Stéphane Dion vs. the real world

DION WAS TURNED INTO GREEN WINDOW DRESSING.

Former Foreign Affairs minister Stéphane Dion continues to leave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an awkward spot. After being shuffled out of the Foreign Affairs portfolio earlier this week, Dion was offered an overseas diplomatic posting, rumoured to be a dual ambassadorship to the European Union and Germany. Reports say he has yet to reply to the offer.

It’s a strange footnote to the apparent end of Dion’s political career, one long defined by both highs and lows — though the lows seem strangely taboo, as if they are somehow not to be discussed.

But a full understanding of Dion’s place in Canadian history is only possible with a full examination of his time in public life. First, a few warranted words of praise: Dion’s work on the Clarity Act, which set legal conditions for any potential withdrawal of Quebec from the Canadian federation, is an important, genuine accomplishment, and something for which all Canadians should thank him. If that were the only episode of note in his career, it would still be worth lauding.

But that wasn’t the only episode in Dion’s remarkable — and we mean that in the most neutral sense — tenure in public service. Dion’s intelligence and conviction are unquestioned. But he never quite seemed able to translate them into success with Canadians. This often seemed to befuddle him and his supporters, but it shouldn’t have.

Dion lacked many essential traits required for truly successful public service. The longer he’s spent in the public eye, the more apparent this has become. Consider his time as environment minister, under prime minister Paul Martin. Dion’s support for the Kyoto climate change agreement is well known. But his appointment to environment minister in 2004 did nothing to alter the Liberal government’s total disregard for its Kyoto commitments. Dion was sent out to talk a good game his government had no intention of living up to.

From his success on the national unity file, Dion was turned into green window dressing, and none of his colleagues seemed to much mind. Consider as well Dion’s brief tenure as Liberal leader — chosen as a compromise candidate to the shock of even partisan Liberals. Perhaps seeking to make up for lost time, he chose to make a carbon tax — the Green Shift — the centre of his campaign. This resulted in the biggest defeat the Liberals had yet suffered, and the party didn’t dare run on it during its 2015 campaign.

That’s not even counting the disastrous end of his tenure as leader, with the aborted effort to form a Liberal-NDP coalition, backed by the Bloc, that would have seen Dion installed as prime minister — even though he’d already resigned as Liberal leader after his colleagues made clear their lack of support for him. Canadians were appalled, the coalition collapsed, and only Dion seemed surprised.

Dion’s time at Foreign Affairs was hardly more distinguished. The Prime Minister personally led Canada’s delegation to the Paris climate change talks, and Chrystia Freeland, Dion’s replacement as Foreign Affairs minister, did the heavy lifting on our free trade agreement with Europe. Dion was left with little else to do but rubber-stamp the shipment of Canadian arms to Saudi Arabia and send out plaintive tweets calling on the international community to do something about the annihilation of civilians in Syria and northern Iraq, as if he’d forgotten he was the foreign affairs minister of a country that had ended its combat efforts in that theatre, for reasons his government never managed to fully explain.

There is a lesson here for Canadians, and especially the Liberal party. Stéphane Dion — professor, hard worker, bilingual public servant, environmentalist — made an excellent party leader and senior cabinet minister, in theory. On paper, one can see the appeal. But that appeal never quite translated into sustained success or notable accomplishment beyond the job titles. Some Liberal insiders have said he lacked the necessary communication skills. Others have said he simply wasn’t good enough with people, an essential ingredient in politics and diplomacy. Perhaps. Or maybe the explanation is simpler. Dion might have excelled in all his posts in a world that was as the Liberals wished it was, but he struggled with the nitty-gritty reality of domestic politics and foreign affairs as they actually are. Not every problem can be handled with a piece of cleverly crafted legislation. It’s a lesson both the Liberals and Mr. Dion should keep in mind, in Berlin or wherever else he lands next.