarding his possible sympathy for Quebec independence were a titanic fuck-up. And you only get one of those in politics, if you're lucky. Another outburst anywhere approaching that will kill him.

2) If he knows anything at all about his own party, he knows that he can’t play National Saviour while ensconced in never ending leadership wars unless he wins by a margin so unimaginably large as to silence his potential Bruti forever. And if he can’t play National Saviour, why bother?

Even If Trudeau were to win, the supporters of his rivals would do everything in their power to sabotage his leadership and election prospects. Such as it has always been. As Turner did to Pierre Trudeau, as Chretien did to Turner, as Martin did to Chretien, as Ignetieff did to Dion, and as Rae did to Igntieff, Rae and everybody else will do to Justin.

The Liberal leadership has been a poisoned chalice for much longer than most folks understand. The Grits have only won elections since 1975 because the opposition parties were either incompetent or divided. As we've seen over the last decade, that isn't the case anymore and the divisions within the LPC have rapidly destroyed them.

3) He’s fourteen years old and might like the idea of  having a future in politics. The ordinary rules don’t apply to people named Trudeau.If Justin runs and loses, his mystique – the only thing he’s really got going for him at present  – is ruined. A Trudeau loss would be devastating in ways that Bob Rae’s dual defeats weren’t. Rae is seen as being a credible manager. Justin Trudeau is looked upon, by Liberals dumb enough to do so, as a messiah.

Bob Rae, if nothing else, is a well-known and established commodity in politics. He's been on Parliament Hill or Queens Park since the 1970s. He's run more campaigns than all of the other party leaders - and Grit leadership aspirants - combined. If Bob runs for and loses the Liberal leadership for the third time, he'll retire peacefully, knowing that he's had a long and distinguished career.

Before running in Montreal - one of the very few places left in Canada where Liberals are still allowed to roam free - Justin's life experience consisted entirely of being a school teacher. He's run nothing larger than a classroom in his entire life. Not only has he not even been Minister of Hipster Beards, we don't even know if he was Class Clown in school.

This gives him the same resume problem that Micheal Ignatieff had, but Ignatieff could at least position himself as a "public intellectual" who had written some seventeen books that nobody has read. Iggy was the first Liberal leader to win the leadership without considerable political experience behind him in my lifetime. I just don't see the Grits going back to that well anytime soon, at least not if they intend to be taken seriously.

Oh, and for the enemies of Bob Rae out there, none of you bitched when Ignatieff ran for the permanent leadership from the interim leader's office.

If Trudeau runs and loses, he's done. Celebrity mystique is a fantastic thing if you win on your first try. If you don't, it dissipates so quickly that you may as well have never had it in the first place.

4) Beating Bob Rae is going to be very, very hard. Rae has the money, organization, momentum and political experience that give him a profound advantage in a hypothetical head-to-head with Trudeau. Bob also knows things abut public policy, caucus relations and campaigns that Justin can't be expected to.  These are all things that the Grits are going to need if they plan on having a life-expectancy of more than three years.

Giving the leadership to a pre-teen novelty would be every bit as desperate as it looks, by a party that needs to be seen as anything other than desperate. And the Liberals are nothing if not pragmatic. It might not have worked out the way they wanted, but there actually was a rationale for getting behind Dion and Ignatieff that there isn’t for Trudeau, other than his surname. Naming Trudeau as leader will be telegraphing to the other parties that the Liberals are officially out of tricks and are going for a Sarah Palin-style Hail Mary that's doomed to failure.

5) Given that I don't think he's not an utter mouth-breather, I’m pretty sure that Justin has considered the very real possibility that the Liberal Party only has one more election in it. What do you suppose that his formally presiding over the death of the Most Successful Party in the History of Democracy will do to the family legacy?

If dear old dad’s eternal term of office teaches us anything, it’s that the Trudeaus care a whole lot more about the family name than they do the Liberal Party. Pierre so hobbled his rival and successor, John Turner, that he essentially handed over the government to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in 1984. The elder Trudeau destroyed the party brand west of Manitoba and crippled it in Quebec. Were it not for the fracturing of the Mulroney coalition, Pierre likely would've been the last elected Liberal prime minister.

If Justin runs a general election in 2015 and the Liberals lose even more seats (which seems an entirely reasonable prospect at this point), the party is finished forever. And so too will be his political future, even though he'll only be not quite 44 years old.

6) Even a wildly unpopular Harper would disembowel Justin in public. But Stephen Harper isn’t going to be around forever, and all of his potential successors are laughable ward-heeling hacks or genetic fuckheads. The Tories have the shallowest bench imaginable. Always remember, a misfit like Vic Towes is in Cabinet because everyone else in caucus is actually worse.

It's hard to see a scenario where Trudeau beats Harper (assuming that Harper stays in the leadership for another election.) But – with a united Progressive Party behind him – seeing him lose to a bloated hack like Jason Kenney in 2019 strains the power of my imagination. And I’m a pretty imaginative cat.

Let's get one silly notion out of the way right now. There isn't going to be a great Progressive merger. The NDP are smart enough to understand that the Liberals are dead and that they only have to wait for them to fall down before eating the carcass. Even the Grits that favour a merger are still so impossibly arrogant as to think that they can dictate the terms of one, which they can't, having only slightly more than a third of the NDP's seats in Parliament and polling that consistently shows them a distant third in public preference.

Because the LPC's public support is so pathetic, they aren't going to have money or credible candidates in the next election. Donors are fickle and the desire to serve the public isn't necessarily the same as a masochistic need for public humiliation. That means that the few remaining Liberal bastions in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are going to divvied up between the Tories and Dippers (with the Dippers probably getting the majority of them.)

Justin Trudeau is sufficiently left wing, and his celebrity strong enough, that he could win the leadership of a newly dominant NDP (or United Progressive Party, or whatever the fuck else they'd call it) after the final fall of the Liberals. Like Harper, Tom Muclair isn't going to be around forever, and he's already started bringing the NDP close enough to the middle that Trudeau could take it over when he's gone.

If Boy Justin focuses all of his energy on being the best constituent-service MP for the people of Papineau possible, raising shit-tons of money and quietly making nice with Dipper power players, he could probably survive the apocalypse. As the last national Liberal standing, he could bring together and lead a new Progressive movement. But he won't be able to do that as a failed Liberal leadership candidate or as the last fully discredited Liberal leader.

Justin Trudeau is a young man and the LPC is about as close to a political funeral as you can get. Being a pallbearer is no fun, but it sure as shit beats being the guy in the box. That being the case, he has a much better shot at running an NDP that swallows the remains of the Grits whole after the flood than he does being the Last Liberal Leader, so why not wait? Right now he has everything to lose and nothing to realistically gain.

Stephen's Harper's risky ploy

Up until fairly recently, I thought that, if nothing else, Stephen Harper was at least a competent politician. Sure, he's a jabbering dupe of a prime minister, and his party has come to embody all of the worst excesses of his Liberal blood enemies, but at least he was a better than average campaign strategist.

That's changed over the last year. He won his long-awaited majority after running what was easily the worst of his four national campaigns. He won because the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff self-destructed. Towards the end of the campaign, he wound up running against the idea of an NDP majority, which no one would have thought possible even a month earlier. As the Dippers rose, they split the Grit vote in enough ridings to allow the Conservatives to come up the middle. Winning because the other side falls apart is hardly an accomplishment to be very proud of.

As it happens, the Tories may have still had to cheat to win, even as Canada's Natural Governing Party was busy committing collective suicide. In recent weeks, there have been credible reports of robocalls being made in dozens of ridings. Those calls, which were fraudulently identified as coming from Elections Canada, told Liberal-leaning voters that there polling place had changed. And that, as you might imagine, is a fucking crime.

Those calls almost certainly originated with the Conservative Party, and Stephen Harper almost certainly knew about them. To suggest otherwise is to entirely ignore the last six years.

Harper has famously micromanaged both his party and the government to such an extent that Tories everywhere are afraid to say or do anything at all without first clearing it with the Prime Minister's Office. Entire books have been written about his top-down management style, for Christ's sake.

If the robocall scandal is even half as widespread as is currently alleged - and I'd be awfully surprised if it doesn't get a lot bigger - there is no credible way that Harper didn't know about it. Nothing happens that the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO doesn't know about, and if the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO knew about the robocalls, you can bet your ass that Harper knew about it. The suggestion that the spending required to launch calls as widespread as what we're hearing would escape Harper's notice, or that of his top campaign people, is ludicrous. And if his top campaign people knew, he knew.

If I were the Prime Minister, I'd be looking for a very good criminal lawyer right about now. I just can't see a scenario where the Tories can avoid a public inquiry on this one. If they refuse to initiate one, they look guilty. But if they do, the chances are pretty good that they'll be found guilty. And once the small-fries start looking at the prospect of going to jail, they'll start trading up with prosecutors. Once that starts, it isn't likely to stop. One of the drawbacks of Stephen Harper's management style - as opposed to, say, Brian Mulroney's - is that it doesn't inspire much loyalty.

The In and Out scandal dragged on for years, but no one really cared about that because to even understand it was to get so far into the weeds of Canadian campaign finance law that no one could be bothered. By the time the Tories admitted their guilt, no one noticed.

This is different. If true, this is voter fraud carried out across the second largest country on Earth. As things currently stand, it stretched across multiple time zones and could have affected tens of thousands of voters. That's really easy to understand. This is far more like the Sponsorship Scandal - or even Watergate - than it is In and Out.

I will credit Harper for one thing. He's smart enough not to play defense. He knows that once you go on the defensive, as Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff learned to their sorrow, you're dead.

So he's going on the offense, as he usually does. What's newsworthy is his target: Interim-Liberal leader, Bob Rae.

 

Rae is a strikingly odd choice of a target. After all, he's the temporary leader of the third party in Parliament. The Grits are so wholly discredited that it's hard to see them winning a national election ever again. Rae is also the only halfway credible or smart figure in the party, but he agreed when he accepted the interim leadership that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership. Should he renege on that, he'll re-ignite the decades old civil war in the party that destroyed them in the first fucking place.

The hyper-smart, "small c" conservative, Gerry Nicholls, has a theory about why Harper's doing this, but I disagree with him.

While the Prime Minister is the living embodiment of everything that's truly wrong with the Human Spirit, he's not actually retarded. And while he's more than willing to piss away a grand fortune in public money in hucksterish, electioneering nonsense, he doesn't have a history of doing so with party money.

Historically, Harper has only gone jihadi on those that he perceives as a threat. You'll notice, for example, that he hasn't dumped a ton of money shit-talking the NDP, even though they happen to be Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And you know what? Harper isn't wrong. If Bob Rae can overcome the mortal handicap of leading the fratricidal and cannibalistic Liberal Party of Canada, he is the clearest threat that Stephen Harper has ever faced. Assuming that the NDP doesn't swallow the Liberals whole before the next election - which almost certainly won't happen - Rae is the only saviour the Grits have.

Firstly, Rae's alone among prominent federal politicians in being not only smarter than Harper is, he is also the only guy who has more experience, both in politics and governing. No other Dipper or Grit has Bob Rae's resume, or anything close to it.

Secondly, he's managed to get through life pretty much free of scandal. Say what you will as his time as Premier of Ontario (and I've said the most horrible things imaginable, and voted against him on two seperate occasions. I'll always regret that I was only born in 1970 and haven't lived in the ridings of Toronto Centre, York South or Broadview, so I could I have voted against him more often.), but his government was shockingly clean.

I'm not going to pretend that he's not a credible threat to Harper, and perhaps the only one out there. If anyone can take out Harper, it's Bob Rae. The Tories aren't just right to try to take out Rae, they're smart to do it when he doesn't the money or the media spotlight to respond.

Having said that, the line of attack is confounding, unless you really appreciate lying.

If I had Harper's record, spending and deficits would be the absolute last thing I'd hit Rae on. This is because Harper himself has surpassed even Pierre Trudeau as being the spendingest prime minister in the peacetime history of Canada. His per-capita deficits certainly reflect that.

Stephen Harper is maybe the last person on earth that isn't George W. Bush that should be hitting Bob Rae on being a shopoholic communist. After all, what in the fuck do you suppose that Harper himself has been doing for the last three years, if not trying to spend his way out of a recession? If Harper can magically get himself around that argument, Rae can then ask him what he was doing in pissing away a $13 billion surplus by turning the tax code into a middle-class giveaway before the world started ending.

Like him or not, Rae displayed an almost heroic level of political courage in attacking his deficits by confronting his own strongest constituency, the civil service unions. And that cost him his job, which he must have known it would. And few things are as dazzling hypocritical than nu-conservatives shithammering Bob for Rae Days while celebrating weapons-grade fuckheads like Scott Walker and John Kasich for essentially doing the same thing.

If I was Bob Rae, I'd be using this Harper ad in my leadership campaign because it highlights his strengths. Rae can run those 30 seconds and respond with "Yes, for the first half of my term, I was a socialist. What's Stephen Harper's excuse? When I saw the error of my ways, I tried to rectify the situation on the backs of those who had supported me. Will Stephen Harper do that?"

This ad is a big bad mistake because it allows Bob Rae to hit Harper from his own right. Rae spent a shitload of money because he was ideologically inclined to do so. And when he saw that he was wrong, he blew himself up trying to right the situation. Harper, on the other hand, spent a shitload of money to try to buy elections, and then cling to power. And absolutely no one thinks that he's going to try to balance his budgets on the backs of the people who brought him to power.

It should be fairly easy to merge the second half of Rae's Ontario term with the Chretien-Martin austerity budgets that eventually balanced the books. And then compare them to Harper's record of being proudly allergic to money, sucking off everyone who might potentially vote for him like a three dollar crack whore, and voter fraud.

If the Liberals can stop being Liberals for fifteen fucking seconds, Stephen Harper just handed them a platform that they almost can't help but winning with.

But I know the Liberals far better than I'd like to. And I know that they'll see this ad, get scared stupid and suffocate Rae in his sleep tonight. That's why they're useless and better off fucking dead.

Rae's Day: How He Can Win and Why He Won't

A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.

Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.

This is because Liberals love nothing more than going to war with one another. At this point, they love it more than winning elections. The party has been fighting their retarded leadership wars since 1975 and is divided into two factions: the Trudeau-Chretien-Rae wing and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff wing. And each faction has acted as suicide bombers against the other for almost the entire time.

Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.

The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.

Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.

Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.

Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.

(For the record, I voted against Rae twice in Ontario, casting ballots for Progressive Conservative Mike Harris in 1990 and '95. After the 1999 campaign, I've voted exclusively for minor parties and independents provincially.)

Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.

He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.

But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempted in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit. That's problematic because Canadian Conservatives tend to look at U.S Republicans for spiritual guidance, and Rae Days undercuts that.

Bob Rae's deficit reduction plan, while not wholly effective, might be the most courageous political effort in my lifetime. He had to know that assaulting his own political base would lead to his ruination, but he did it anyway. As a matter of practicality over politics, it ranks with the first President Bush's budget reconcilation deal of 1990. And for that, Rae has at least my respect for trying to do the right thing against political self-interest. Bob Rae made tough decisions that doomed him, which none of those who oppose him would ever dream of doing, mostly because they're cowards and hacks.

I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.

Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.

Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.

Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Queen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked magnificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.

But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.

One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.

Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.

Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.

If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.

But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.

They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Liberals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.

Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.

Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amateur that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it.