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Monday May
4,
2009 BACK NEXT
And now let the race
begin. Now that the Liberals’ biennial Vancouver convention this
past weekend corrected last December’s breached delivery of new
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, all parties have their leaders
officially nominated or re-appointed. So this week the race for the
next federal election officially begins. Contrary to what many people believe,
I suspect this race is going to be long and nasty. The
front-runners are, of course, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and
Ignatieff, while the runners-up are NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc
Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe. The dynamic this time, however,
is completely different. Last year, Prime Minister Harper ran
against all of them because they all felt threatened by the
possibility of a Conservative majority
government. Last year, the Bloc Québécois
and Duceppe, felt directly threatened by Harper’s success in Quebec.
They didn’t consider the Liberals of Stéphane Dion a direct
competition and therefore concentrated their effort on the
Conservatives. Now they know that the threat comes from the
Liberals, and the danger is real and
serious. If the Liberals want to be at 24
Sussex Dr. they need Quebec’s seats, and those seats will come from
the Bloc, not from the Conservatives who don’t have that
many. Rest assured that Duceppe’s
target will not be Harper next time
around. Last year, Layton’s NDP for
the first time tried to advance the idea of becoming the
only alternative to the Conservatives replacing the Liberals.
Layton, obviously, didn’t consider Dion a threat but only an instrument
for his plan that materialized way before the
election. Layton was waiting for an
opportunity to make it official. To do that he had to avoid, at all
costs, a Conservative majority government and play his cards in
another minority environment. He almost succeeded when the
Conservatives gave him the chance to trigger the crisis at the time
of the controversial economic update. It seems ironic but his master
plan failed mainly because of Dion’s sloppy out of focus taped
rebuttal to Prime Minister Harper’s national televised
address. That tape sealed Dion’s fate as
leader of the Liberal Party and the one of neo-democratic leader who saw
his dream of uniting the left under his leadership
collapsing. “I was there, watching TV, ready
to go, but I could do nothing about it,” Layton told me a few months
later. I’m sure the 30-minute delay
in presenting the Liberal tape to national broadcasters was
Layton’s second worst political time of his life. The worst was watching
the following five minutes of Dion’s
tape. This time around, however, the
plan for Layton’s campaign is more
complicated. He can’t just attack the
Conservatives and he can’t just concentrate his attacks on the
Liberals and help the Conservatives get a majority. It’s the usual
dilemma for the NDP, a dilemma that crushed many of Layton’s
predecessors and, if he doesn’t find a way out before the next
election, he will join the list of other NDP leaders with a bright
future behind them. As for the Liberals, some
in Dion’s entourage tried to use the producer of the tape as the
fall guy for the mishap. Yes, the tape was poorly produced and out
of focus, but if an event is poorly
prepared,
this says a lot about the
organization. Furthermore, it was not just about
the tape that turned many people away from the coalition; it was
the content as well. Harper was more convincing than Dion, and the
producer of the tape had nothing to do with the it. This
time, the Liberals have better leader, a better organization with more
money. However, this time they are not going to have the
wing support Bloc in Quebec and the NDP in the
country. Ignatieff has to fight on his own Harper and
has to make sure that the move to the centre will not leave the
party vulnerable on the left. Aside for some rhetorical
criticism against the Conservatives, Ignatieff basically is heading
towards a showdown Harper to get votes from the electorate so-called
radical centre. Harper Ignatieff and don’t have a lot of differences
in dealing many issues, now, or in the past.The Liberals supported the
Conservative economic plan, they have policies in Afghanistan and
both parties are trying to get closer to administration of Barack
Obama. Basically, the fight will
not be about their different policies, but about the leader who can better implement
extremely similar policies to get the votes of the “radical centre.”
The next campaign will not be issues, but about the leadership, and
this means that it will be personal and and most of all very
long. In fact, I believe that the NDP and Bloc are not eager to help
Ignatieff unseat Harper expense. Now that Ignatieff has been crowned
in Vancouver, I’m sure fireworks are just about to
start. Stay
tuned.
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