Why are the Liberals panicking?
A SINGLE ATTACK Ad does not a rout make. And besides, in Bob Rae’s record there’s ammunition to counter-attack
One of the recurring characters in Canadian politics is the devilish adversary who Wins Either Way, a spectre that can be relied upon to induce a state of near-panic and hopelessness amongst his intended victims. At the height of his powers, for example, Lucien Bouchard was often said to possess this confounding genius. If the rest of Canada refused to yield to his demands for powers and money, he would use it to prove Confederation was a straitjacket from which Quebec had to escape. On the other hand, agree to his demands and it would only show how pliable the rest of Canada would be in post-separation talks. He wins either way.
Something of the same panicky sentiment seems to have taken root among some Liberals with regard to the Conservative war room. The mere unveiling of an attack ad on their interim-possibly-permanent leader, Bob Rae, has Liberals running about with their hands in the air. What do we do? What can we do? If we fail to respond, the Conservatives will swamp the airwaves with these ads, stamping Rae as a failed premier and incorrigible spendthrift before we’ve even elected him leader. But if we raise a lot of money to spend on ads defending him, we use up scarce party resources buffing Rae’s profile, to the detriment of other potential leadership candidates. Damn Stephen Harper! He wins either way.
Of course, the very hopelessness of the Liberals’ situation ought to be liberating. If your adversary wins no matter what you do, you might as well ignore him and just do what you like. More to the point, far too much significance is attached to these sorts of ads generally. The idea that it was Conservative advertising that destroyed the otherwise brilliant political careers of Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, and not, say, their own failings as leaders or the platforms on which they campaigned, is a pleasing fiction. It pleases Conservative strategists to believe it, because it confirms them in their self-image as master manipulators of public opinion. It pleases their targets to believe it, because it absolves them of their own responsibility for their defeat. And it pleases the press, because it validates our cynicism about politics, and the indispensable services we provide the public as their interpreters.
Actually, as these things go, the Rae ad is fairly mild. It focuses less on defaming his personal character and more on his record in government, albeit one that is now 20 years in the past. Minus the sneering tone and out-of-context chuckle, it’s also broadly true, or at least not untrue. Rae’s Ontario government did run up big deficits, while unemployment soared. But this is not exactly news. What is more, exactly the same could be said of the Harper government. In fact, for all his notoriety, Rae’s record compares rather well with Harper’s.
In his first two fiscal years as premier, Rae increased spending from $42 billion to $49 billion, an increase of roughly 16 per cent. Thereafter, spending declined slightly: after four years in office, Rae left spending 15 per cent higher than he had found it – after inflation and population growth are factored in, just two per cent. By comparison, in his first four years Harper increased spending almost 40 per cent, from $175 billion to $245 billion. And while spending has since levelled off, it remains about 14 per cent higher, after inflation and population growth, than it was in the Liberals’ last year.
It’s true that Rae ran larger deficits than Harper has: 4.4 per cent of gross domestic product at Rae’s peak, versus the 3.6 per cent the Harper Conservatives reached in fiscal 2010. But it’s also true that Rae had to deal with a much worse recession than Harper did. From the fourth quarter of 1990 to the first quarter of 1991, Ontario’s economy contracted by nearly eight per cent. That is twice as deep and twice as long as the 2008-09 recession. Neither man can be blamed for the worldwide economic downturn each encountered, and though each tried to spend his way out of it, neither can claim much credit for the recovery that followed. But if the Conservatives want to fault Rae for trying, they are surely at least as vulnerable on the same count.
So my advice to the Liberals is not to get too exercised about this. We are at least three years away from the next election, and a year from electing a Liberal leader. An enormous amount can and will happen before then, from the election of the New Democratic Party leader this weekend to next week’s axe-swinging federal budget to the possible return of the Parti Québécois to power. That suggests a measure of calm, not to say sang-froid. A party that can be so unnerved by a single attack ad is unlikely to persuade the public it has much of either.
And for goodness sake don’t go rushing about in panicky pursuit of a merger with the New Democrats. They’re not interested, most of them, for starters. And the NDP has problems of its own. It’s fading in the polls, and it may well be about to pick a leader, in hopes of retaining the party’s windfall of seats in Quebec, who will profoundly alienate the rest of the country. In the circumstances, Liberals should be thankful for the opportunity to pick second.