Wells: Why Dion was not a leader, in his own words

This week’s lesson, not a new one, is that a failure of introspection can be fatal to a political career. Stéphane Dion told a roomful of reporters on Monday what a very long list of Liberal MPs and failed candidates had tried to explain to him in the week since he lost the election. Again and again at the door, campaigning Liberals were told voters didn’t like Dion. Why? Because he kept talking about a carbon tax.

Well, that’s pretty straightforward. Listening, I was actually impressed with the candour of those ex-candidates. Must be hard to tell a defeated leader that he was the problem.

Except it’s not hard at all if the leader won’t hear. Dion received all his visitors’ petitions and decided the voters had been mistaken. Or bamboozled. The Conservatives spent so much money distorting him that Canadians never had a chance to think straight. To know Dion would have been to love him. To understand the carbon tax—sorry, Green Shift—would have been to adore a thing of beauty.

This complacent reading of events does Dion no honour. And because he is determined to stick around for a while, assigning himself important tasks for which he has shown no aptitude, the professor’s eagerness to grade himself on a generous curve remains an obstacle to improved Liberal fortunes.

Before I light into him some more, I want to emphasize—partly so you can decide what to make of my own judgment—that I have made no secret of my admiration for Dion for more than a decade. In the 2006 leadership race I rated him more highly than his competitors. And in the recent campaign’s final week I saw glimpses of a more impressive retail politician than Dion had ever been before. There is so much to like about him.

But leadership is a particular set of skills. Not everyone has them. One is an ability, which begins with a simple willingness, to play the hand you’re dealt. Grumbling about your hand is the eternal hallmark of the mediocre player. Dion shows no courage when he admits he “failed” and then proclaims, in the next breath, that his failure was imposed on him by foul adversaries. No courage and no inclination to learn and apply hard lessons. He knew his opponents were foul, by his lights, when he asked for a mandate to beat them. He went about it badly from the outset.

Two of the arenas of his incompetence were party organization and parliamentary performance. Which is why so many Liberals were discouraged to hear he will stick around to reorganize the party and lead his party in the Commons.