The War Room WARREN KINSELLA
The Bereft Left I
t was the mass-firing that would have echoes for a long, long time: in November 2009, with the Liberal Party continuing to slump in the polls, Chief of Staff Ian Davey and dozens of others in O.L.O. were summarily (and shabbily) dismissed by Michael Ignatieff. I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t like the newly-minted Chief of Staff,
however, and he didn’t like me. By May 2010, I had had enough, so I emailed Ignatieff and told him I was quitting. “My reasons are myriad,” I wrote. “Chief among them is the regrettable state of the party, and the appalling way in which my friends have been treated.” Ignatieff sent a nice note back, saying that that he would miss me, but that he un- derstood. “The regrettable state of the party” was a bit of
politesse, and didn’t simply refer to the fact that Ignatieff and his new apparatchiks had taken the party lower than Stéphane Dion ever did. It also referred to the undeniable rightward list of OLO (on Afghanistan, on the oil sands, on health care). It referred to the party’s vast, yawning policy vacu- um. It referred to the collapse of whatever election readiness we had built up. It referred to the fact that the Liberal leader hadn’t been cured of any of his bad habits – namely, always talking tough about the Reformatories (i.e., they’re corrupt, they’re incompetent, they’re bullies, blah blah blah), but never actually doing anything about it (i.e., voting against them in a confidence measure in the House of Commons).
Unencumbered by duties in Ottawa, and wor-
ried about what the country would look like after four years of Conservative majority rule, some of us started talking about finding a fix. The source of our inspiration was unlikely, to say the least: Ste- phen Harper. Even with his principal opponent down on the
It astounds me, frankly, that sane New Democrats and Liberals continue to believe that the result they obtain in 2015 will be somehow different from the results they obtained 2006, 2008 and 2011. It won’t be. It’s the dictionary definition of insanity, in fact: keep doing the same thing, over and over, and expect a different result.
10 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
proverbial mat – even with his foot on Ignatieff’s throat – Harper kept doing something that was very peculiar: he kept going on, and on, about the spectre of a Liberal-socialist-separatist coalition – in his attack ads, in the House of Commons, in every focus-grouped Conservative talking point. It was peculiar because, one, the Conservative Party was itself the successful result of a coalition – and, two, because Harper himself had been the chief architect of the venture. If history were to remember Stephen Harper for anything, in fact, it would be for bringing together the warring factions on the Right. The reason why Harper kept fulminating against a coalition on the Left, we figured, was therefore simple: he feared it. He knew that successive polls indicated that Canadians were mostly supportive of the concept, just as long as it didn’t involve the Bloc. Harper also knew a coalition on the Left could defeat him, as a coalition on the Right had defeated Paul Martin. Simple.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62