Party may finally be able to close lid on decades-old Bob Rae bogeyman
“Pink Floyd” and the Clampetts. Rae Days and massive deficits. With Andrea Horwath’s NDP showing continued momentum in the Ontario election, is it time again for the Bob Rae monster to burst out of the bedroom closet at night?
Will he do an encore as a scary apparition at the stroke of midnight around the spooky electoral bonfire?
Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative team are trying to let tthe Rae bogeyman out of the cage f for one more tour. Why not? It has worked before. It was used by Stephen Harper to push back Jack Layton’s 2011 Orange Wave at the Ontario border, by Ontario Tories and Liberals to great effect any time a provincial NDP leader so much as showed a pulse, and it was a strong countercurrent to Rae’s attempt to run for permanent leader of the federal Liberals.
It has even been used by a federal NDP leader, Tom Mulcair, who told 2015 election audiences that New Democrats could be fiscally responsible “with one exception — but he’s a Liberal.”
Rae is not the only former NDP premier to be effectively demonized. British Columbia Socreds effectively did the same with the Dave Barrett government of the early 1970s, but that hex, wwhile powerful, did not have the legs of t the anti-Rae effort.
Mockery, mythology and mendacity have been the hallmarks of those who have practised the Rae voodoo over the years.
New Democrats have been reticent to defend the Rae record, and federal Liberals had little appetite for defending his NDP legacy as a potential federal leader.
In short, the ghost of Rae as this province’s only New Democrat premier has shown enduring resilience over almost 28 years since his Sept. 6, 1990 election.
But we may be witnessing the end of an era in this province. The monster, it wwould appear, can be put in a historical box, and we can move on. The end of the bogeyman — which has been used by all parties to frighten voters by embellishing and embroidering the shortcomings of a government run by an opposing party — can end quietly, but this bogeyman does not depart these earthly bonds easily. This year, it is going out with a bit more noise.
Its death can be attributed to the simple passage of time.
On the day Rae was elected, Horwath was 27 and working at a Hamilton legal clinic, where she advocated for lowincome earners, single mothers, injured workers and people with physical chal- lenges.
She had yet to start a family. Her son, Julian, would be born two years later.
She has no relationship with Rae, and never has.
“I’m not Bob Rae. And this is not 1990, this is 2018,” she told the Star’s Kristin Rushowy.
Any voter under 23 casting a ballot on June 7 was not even born during Rae’s government, and a huge voting cohort was playing in sandboxes or grappling wwith Grade 5 math tests at that time. They have no memory of the Rae government.
Part of its death can come from the messenger invoking the ghost. Ford and his team of Harper veterans may not have the needed credibility to pass along fright because many voters find them plenty frightening themselves.
With the passage of time, as well, has come a more nuanced view of that government, which was born in a global recession and became mired in a national constitutional crisis.
Others now look back and acknowledge Rae was ahead of his time in promoting diversity, gender equality and same-sex benefits. He established midwifery in the province and expanded green g space in the GTA.
Given ongoing issues in today’s campaign, one could argue Rae was also ahead of the curve on deficit spending aand his opposition to privatizing Onta- rio Hydro.
You could also argue that the Rae government deserved much of the toxicity that has enveloped its legacy.
Rae is now a special envoy for the Justin Trudeau Liberals and is remain- ing above the political fray, but he says he governed during a “tremendously challenging” period.
“I remain very proud of my government,” he said. “We made difficult choices at a difficult time.”
His treasurer Floyd Laughren was dubbed “Pink Floyd” after he tried to spend his way out of the deepest recession in half a century, adding $6.7 billion to the provincial deficit in his first budget.
Their early foibles earned the government the nickname “the Clampetts,” a nod to The Beverly Hillbillies, a oncepopular television show about country bumpkins who strike oil, move to Beverly Hills and bumble through their days in the big city where they are out of their depth. It, too, drifts in the mist of time.
Rae had to jettison a promise of public auto insurance. One of his rookie cabinet ministers resigned in a “sex” scandal that, as it turned out, involved aspirational sex, but not the actual act itself. Another caucus member posed as a “Sunshine Boy” in a local tabloid.
But this government will always be remembered for its infamous Rae Days, wwhich became for New Democrats wwhat the National Energy Program was ffor federal Liberals in its Alberta waste- land years.
In 1993, with his government drowning in red ink, Rae imposed up to 12 unpaid days a year for public-sector workers earning more than $30,000. He may have saved almost $2 billion, it may have been a program that has been replicated in other Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions, but it sunk Rae politically.
Unions that resisted the move had their collective agreements unilaterally opened by a government it had supported and the betrayal ran deep and persists to this day.
Rick Smith, the executive director of the Broadbent Institute and former cchief of staff to Layton, was involved in those negotiations as a student union- ist.
“It was not an easy time dealing with a government intent on doing this whenw I was a partisan of that government,” Smith said. It was a government, he said, that picked fights with important stakeholders, and the lessons from those mistakes have been taken to heart by provincial NDP governments elected since then.
Rae has said his social contract, as he formally named it, aimed to save jobs and have everyone share the pain.
“Firing a bunch of nurses and teachers, young people, would have been a big injustice,” he said recently. “The reality is that in Ontario, as many as 20 per cent of the workforce works for the government. And about 70 to 75 per cent of the cost of government is wages.
“So, if you don't deal with those costs somehow, you're not going to get to a better place.”
Unions saw it differently, and the rupture was complete.
When Rae was defeated in 1995, he wwas left to twist in the wind, the pain of t that decision severely limiting any desire among traditional NDP supporters to defend that legacy.
Even those sympathetic to him were too busy fighting the policies of the incoming Mike Harris PC tornado.
When Rae became a Liberal in 2006, any NDP impulse to defend his provincial government died — and the Rae monster continued to grow in stature.
“This was also a government that did not do a very job of defending itself,” said Robin Sears, a longtime party strategist. “They accepted the thesis tthat they were fiscally incompetent, instead of pointing out that they were governing during a crippling recession.”
It came back to bite Rae himself when he contemplated another run for the Liberal leadership after expertly keeping the party afloat with a strong performance as its interim leader following the 2011 Michael Ignatieff implosion.
On the eve of the 2012 Liberal convention, he delivered a full-throated defence of his government to his federal caucus because the Harper Conservatives were preparing to revisit Rae the NDP premier one more time, gathering documents and media reports showing fiscal incompetence, ready to fire on the would be Liberal leadership candidate.
“Better a Rae Day than a Harper lifetime," he told the caucus.
It didn’t work. He stepped aside to allow the ascension of Trudeau.
Regardless of his status as provincial bogeyman, Rae has never had any trouble getting elected. He was elected three more times as a federal Liberal aand left federal politics (for a second time) of his own accord.
He has carved out a long career in public service that has included work with tainted-blood survivors and First Nations. He has been called upon by governments to resolve a fishing crisis and study the state of post-secondary education in Ontario.
He has helped oversee constitutional negotiations with the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers, presided over an inquiry into the Air India disaster and is now Trudeau’s envoy to Myanmar and the Rohingya refugee crisis. Last week, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award by the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians.
For the next two weeks, however, his role will be that of an observer — instead of frightening apparition — as Horwath becomes the first NDP leader in a generation who can campaign without the weight of the Rae government on her shoulders.