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

Senior Liberal party staff knew in 2006 that the party’s fundraising apparatus was out of date. That’s why they passed a new constitution at the same convention that made Dion leader, no mean feat given hidebound vested interests. They had outside experts prepare an elaborate strategy for modernizing the fundraising process. Detailed blueprints for change were delivered to Dion the day after he became leader. He ignored them. Not because he had a better idea but because he had none.

Since he became leader the party has gone from $5 million flush to $6 million in the hole. It has had two presidents and three executive directors, none a professional organizer or fundraiser. Dion has had two chiefs of staff and four communications directors. At party fundraisers he would speak for an hour and chase every rogue particle of enthusiasm from the room. He runs an office the way a faculty chair runs a faculty, which is to say that he cannot in any serious way be said to run it at all. He compensates for an absence of organization by requiring every decision be made by him, multiplying delay instead of dividing it.

In the Commons his shaky English was only part of the problem. The greater part was a relentlessly tactical approach, an obsession with picking a scandal out of the morning’s newspapers and getting onto the evening news with it. No story was treated differently from the last or the next. No day was different from yesterday or tomorrow. If the Harper Conservatives could get away with one tone, snide dismissal, it’s because the Dion Liberals only ever went at them with one tone, howling indignation. This inability to see beyond question period was not Dion’s making but he did nothing to question it.

Here, too, Dion’s special knack for organization made things worse. An obsession with tactics made the 8:30 a.m. tactics meeting the only one worth attending. The more the party’s assorted factions grumbled, the more the loudest grumps—Paul Zed, Denis Coderre—were invited to tactics to shut them up. The tactics meeting quickly became useless. Ralph Goodale, the House leader, soon improvised a secret “real” tactics meeting at 7:30 to cook the outcome of the big fake tactics meeting afterward. Guess how long secret tactics stayed a secret. Guess how happy the outer circle was when they learned there was an inner circle. Guess how likely Dion is to fix all this if he believes his only problem is “Conservative propaganda.”

Dion says the televised leaders’ debates finally gave him a chance to shine for Canadians. But he will never debate Harper on TV again. Instead he has given himself jobs he was never good at. He could begin by admitting, at least to himself, that he was never good at them.