Raitt could beat Trudeau, but won’t get chance
When Stephen Harper stepped down, Lisa Raitt was mentioned in the top tier of potential successors by many Conservative watchers.
She had been a cabinet minister for eight years, where she dealt adroitly as Labour minister with major disputes at Air Canada, Canada Post and Canadian Pacific Railway, and with the Lac Megantic tragedy while at Transport.
The mother of two boys, she was born into a blue-collar family in Cape Breton. She’s the youngest of seven kids who found out in her teens that the people she thought were her parents were actually her grandparents, while the woman she’d known as her older sister was her mother.
Against long odds, she worked her way through university and law school. Before entering politics, she was the chief executive of the Toronto Port Authority.
Raitt is refreshingly candid for a politician and genuinely funny — she once told me she welcomed the prospect of promotion, because “being in Labour for 27 months is enough for any woman.”
She would be a great foil to Justin Trudeau in any election that centred on Liberal arrogance and entitlement.
Unfortunately for Raitt, she’s not up against Trudeau, and the hardline Conservatives who will vote in this contest appear to want their leader to be a deeper shade of blue.
Raitt concedes nothing, but the path to victory is not immediately visible. In the polls, she trails not only Maxime Bernier, but also Andrew Scheer, Kellie Leitch, Erin O’Toole and Michael Chong. In the first three months of this year, she pulled in only one quarter of the donations that Bernier raised. She was even outgunned by social conservative Pierre Lemieux.
Raitt is frank that victory looks like a long shot.
“At these events, the typical Conservative base goes to talk to who you might assume would be the typical Conservative leader. I get the other ones — the women who have just joined the party; the over-60s; the young moms; the professional women who see me as their voice.
“Are there enough of them in the party? Well, we need them to win a majority, so I certainly hope I’ve done my part to grow the party. We’ll see if there’s a path there,” she said in an interview at her favourite Ottawa hair stylist, C’est Fou, where she is trying to persuade her 16-year-old son, John Colin, to cut his curly locks.
Does she regret her campaign strategy?
“I was always going to run the race that made sense for me and the one thing that I bring to the table that’s different — competence, of course — but I have this backstory that’s different from anyone else. My story is unique — there’s no other Cape Bretoner, there’s no other mother, no other executive from Toronto. I thought it would be helpful for the base to understand who I am, as opposed to knowing me as Harper’s cabinet minister for the past eight years,” she said.
When Kevin O’Leary was still in the race, and Leitch was garnering attention for her “values” campaign, Raitt complained about her party being hijacked by the “noisiest people in the room.”
It was one of the few occasions she generated any real media coverage.
“We’ve put out some strong policy, some of it controversial. I talked about decentralizing the Ottawa system but no one has picked up on it. I would absolutely decentralize the system. I’d make sure that these really great jobs in Ottawa were scattered across the country, where they could be anchor industries in small towns.
“I ran three departments — there’s no magic to it being in Ottawa,” she said.
Raitt’s candidacy was dismissed out of hand by many who were otherwise welldisposed toward her when it became apparent her French language skills were lacking. She has since taken immersion courses and says she has gone from base to intermediate level.
Raitt says she has never contemplated folding her campaign and endorsing a rival, even though she is wooed on a daily basis.
“I hope I win — I think I can hit the ground running ... We’ve only got two years to try to beat Trudeau. That’s nothing.”
I asked if she thought Bernier could win a general election.
“I was interested in what (pollster Nik) Nanos said — 19 per cent of Canadians think he could beat Trudeau. He’s going to have to shore up English Canada and women because those Mad Max memes are not playing to my people,” she said. (To be fair, 37 per cent of Canadians in the Nanos poll said they were unsure; 20 per cent said “none of the above” and just 3.8 per cent named Raitt).
Whichever candidate wins, they would be well-advised to keep her around.
“I can absolutely be the leader; I can absolutely be someone important to rebuilding the party in Ontario and in the GTA. I’d welcome that role,” she said.
But she refuses to commit to running again in 2019, given her husband Bruce was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last year.
“I take the decision seriously and I will figure out what’s going on. But I don’t think it’s fair for me to give a definitive answer when you know life can be so weird.”
Lisa Raitt should be thinking about what colour curtains to hang in Stornoway, residence of the leader of the official opposition. Instead, she’s thinking about life after politics. The Conservative Party may yet rue the decision it seems it’s about to make.