Rae makes plans to rebuild party of Laurier, Trudeau

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This article was published 05/06/2011 (5314 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOR most of Canadian history, achieving the ultimate position of power in national politics meant winning the leadership of the federal Liberals. The head of Canada’s “natural governing party” has been able to count on occupying the Prime Minister’s Office about 60 per cent of the time since Confederation, nearly 70 per cent during the 20th century.

The legendary party of Laurier, King and Trudeau is now, at long last, the party of Bob Rae — for the next 18 months anyway, and with an asterisk denoting “interim” beside his entry in the Liberal leadership annals.

But the unapologetic power seeker, a former NDP premier of Ontario and born-again Liberal who had previously mounted one unsuccessful (2006) and one pre-empted (2008) bid to lead his re-adopted party, has finally seized the crown at a most inopportune moment.

Humbled like never before in last month’s federal election, the Liberal party — never so short of seats, never so starved of funds, never so far removed from the power that once seemed its entitlement — has been banished for the first time from both 24 Sussex Drive and Stornoway. And it is at serious risk, in the eyes of many observers, of disappearing altogether from Canada’s political landscape.

But as the silver-haired Rae stepped into a TV spotlight and a crush of cameras this week in a grand hallway outside the House of Commons, just moments after the announcement of his shadow cabinet, the 62-year-old leader of the nation’s third party projected all of the poise expected of perhaps the most seasoned parliamentarian in the place — a man who, as a young New Democrat MP a full decade before some of the NDP’s newly elected members were even born, rose in the same House to reject a Progressive Conservative budget and trigger the fall of Joe Clark’s minority government in 1979.

But how now, a reporter from the assembled media throng asked the new Liberal leader, would he prevent his shrunken party from sinking into oblivion in the face of Stephen Harper’s decisive Conservative majority and the startling rise of Jack Layton’s NDP as the country’s official Opposition?

“This doesn’t feel like oblivion to me,” the upbeat, unfazed Rae responded, while surrounded by a pack of interested journalists.

Rae will encounter doubts, despite his repeated assurances, that he won’t seek the party’s permanent leadership somehow a year and a half from now. He will continue to face questions, fuelled by his own musings after the May 2 election, about whether it wouldn’t be better for the collapsed Liberals to seek a centre-left merger with the more robust NDP — a common front of “progressive” Canadians to counter the country’s reunited and seemingly invincible conservative movement.

And Rae will have difficulty establishing policy stances that manage — all at the same time — to effectively challenge the governing Conservatives, to meaningfully differentiate Liberals from New Democrats in voicing opposition, and to attract the kind of public support that was so obviously denied his party under Michael Ignatieff’s leadership in last month’s vote.

Meanwhile, a promised replanting of Liberal grassroots will force Rae to divide his time between low-profile spadework in local ridings across the country and more media-friendly, Ottawa-focused interventions on national issues.

Rae was first elected to the Commons at the age of 30 in a 1978 Toronto byelection. Today he’s one of only a few MPs — another being his new deputy leader, Ralph Goodale — who served in the House prior to 1984.

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