Modeling Journey

Dion has announced via a press release, two things: sitting MPs will not have to fight for their right to represent ridings, and 33% of candidates must be women.

This is hardly renewal, in my eyes. When Martin safeguared sitting MPs by giving them the same protection, it was a retrogressive and undemocratic step. And Dion is repeating this retrogressive step. By protecting incumbents, we are denying Liberal members in those seats the right to choose their candidates. Every incumbent gets protected, even those who are not highly regarded by the members of their riding. All such members are denied the chance to voice their view of the performance of their MPs.

In one stroke, Martin and Dion have changed the democratic balance within the Liberal Party into something even the corrupt politicians in the US would envy. Imagine! Sitting MPs do not have to raise funds to ensure that as incumbents they can beat off attackers during nomination fights, as American Senators have to do. Here, in democratic Canada, the party leaders simply issue an order protecting their own seats, and the seats of those now sitting as MPs.

What a remarkable Canadian coup! And it is greeted without a word of protest, not even from those who thought they were fighting for renewal of the Liberal Party.

At the same time, the 33% candidates who are women, will have to scrounge around for the seats where the Liberals are not the strongest, and take their chances. If electing more women to represent the Liberal Party as MPs in Parliament is the aim, and if it is a morally justifiable and worthy aim, then at least lets not pretend that protecing all sitting MPs and relegating women to the rest, is the best way to achieve this high moral purpose.

At the very least, Dion should choose by random choice some 20 seats where the Liberals have large majorities, and allocate those seats to women, so that the next Parliament has twenty more women MPs representing the Liberal Party.

That would be decisive leadership. Protecting sitting MPs is not.

Dion has a chance to make a quantum leap forward in political parties, making the Liberal Party a world leader in the advancement of women's involvement in politics.

He can do this by tackling the job in several blocks:

First, he can change the representation of officers in the Party throughout the country to be 50/50 male/female.

Secondly, he can ensure that his advisers are balanced equally between women and men.

Thirdly, he can impose candidates on ridings where the Liberals stand the best chance of winning, by exercising his powers of appointment to parachute women into ridings where they will win. This means ridings which already have Liberal MPs. By so doing, he will clearly indicate that this gesture is not mere tokenism, but a serious commitment to remedying the democratic imbalance in the Liberal Party. He can select the ridings by random choice. He can draw up lists of women candidates, inviting contributions from Liberal members. He can give ridings choices of women candidates, so that they can vote for the one they prefer from the list of elegible candidates.

Fourthly, he can commit the Liberal Party to passing legislation within 90 days of it assuming power as the government, designed to ensure the democratic imbalance is remedied throughout all 308 constituencies. The contents of the legislation should be drafted by the panel he is setting up to review the issue of women in politics.

Fifthly, he can commit the Liberal Party to reviewing the adoption of proportional representation at the federal level, with a referendum, similar to BC and Ontario. This will solve a host of problems, and ensure that all votes are equal, and all votes matter.

Sixthly, he can launch within the Party a separate initiative to train and fund women who wish to seek election as candidates, for both party positions and to run for election. The panel can come up with a range of training, mentoring and financing alternatives.

These steps would certainly amount to significent party renewal, and would catapult the Liberals into the forefront of gender-democracy.

The Globe & Mail is speculating that Harper will run on a constitutional change which will restrict the right of the federal government to spend money in the jurisdiction of a province. They speculate that Harper would introduce a one-subject constitutional change, to avoid having the constitution opened up to other matters.

G&M also say this would put Dion in a quandry, and risk him splitting the Liberal Party.

Why? Because, says the G&M:

"On a grander scale, Mr. Harper is said to be considering the idea of putting constitutional limitations on Ottawa's spending power as part of resolving the fiscal imbalance -- an initiative that, presumably, would be accompanied by tax cuts flowing from Ottawa's scaling back its activities. This would present Mr. Dion with a difficult choice. Mr. Dion's rival for lefty votes outside Quebec, Jack Layton, would howl at any proposed limitations on the federal spending power. But Mr. Dion already has a record in limiting Ottawa's spending power (1999's Social Union agreement with the provinces went even beyond the Meech Lake accord in this respect). And he has a history of championing constitutional amendments: He pushed for recognition of Quebec as a distinct society even after Meech Lake failed, and he was the driving force in two successful amendments dealing with education in Quebec and Newfoundland. If Mr. Harper were to bring forward a constitutional resolution, Mr. Dion would have to choose between competing with the NDP for votes on the left outside Quebec and siding with mainstream public opinion inside his home province. Should he choose the latter, he would risk a split within his own party."

The G&M are right about the splitting of the LPC if Dion for a moment thought of backing such a Harper move.

The centre of gravity of the Liberal Party is in supporting a strong federal government, and fighting anything which might limit the power of the Canadian government from ensuring national programs are used in the interests of all Canadians.

For Dion to support Harper's proposal on this issue would be a massive sellout of Liberal values, and would indeed split the party right down the middle.

The Cat gives odds of 5 to 1 (hypothetically) that by this time next year, Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister, having been beaten by the resurgent Liberal Party which will become the majority government, will be facing open rebellion amongst Tories dissatisfied with Harper's one-man one-decision style of rule. A leadership review will be called, and several candidates will run, with Peter Mackay being sounded bested, Harper quitting rather than running and losing, and a new Tory leader, cut on the mold of the old Progressive Conservatives, becoming the new Tory leader.

And Stephen Harper will take his place as a footnote in Canadian federal politics.

Now that he was elected leader on a platform of renewal (pushed over the top by the premier renewal candidate, Kennedy), Dion has to decide how fast he goes in implementing party renewal. The risk he runs is that delay will lead many who supported him or participated in the selection of delegates and the convention to conclude that it is "business as usual", and that neither he nor Kennedy are prepared to walk the talk.

Some interesting observations on the dilemma facing Dion and Kennedy are contained in an article headed Seeking and keeping the hot seat: Party leadership successors in comparative perspective, written by Frederik Bynander and Paul 't Hart .
(The article may be found by googling the title or at http://polsc.anu.edu.au/staff/hart/pubs/successor_200606.pdf)

Some quotes from the article for Liberals to consider:

"Reform-inclined incumbents have to decide whether to pursue a crash through approach, i.e. launch major proposals for change early on, while they are still 'fresh' and in their 'honeymoon' period; or to tread gently at first and delay the internal battle until they are well entrenched as leader and after having been able to promote their supporters into pivotal positions within the party; or not to go for a single major reform at all but to pursue an incremental, long-term strategy."

"These judgment calls not only depend on new incumbents' personal style and risk-taking inclinations, but also on their more or less objectifiable strength within their party-- as indicated by the margin with which they were voted in or the known level of support among the former leader and the other key internal power brokers -- and their potential polling strength at the time. "

...

"Our dataset shows that new party leaders have tended not to be revolutionaries. In general, the number of successors that comes to office with an avowed commitment to transforming the party is limited: not even 10% in our sample, and usually precipitated by extraordinary electoral losses or the unexpected loss of long-held government rule. "

...

"But notwithstanding the lack of concrete moves towards internal party democratisation with regard to leader selection procedures, one may plausibly wonder to which extent this premium on continuity and not rocking the boat will remain the dominant imperative.... Contemporary electoral markets are much more volatile than they used to be .... In the West volatility results from accelerating social and cultural changes, which put even highly established parties at risk of plunging into big depths in no time.... Western political parties now are much more under pressure to reinvent themselves than they were a few decades ago... "

"One way or another, many parties have had to reconsider their programmatic and organizational legacies in order to stay in the game. This has increased both the political momentum and the tactical possibilities for new party leaders to adopt a self-consciously reformist posture. Hence it is much more likely for contemporary than for early post-war leader-elects to be chosen on a platform of party innovation or to reveal reform ambitions shortly after being elected.... If they don't, and if their party has enjoyed meagre electoral fortunes in the most recent past, they are not likely to stay in power long, because they are unlikely to improve those fortunes. "

"In our dataset, the rapid turnover of Australian Labor leaders Australia since Paul Keating?s 1996 departure, and of British Conservative leaders since Blair?s 1997 landslide against Major, illustrates the point clearly: none of the people holding the opposition party leader's role succeeded in developing a clear, cogent and appealing new platform upon which the 're-branding' of the party could be footed."


So, Messrs Dion and Kennedy: how soon can we expect meaningful steps towards the renewal of the Liberal Party, starting with:

- the election of the leader (our current system is clearly not democratic enough, see Red Tory's blog for some concise comments);

- the selection of candidates as aspirant MPs (which is clearly broken, because the current instant party members and bused in voting sheep is a travesty);

- achieving a balance between male and female party officials;

- making sure we select, within a very short period, 50% women as candidates, in good ridings, so that the Liberals in the House are fairly balanced;

- changing the decision on policies so that members of the Party may have greater input on the direction of the party;

- changing the behaviour of Liberal MPs (to stop the buffoonery which now gives Parliament a bad name).

Have I missed any starting items? The last thing we need is another batch of Liberal promises, made but not delivered upon. So let's get cracking.

This just in: Bob Rae favoured over Ignatieff in all provinces except Quebec!


"Canadian PressPublished: Thursday, November 30, 2006
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MONTREAL (CP) - A new national poll suggests Canadians of every federalist party persuasion believe that Bob Rae is a more electable option as Liberal leader than top rival Michael Ignatieff.
The Nov. 24-26 Decima Research survey found that Rae's perceived winnability topped Ignatieff's by a significant margin in every region of the country except Quebec. More than 1,000 respondents were asked by Decima to picture themselves as delegates to this weekend's leadership convention in Montreal

In a final-ballot showdown between front-runner Ignatieff and Rae, they were asked who they felt had the best chance to win for the Liberals in the next election.

Under this scenario, 37 per cent chose Rae and 25 per cent picked Ignatieff.

The results of the poll, which was distributed to The Canadian Press, are considered accurate within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Decima CEO Bruce Anderson says the poll suggests Rae's winnability factor is perceived to be higher among all age groups, men and women, urban and rural voters, and everywhere but Quebec - where Ignatieff would get 36 per cent support and Rae 25 per cent.

Ignatieff also led in the poll among self-identified Bloc Quebecois voters.

© The Canadian Press 2006

In a few days, delegates will choose a leader for the Liberal Party. When they do that, they will be choosing a person who most likely will be the next Prime Minister. And they will be making a choice about the "voice" of Canada. The new leader will set the tone for the Party, and have an enormous impact on who is chosen to speak for the Party, and what policies will be adopted and implemented.

Bob Rae on August 10, 2006 spoke at the Munk Centre at the U of Toronto on the topic of Canada Needs to Find its Voice Again in Foreign Policy (Munk Speech). He made a number of important points, and delegates should consider what Rae said in the light of what Ignatieff has said over the past few months and in Ignatieff's writings. Rae said that "Our foreign policy will inevitably reflect who we are, our values as well as our interests." Note his use of the word "values" as well as just "interests".

There is a dramatic difference between Bob Rae's values and those of Ignatieff, with respect to what should drive Canada's foreign policy. This gulf has been illustrated many times during the campaign, and will be highlighted below.

Can Bob Rae give effect to Canadian values in the foreign policy he will pursue as prime minister?

Tom Armstrong, who was Ontario's Deputy Minister of Labour and of Industry during Rae's premiership, wrote an article in The Hamilton Spectator August 14, 2006 about Political Mythmaking: Ontario style. In it he said this about Rae's doggedness in trying to save jobs during that savage recession: "His personal efforts in achieving success exceeded, in dedication, intelligence and shrewd negotiating skills, anything I had previously experienced." Rae's efforts in many fields since losing the 1995 election bear out Armstrong's observation of Rae: he is a man who brings enormous practicality and gifts to bear on any problem he is involved with, a man with inclusive instincts rather than polarizing ones. This is a sharp contrast with Ignatieff, who to date in this campaign has succeeded in driving people apart more than uniting them.


The question facing Liberals is this: What is the Liberal voice in foreign affairs? What values should underpin any foreign policies of the Liberal Party?

There seems to be a clear choice between the values of the Liberal Party of the past (which Rae shares), and the pre-emptive war and American imperialism supporting underpinnings of Ignatieff.


Bob Rae in the Munk Speech was very clear: "We have no imperial ambitions, nor should we see ourselves as anyone else's foot soldiers in imperial adventures." Because Canada is not a neutral country but is "engaged in the world", Rae cautioned against the loss of our values as Canadians when fighting the terror onslaught: "We have also learned that in fighting that enemy we must not lose our way or our values." He went on to say that Canadians are a people of principle, but not a people of ideology: "We are pragmatic, not dogmatic."

We shall come back to how Ignatieff stacks up against these points.

Bob Rae clearly favours a "balanced, pragmatic, multilateral approach to global affairs." This is where the great divide between the new Ignatieff doctrine and the past Liberal values starts. Ignatieff was, and apparently still is, clearly on the other side of the use of a multilateral approach for dealing with certain major challenges, such as Iraq and the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rae approves of Jean Cretien's decision not to support the invasion of Iraq because it was taken as a result of the Government's "principled view that the invasion was illegal, and its pragmatic concern that an invasion can very quickly become an unpopular occupation." Rae comments that this decision was not taken as a result of a poll, but based on principle.

Rae then says that principles should guide our foreign policy in other areas, as well: "We should be clear advocates against torture and coercive interrogation, and for the promotion of human rights. There should be no confusion in what we think and say in these areas."

Are Ignatieff's thoughts in these areas clear or confused? Witness the many arguments about what he did or did not say about torture and coercive interrogation, and about his reasons for supporting the Iraq war, and you can only conclude that there is confusion, not clarity.


Ignatieff's views regarding multilateral approaches is very different from those of the Liberal Party. He seems to be against it, relegating it to a bit player once the mighty US war machine has come in and blasted a path for others to follow, cleaning up behind American armed forces.

Rae argues that "We need to find our voice again." Harper's approach to international issues is simplistic and out of step with Canada's traditional role in the world, and threatens to submerge the distinctive voice the world expects to hear from us. Rae's use of the word distinctive is obviously not and advocasy of a foreign policy approach which is a carbon copy of the American President's. Our policies should be founded on our values, and not on the values of our superpower neighbour, where our values differ from theirs.

By contrast, the "distinctive voice" which Ignatieff seems to be advocating for Canada is something drastically different from the values of the Party in the past few decades. Ignatieff seems to speak with an American voice. In his 2004 Whitman Commencement Address he said: "Being an American is not easy. It is hard. We are required to keep some serious promises." (Sounds a bit like George Bush saying that being President is "hard" and people should realize that.) Ignatieff later explained away the use of the word "we" in his speeches to Americans, saying that "Sometimes you want to increase your influence over your audience by appropriating their voice, but it was a mistake."


It is possible that Ignatieff has done more than just appropriating the voice of the American audiences he was addressing.

He seems also to have appropriated their values, as well as their voice, and some of those values are not consistent with Liberal Party values.


Bob Rae described the foreign policy of the Harper neocon government as the "Bushification" of Canadian foreign policy (U of Montreal speech on September 8, 2006). Ignatieff's support of the Bush doctrines with respect to Iraq, amount to the same Bushification of our foreign policy.

Ignatieff has been described as one of Bush's Useful Idiots by Tony Judt in his article with the same name (London Review of Books lrb.co.uk) 21 September 2006. Ludt spoke about the problems facing liberal writers in the US, faced with the Bush doctrines. He describes Ignatieff as one of the "intellectual supporters" of the Iraq war, and makes the point that the worldview of many of Bush's liberal supporters is that these supporters do not look on the War on Terror or the war in Iraq or the war in Lebanon "as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation ... Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and, as before, we must take our stand on the issue of the age." Judt also has this scathing commentary on Ignatieff's and other liberal supporters statements about their support for the Iraq war: they have "focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving 'preventive war' a bad name."

Rae and Dion focused on this aspect of Ignatieff's support of Iraq during the debates, and we did not really receive a satisfactory answer (Ignatieff's answers kept sliding along, changing from WMDs to Kurds to who knows what).

In passing, Judt makes the comment that "American liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end." Judt also comments on the willingness of many American pundits and essayists to "roll over for Bush's doctrine of preventive war". This is certainly not consistent with Rae's support of a principled foreign policy, based on Canadian values.


How does this fit with Ignatieff's writings and statements on foreign policy, in particular, regarding the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Ignatieff said that he was mislead by the "evidence" at the time into believing that weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of Saddam. When the Bush administration was pushing all and sundry, in a mad rush, to vote in the Senate and at the UN, so support war on Iraq, there were many who thought the evidence presented was flimsy, and that the reasons for the use of force were unconvincing. Howard Dean for one thought that, and said so. Jean Chretien thought that, and governed Canada accordingly.

And Ignatieff? He was mislead. It is a bit ironic that in his Empire Lite article in the New York Times Magazine on January 5, 2003 (two months and fifteen days before the US invasion of Iraq), Ignatieff wrote that President Bush "appears to be maneuvering the country toward war with Iraq." Did Ignatieff have some concerns about such moves by Bush? If he did, they did not seem to change his support for the Iraq war.


Let's dig a bit deeper. What did Ignatieff say about the need for a multilateral approach towards this Iraqi invasion? Did he come down on the same side as Canada's Prime Minister, Jean Chretien?

No. At the same time that Canada's government was recommending support of the UN initiative to deal with Iraq, Ignatieff wrote in his Empire Lite article that "The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark."

Does Ignatieff's view of the UN as a dozing dog match the Canadian view of using multilateral approaches?

Well, Ignatieff has explained his approach to multilateral approaches to foreign affairs, for he goes on to say: "Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless American bares its fangs."

Here we see in stark contrast the differences between Ignatieff's so-called realistic appraisal of life in a world with one superpower, and the Canadian approach. Bob Rae in his Munk Speech had this to say about Canada's relationship with the USA superpower: "Some will say that this approach will put us at odds with the United States. The United States is Canada's most important bilateral partner, economically and otherwise, and we should not take that friendship for granted. At the same time, when we have principled disagreements with the Americans, Canada needs to clearly articulate its views." Earlier in his Munk Speech Rae spoke of Trudeau: "Nor did Pierre Trudeau have the enthusiastic support of either super-power when he launched his initiative to point out the folly of the so-called "balance of terror" in the early 1980's".


Ignatieff in his Imperial Lite article speaks of the manner in which, post 9/11, America is to run the world as an imperial power. "It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change an the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest." He then went on to say: "Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role." And: "... Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Eqypt to Afghanistan."

Ignatieff then agreed with Bush's decision to invade Iraq by saying that the Iraq war was justified because "Containment rather than war would be the better course, but the Bush administration seems to have concluded that containment has reached its limits and the conclusion is not unreasonable."

He also remarks that "Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignity of a state." I doubt that most Canadian's would agree with any claim by any state (be it an empire-lite state or any other state) to have interests of that nature which trumped sovereignity....

Ignatieff develops the rights of the Empire Lite further when he comments on the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Ignatieff doctrine involves the use of American troops in a pre-emptive role, followed by the use of UN troops in Iraq and Israel to "keep the peace" under United Nations mandate. As he says, "If America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region." And: "Properly understood, then, the operation in Iraq entails a commitment, so far unstated, to enforce a peace on the Palestinians and Israelis." He is clear on the roles of Europe and the USA under this imperial power: "The Americans essentially dictate Europe's place in this new grand design.... America ... enforces a new division of labor in which American does the fighting, the French, British and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid."

What role would Canadian troops have under the Ignatieff doctrine? Unfortunately, Ignatieff did not say (perhaps Canada was not on his mind right then).

Contrast Ignatieff's views with Rae's assessment of Chretien's decision on Iraq: "It was a judgment call that was fundamentally sound, reflected our values, and offered our independent voice."

And contrast the Ignatieff doctrine with Rae's view about Canada's role: "Together with others, Canada needs to do what it takes to get the parties to the table. Conflict resolution should be at the heart of our foreign policy, not an afterthought, or an interesting sideline to other efforts. This will require much greater discipline and determination than we have been able to do so far."


Finally, Bob Rae also sees that the Canadian values of compassion and concern for those who are vulnerable should play a role in our foreign policy. He says Canadians have a right to ask where their government is, why isn't it in the lead, when it comes to famine throughout the world. "If thousands of children die each day in countries that are in the clutches of extreme poverty, what will it cost us as a country to reduce, and then end the slaughter?" A noble goal, for a noble country like Canada, and very consistent with the values which underly this great experiment in nation-building.