Bob Rae Still Clinging To Faint Hope For Leadership?

REUTERS/Chris Wattie

It’s almost like the Conservative Party of Canada is writing this script. Just when the Liberals seem to be reorganizing, consolidating, and revitalizing, along comes some bone-headed move that knocks them flat again. Stephane Dion was already a fairly unpopular candidate for Prime Minister last October when voters punished him at the polls, but the proposed “Green Shift” was really seen, however unfairly, as a referendum on carbon taxes in Canada. Not only did Mr.Dion not respect the decision Canadians had made at the time, he later suggested that Canadians had been misled by Conservative attack ads which distorted what the party was really trying to accomplish.

Along comes Michael Ignatieff, the also-ran for the 2006 Liberal leadership convention who was appointed to leader by some very evident behind-the-scenes power plays. No matter how well the Liberals try to spin that one, the convenience of having each of the leadership hopefuls resign, one after another after another until only Bob Rae was left standing awkwardly in the way of Mr.Ignatieff’s assent, was too much to have been purely altruistic. It was clear then, as it is now, that Bob Rae was asked to step aside so that the man the party hired in 2005 to lead the party from the darkness of a Conservative Canada could take his spot as Prime Minister in-waiting.

Yet after Stephane Dion’s disastrous play at a platform involving a carbon tax, followed by Michael Ignatieff’s persistent assertions that there would be no followup to it, the Liberals are looking at trying to corner the environmentalist market yet again, this time with a national “clean-energy” jobs program. He announced this a year less a day after the Green Shift was defeated in an official election ballot.

On the surface it certainly sounds alluring, with fancy green industry tech words masking what would be a transformation of our technology and industry sectors, and the “upgrading” of our energy infrastructure to make the federal government a “model of environmentally responsible behaviour.” The Liberal porposal was not accompanied by cost estimates, to the great surprise of nobody. But I’m certain the party will soon be providing a calculator on their website to help us understand.

That’s really the issue here though, isn’t it? How much is all this fancy green industry stuff going to cost us? If voters are going to believe that a radical transformation of our energy into a “green” and “smart grid” system is going to be cheap, they only need to look south of the border to see that they’re probably wrong. And if voters get the whiff that this is a backdoor carbon tax, a backdoor “Green Shift” on Canadians, it could result in Michael Ignatieff’s inevitable defeat at the polls, and the search for leader number four in the same number of years.

With Michael Ignatieff widely regarded as a flip-flopper now by even the most esteemed of news publications, what does this bode for the second also-ran in the 2006 Liberal leadership race, Bob Rae? Some believe that Mr.Rae now secretly has the confidence of his party, but not his former leadership rival. But is it really logical that the Liberals would try yet another guy who lost to, in the following order, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff?

No, when the Liberals finally get their clocks cleaned in the polls, and they’re forced to go through their wilderness years [for real this time], it will be time to have a real rebuilding of the party, a real reevaluation of what their party stands for, and a real leadership race. One can only hope, if one were a Liberal supporter, that a real leader shows up by then.