Grit Dream Team, or Dion's Nightmare?

I'm not going to lie: I blatantly stole this blog post title from Maisonneuve's MediaScout. However, I think I can more than repay the favor by shamelessly plugging The Scout in this post. A few of you may remember, that a while back the AGRDT team promised  that wherever possible we would highlight good examples of alternative media methods and innovative vehicles.  MediaScout is an excellent example of this. Each day, the team at Maisonneuve Magazine goes through seven of Canada's major dailies and compiles a digest consisting of their front page items and leads. This format allows one to quickly determine what's making news in Canada, and alternately which stories are falling by the wayside. Each digest also includes commentary on the mainstream media's strategies and angles in relation to their coverage of each story and links to the various stories it summarizes. What a handy way to read the morning news, hey?

Anyhow, today's lead story, Grit Dream Team, or Dion's Nightmare?, basically sums up my take on the implications of yesterday's by-election drama (i.e. no one really knows what this means, but it will be nice to have a few more articulate and intellegent MPs in Rae and Hall Finlay kicking around), so I've posted it below.

The only thing I would add is this: here's hoping that we don't see a rash of Liberal in-fighting as a result. As well, way to go, Green Party for their second place finish in Willowdale and their virtual ties with the NDP in the other ridings.

If someone had claimed in 1995, as then-Ontario Premier Bob Rae prepared to leave office, that the New Democrat would re-emerge thirteen years later as a possible future Liberal prime minister, MediaScout would have laughed the notion straight out of town. After all, besides the unlikely political apostasy, Rae’s premiership, widely regarded as a disaster, left the province in financial ruin and his political stock in the basement. It’s a good thing for MediaScout’s reputation, then, that no one had the gall or the foresight to make such a prediction. Rae, who narrowly lost the Liberal leadership race to Stéphane Dion in 2006, easily won a by-election yesterday in the riding of Toronto Centre, which will allow him to join his new party as an MP in Ottawa. Rae’s win and his imminent arrival in the Liberal shadow cabinet—probably in a continuation of his role as foreign affairs critic—are interpreted in two, possibly contradictory, ways in today’s sources: As a boon for the party or as the next step in the man’s ongoing hunt for the keys to 24 Sussex Drive.

Meanwhile, in three other by-elections held yesterday, the Liberals retained two seats (Willowdale in Toronto and Vancouver Quadra) and lost one (Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan). Despite the best efforts of Robert Fife on CTV News to interpret each riding’s results as a bellwether of the Liberal party’s vitality, the significance of the victories in the three Grit stronghold ridings and the narrow defeat in the swing Saskatchewan seat remains murky. What is clear is that with the addition to the House of Rae and former rival leadership candidate Martha Hall Findlay, who handily won in Willowdale, the already star-studded Liberal benches will now boast an even more formidable line-up of political powerhouses. This is in contrast to the Conservative government, described by Don Martin in the Post as a one-man show and “a wasteland of rival ambition.” According to the Globe, Dion plans to use the strength of his team as a selling point, declaring, “I am a team player and a team builder and tonight it’s clearer than ever that I have a much better team than Stephen Harper.” However, Dion likely sees that the perceived competence of his right-hand men and women is as much a curse as it is a blessing; the embattled leader’s failure to convert the government’s political mistakes into gains in the polls only reinforces the impression of Rae and his former roommate, deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, as “leaders-in-waiting,” as Don Martin describes them. Though Dion’s team may be better than Harper’s, the Liberal leader might find that they’re a bit too good for his own good.

If the Liberals can manage to hold things together, it looks like we'll be heading into an election sooner than we thought. If on the other hand, if Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff can't learn to get along (both are strongly divided over the question of Liberal election readiness, with Rae on the cautious side and Ignatieff on the full-speed-ahead end of things), we will likely see the maintenance of the current government, a another Stephen Harper minority win, or, even worse -- and I can barely write the words -- a Harper majority. I kind of like being the most progressive country in North America, I've got my fingers crossed for the Dream Team alternative. The Liberals are a long ways from perfect, but they're equally far from my worst nightmare. 

Comments

Excellent post. Though you are right to worry about Liberal infighting, it is clear the party is going to do its best to play up the "dream team" angle of the by-election wins last night (which as you correctly state don't prove anything other than the Liberals could run a red-painted fencepost in Toronto and still win). Luckily, in Hall Findlay and Rae the Liberals have two able and dynamic MPs who will be assets in their quest to combat the regressive Harper agenda. Hopefully, Canadians will view the Liberal party as a package deal the next time this country inevitably heads to the polls and in any election campaign, I'd rather my team to have Iggy, Rae, Hall Findlay, Brison, and Dryden than Stock Day (Harper's supposedly best-performing cabinet minister), Baird and Flaherty. However, if the next campaign centres around leadership rather than ideas (always a worry with a media system that loves to play up horse races) then there is cause for concern, as anybody who saw Dion speak last night can attest. Nevertheless, I remain shamelessly optimistic that the dream team can put infighting aside because, as the deservedly maligned former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once arrogantly stated, "you have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Rae, Iggy and the Liberal dream team are stuck with Dion for at least this round, and by portraying themselves as a cohesive unit and viable alternative PARTY (because last time I checked we don't live in a Putinesque cult of personality state - as much as Harper wants us to think so) they can play damage control and limit Harper to another minority at worst. If they fail to form the government, ONLY THEN will it be time to resume infighting and open the wounds of the previous leadership race after Dion joins the company of Edward Blake as the only Liberal leader never to become PM.

[JR]

Don't know why it's not attributing my name to that last post, though I guess it's obvious who wrote it!