Michael Ignatieff Trying to Exorcise Dion Demons

Toronto Star columnist James Travers makes a good argument when he says that the situation is “win-win” with regards to the Liberal election gambit in Ottawa. Although it’s an election that nobody wants, or to borrow from Michael Ignatieff himself, we need another election like “a hole in the head”, if the Liberals manage to provoke a showdown it could be fortuitous in both victory or defeat. As Mr.Travers puts it: “At the moment of impact, or in that bat of an eye, Ignatieff at best becomes prime minister and at worst exorcises the Stéphane Dion demon.”

An election is a calculated risk that has no apparent downside for the Liberals, although it does have significant downsides for Canadians. Allright, so it isn’t actually true that the election would harm the flow of stimulus, but yet another election in the summer would cause a cynicism in the voters that would ultimately hurt the legitimacy of our democracy. These never-ending threats and instability of government, are closer to the parliamentary systems we mocked in Europe, such as Italy’s paralyzing politics of the nineties and the repetitive elections that defined that period.

Although Michael Ignatieff’s “an election if necessary, but not necessarily an election” gives him a good stick to hold at the ready, it risks exposing him to ridicule should the government not fall. Although this is indeed a stand being taken by the new Liberal leader, a stand is only as effective as it’s outcome. Indeed, history does not reflect well on Nikita Khrushchev’s gambit in the Cuban missile crisis. Although it is argued now that the Soviet Premier only placed missiles in Cuba to get John F. Kennedy to remove American missiles from Turkey and had no intention of a full-scale nuclear war with the United States, the compromise with the U.S. showed the Russians as retreating from circumstances that they themselves had initiated.

At a certain point the Liberals will either have to pull the trigger, or else force such a concession from Stephen Harper that they will be able to walk away with a significant, but small, victory. As Dave Breakenbridge writes, at a certain point the Liberal repetitions can be boiled down to a simple summarizing point:

“We’re not happy with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and we really think we can do better, but, gosh darn it, we’re not quite ready to force an election on him just yet.”

The melodrama that weakened Stephane Dion was largely brought on by his own serial prevarications, and not much is different in this soap opera. By trying to appear tough on the budget, it was Michael Ignatieff himself who demanded these quarterly performance reports that are creating showdowns with the Conservatives that are based more on posturing than policy. Instead of doing what is important during the financial crisis, what becomes critical for the Liberal party is the optics of appearing to hold the government to task, something that plagued the previous leadership.

The main problem with constantly challenging the incumbent, is that sooner or later you’re likely to get the opportunity to explain what you would do differently that is so much better. Unfortunately for Mr.Ignatieff, despite all of his intellectualism, his articulate proficiencies, he’s no closer to explaining exactly why Canadians should choose him for our next Prime Minister. Or as Adam Radwanski writes: “Time after time, [Iggy] articulately ties himself into knots trying to get around the fact that he has very little to say.”

Related

I like this one. “Canada’s media Illuminati”. Election talk sparks pundit chaos. Indeed. [Link]

That Damned Conservative Media Bias!

Andrew Cohen, professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University, seems to have found a pattern of bias in the media against the Liberals and would-be Liberal Prime Ministers. In his op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, Mr.Cohen weaves a tale of woe for embattled former Liberal leader Stephane Dion who had defeat snatched from the jaws of victory with a very timely CTV airing of a now infamous “misunderstanding”. In fact, according to Mr.Cohen, on October 9, 2008, only five days before the election, Mr.Dion appeared on CTV Atlantic just as polls were suggesting that the Liberals were going to be the comeback kids against the Conservatives. And then the hammer fell. An unapproved version of the Steve Murphy interview was broadcast by the network, and then rebroadcast by Mike Duffy later on. To quote Mr.Cohen:

“For CTV, the interview was damaging. For Dion, it was devastating. For the campaign it was, quite possibly, decisive.”

Decisive is an interesting word, really, because it can mean quite a few things. It can relate to something that assures an outcome that was in doubt, such as the Pittsburgh Penguins hanging on by the thin skin of their teeth in game seven of the Stanley Cup finals against the Detroit Red Wings to win 2-1. Or, it could also relate to me stepping on a spider who happened to be crossing the floor in front of my path. For the spider, the weight of my foot was most decisive.

Mr.Cohen spends a good deal of time going on to explain how confusing the question was, how many complaints the interview caused, and how the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council conducted a review and found CTV in breach of journalistic ethics. He complains that the Council findings were largely “ignored” by the media:

Is all this a grammarian’s revenge, Miss Thistlebottom in full flight? A silly parsing of sentences? A regulator’s punctilious dressing down on decorum? Does it really matter how Dion was treated by CTV, particularly by Mike Duffy?

Actually, yes, particularly in a country where the RCMP might well have determined the outcome of the 2006 election, when it announced an investigation, in mid-campaign, into allegations of irregularities on the part of finance minister Ralph Goodale. It caused a sensation. The Liberals lost that election; no charges materialized.

Last October, the polls suggest the Liberal party’s ascent stalled after the interview. While we cannot say if Dion’s momentum would have brought his party victory, it isn’t impossible.

No, I suppose nothing is “impossible”. It is possible that CTV airing the video caused hundreds of thousands of decided Liberal voters [who endorsed Mr.Dion's carbon tax, and up until that moment in time had thought he was a perfectly capable individual despite his inability to effectively challenge the Conservatives at any time in Parliament up until the election], to suddenly change their minds based solely upon one awkward interview being aired. But in the realm of possible and probable stands a vast gulf of doubt.

The fact is that there is a great deal more evidence to suggest that Mr.Dion received softball questions by the media at the time, who did not even bother to challenge their absence of an economic platform beyond the all-encompassing “green shift”, or to grill the leadership in such a way that would force them to come up with more than complaints that they don’t like the “direction of this government” [which, interestingly, is precisely the same language being used by Mr.Dion's successor]. Simply put, Steve Murphy threw a slow pitch over the plate for Stephane Dion, and instead it got turned into some kind of controversy in a way that a privately recorded tape of Lisa Raitt’s own personal thoughts being released to the public never could. Somehow Mr.Dion was a victim for having do-overs aired, whereas Lisa Raitt’s digital tape recordings were completely fair game, free to be read in the House of Commons.

As though it weren’t enough that the media was conspiring to make Stephane Dion appear unqualified for the position in which he was applying, Linda McQuaig reminds us how it also destroyed the hopes and dreams of the coalition:

It wouldn’t have exactly brought the Canadian Establishment to its knees. But late last fall, the Liberal-NDP coalition did briefly seem poised to become the most progressive Canadian government in a generation, possibly ever.

Then before you could say “corporate welfare bums,” it was all over. The Conservatives had mounted a hysterical campaign, the media had joined in trashing the coalition, and the Governor General had shown it no more mercy than she would a tasty seal.

That damned conservative media bias strikes again.

Unrelated Afterword

My articles haven’t been syndicated on the Blogging Tories of late, probably owing to an error of some nature. If you’re just tuning in and have wondered why my posts haven’t been feeding to the main page, there’s always an easier way. You can get every post of mine with feedburner.