Kim Campbell, Liberal darling

Former prime minister Kim Campbell waded back into federal politics last week, slamming Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as a “liar and a hate-monger,” without providing evidence to back up her assertion.

With their party badly trailing Poilievre’s Conservatives in the polls, Liberal MPS, staffers and partisans praised Campbell’s name-calling. This was not surprising as Campbell is part of a special group within Canadian politics.

Campbell is one of those old Progressive Conservative leaders who did very little, and whom the Liberals had little trouble defeating on election day. Along with Joe Clark and Robert Stanfield, these PC leaders are beloved by the Liberal establishment.

That is not to say that Conservatives don’t respect Clark or Stanfield, but Liberals love them to a far greater extent. They often wistfully long for the days of PC leaders who never presented serious alternatives to Liberal policies, or serious threats at the ballot box.

This is the type of PC leader who Liberals will claim they would have voted for had they been alive. In many cases, they were alive and voted for the Liberals anyway. Nonetheless, who can feel vitriol for those who are completely nonthreatening?

This is not the first time that Campbell has opined about the current state of the Conservative party. In the lead-up to the 2006 election, she said that Stephen Harper’s Tories had no chance of winning. While Campbell is an expert in that, she refrained from calling Harper names at the time.

Still, it was not the most vicious verbal attack that Campbell could have mounted against a politician with a francophone surname.

Campbell’s decision to highlight Jean Chrétien’s partial facial paralysis in the 1993 election is one of the most consequential strategies in North American political history. It rightfully deserves a place alongside the campaign strategies of Lee Atwater.

The backlash over the PC attack ad was so devastating, it helped cause the largest seat swing in Canadian history, with Campbell’s PCS going from 156 seats down to two.

Poilievre’s brash and often abrasive manner has been described as unbecoming of a prime minister. Campbell once rooted for a hurricane to destroy Donald Trump’s house in Florida.

Presumably, Campbell was not rooting for the same hurricane to also destroy Brian Mulroney’s house, which was down the road from Mar-alago.

Campbell is not alone in her disdain for younger and more successful Conservative politicians. Ted Heath, a former British Tory prime minister, famously disliked Margaret Thatcher. He did not shy away from criticizing the Iron Lady, even as she won three consecutive majorities.

Similar things have happened in other countries, and not just among conservative politicians.

In Australia, former Labor prime minister and notable sinophile Paul Keating has very vocally attacked the current Labor government. In Keating’s eyes, Labor’s great sin is adopting tougher stances toward an increasingly authoritarian China.

On the other side of the political spectrum, former Australian Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser had a public falling out with his party in 2009, lamenting its rightward shift in the 1990s and 2000s.

As difficult as it may be to accept, politics change, just like all other things. Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell chose different paths when it came to conservative politics.

Mulroney joined the modern Conservative Party, having actively helped organize the merger of the PCS and the Canadian Alliance in 2003. Campbell did not, and neither did former PC prime minister Joe Clark.

Campbell and Clark are two of the shortest-serving prime ministers in Canadian history. Both also emerged as critics of the modern Conservative Party of Canada, and eschewed the possibility of having any influence over it.

Maybe the Liberals truly believe that Campbell’s words have rattled the Conservative party, or helped sway voters away from it as it continues to surge in the polls. If so, they should make Campbell a centrepiece of their next campaign, so long as she has no involvement in crafting attack ads.

A key part of the Liberal strategy has been to portray Poilievre as a rude and classless politician, so Campbell’s campaign experience will be a nice fit.

In fact, the Liberals should gather as many of their favourite PCS as possible to join them for the next election. At least they’re experienced at taking a loss.