Gilles Duceppe lands a new role with Parti Quebecois government

By The Canadian Press - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 5:47 PM - 0 Comments

QUEBEC – The former leader of the Bloc Quebecois, Gilles Duceppe, appears to have landed a government job two years after he lost his last one in a historic electoral drubbing.

He is being appointed by the pro-independence Parti Quebecois provincial government to lead a commission whose role will be to fight the feds over changes to skills training.

Duceppe led the Bloc through six federal elections, with some resounding successes, until the sudden and spectacular wipeout in 2011 where his party nearly disappeared and he lost his own seat.

Now the provincial government has confirmed he’ll be one of the people appointed to key roles in its so-called “sovereigntist government” strategy, more details of which will be released next week.

Continue…

Curtains on Duceppe’s second act

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/CP

Righteous outrage always came naturally to Gilles Duceppe. It seemed to live just behind those icy blue eyes of his, to be summoned on command usually when the cameras were rolling. It was his shtick, part and parcel of a narrative crafted over 21 years in federal politics: sovereignists are the only beings morally capable of defending Quebec’s interests in that foreign land of Ottawa. “The smell of scandal is wafting from the office of the Prime Minister,” the former Bloc Québécois leader belted, eyes ablaze, in a typical stump speech last April. “The Bloc will force Stephen Harper to be accountable as it did with the Liberals and the sponsorship scandal. That we will do.”

Odd, then, to see Duceppe embroiled in a scandal of his own, one that has already sullied his formidable reputation and will in all likelihood spell the end of his political career. Certainly, for a man who prided himself on his hot-blooded honesty, it doesn’t look good: as La Presse reported, Duceppe’s party paid its director general Gilbert Gardner with parliamentary funds for upwards of seven years. This is an apparent violation of House rules, which state that such funds must be used for parliamentary, not partisan, ends. La Presse also reported that Duceppe’s office paid the spouse of his chief of staff and allowed her to use parliamentary resources as she produced a book commemorating the Bloc’s 20 years in Ottawa.

The news has already stymied his attempted usurping of the Parti Québécois leadership—a move that, had it been successful, would have ushered the 64-year-old into the second act of his political career.

Continue…

The Bloc wants in on the inquisition

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 12:52 PM - 0 Comments

I’ve got a piece about what Duceppe’s wee tumble from grace means to the sovereignty movement in this week’s dead tree, but a bit about the nuts and bolts.

As we now know, courtesy of La Presse’s excellent Ottawa bureau, Gilles Duceppe paid Bloc director general Gilbert Gardner (to the tune of $100K a year by the end of his mandate) with funds designated for parliamentary, not partisan, ends. Yesterday, Le Devoir tried mightily to run interference, saying the wording was broad enough to allow for such a thing. For the record, here’s the wording of the parliamentary bylaw: “The funds, goods, services and premises provided pursuant to the by-laws are to be used only for the carrying out of Members’ parliamentary functions.”

Do “parliamentary functions” include a campaign to attract the cultural community vote to the Bloc Québécois, which Gardner spearheaded in 2004? Does it include coordinating research and activities with the Parti Québécois, which Gardner also did in 2004? Continue…

Gilles Duceppe: Uh, nope

By Paul Wells - Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments

The former Bloc Québécois leader was, oddly, seen in some quarters to be the best bet to replace Pauline Marois as Parti Québécois leader. Nobody ever really explained why losing all but 2 oops, 4 of his party’s federal seats made him a sure winner provincially, but nonetheless there was a lot of speculation that a coup was imminent.

Then yesterday La Presse reported that Duceppe spent 7 years paying his party’s director-general from a taxpayer-funded budget envelope reserved for parliamentary staff.

Today Duceppe announced he’s going to work full-time clearing his reputation and has no time for politics.

I feel a bit bad that I didn’t tell you about all of this last week, when it was still possible to wring a little suspense out of the whole situation. Now it’s too late, and all I can tell you is you didn’t miss much.

Quebec’s latest imaginary boyfriend

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

Should it come as a suprise that what looked like a peace accord between Gilles Duceppe and Pauline Marois just two months ago turns out to have been a temporary ceasefire? According to credible reports, Duceppe is gunning for Marois’s job—and getting someone who was once very close to Marois, former PQ MNA Louise Beaudoin, who quit the party last year to sit as an independent, to help his chances.

Even considering the PQ’s rich history of backstabbing, Duceppe’s opinion of Marois has seemingly come a long way in a short time. His widely publicized November 8 letter had been unequivocal in its support of Marois. “With this letter, I want to reiterate a message to all sovereigntists,” the former Bloc leader wrote. “Let Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois do their job.” But that was before Marois went ahead and… er, Marois and the rest of the PQ haven’t done much of anything since then. The National Assembly has been on break since December 9 and doesn’t get going again until mid-February. Continue…

Jack Layton 1950-2011

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 22, 2011 at 9:03 AM - 11 Comments

A statement issued this morning by the family of NDP leader Jack Layton.

We deeply regret to inform you that The Honourable Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away at 4:45 am today, Monday August 22. He passed away peacefully at his home surrounded by family and loved ones. Details of Mr. Layton’s funeral arrangements will be forthcoming.

9:11am. Bob Rae, Carolyn Bennett, Hedy Fry, Wayne Easter, Cathy McLeod, Keith Martin and Governor General David Johnston are among those paying their respects.

9:23am. John Geddes explored Jack Layton’s life and times for this Maclean’s cover story last June. We wrote about his new fight with cancer for this cover story earlier this month.

9:28am. Condolences from Rodger Cuzner, Lewis Cardinal, Colin Carrie, Mike Sullivan and John McCallum.

9:36am. NDP deputy leader Libby Davies talks to reporters in St. John’s.

“He was a great Canadian. He gave his life to this country. His commitment to social justice and equality and a better Canada in the world and at home and I think that’s how people saw him,” Davies told reporters. “They saw him as someone who deeply, deeply cared for people. And they saw that in the campaign and all his work. They saw the courage that he had. He faced cancer and he kept on working, doing his job, because he felt so strongly about what he believed in, so I think people think of him as a great Canadian and we think of him as a great leader, in a political sense but (also) in a personal sense.”

9:43am. More on the life of Jack Layton from the CBC, Toronto Star and Canadian Press.

He was a believer. He made that clear in the first sentences of “Speaking Out Louder:” ”Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters, because all of us need to be able to make a difference.”

9:54am. Mr. Layton’s Facebook page has become a makeshift memorial.

9:59am. Greg Fingas marks the NDP leader’s passing.

After spending a decade laying the foundation, Jack Layton has tragically died before getting to complete the house that so many said couldn’t be built. For now, there’s little to do but to offer condolences and grieve the loss of a great Canadian and friend. But hopefully Layton’s inspiration will only encourage us to finish what he started.

10:01am. A statement from the Prime Minister. Continue…

Deal is off between Duceppe and CBC

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

Former Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe will no longer appear on French-language CBC radio once a week in order to discuss lifestyle, sports, social issues, and, if given the opportunity, politics. Just two days after the announcement that Duceppe was to begin a career in broadcasting, the CBC announced that it requires a two-year “cooling off” period before former politicians can report on politics. Duceppe did note that as the child of a famous actor and a father of children involved with theatre, as well as an avid sports fan, he would have many things to discuss other than politics. But according to Radio-Canada, it was Duceppe who made the decision to call off the deal.

Toronto Star

Former BQ leader joins CBC

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 4 Comments

Prominent separatist Gilles Duceppe, the former Bloc Québécois leader will debut a weekly morning segment on the French-language arm of the CBC next Thursday. Duceppe expects to cover a broad range of issues on the new show, entitled called “la performance de la semaine,” such as the financial crisis, Canada’s Arctic, and the health and education systems.

QMI Agency

Nycole Turmel disappoints Stephen Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 8 Comments

The Prime Minister says he is profoundly saddened by Nycole Turmel’s associations with sovereignists.

“I think it’s very disappointing,” Harper said when asked about Turmel by reporters while handing out scholarships at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. “I don’t know that I have a lot to say but I do think Canadians will find this disappointing. I think Canadians expect that any political party that wants to govern the country be unequivocally committed to this country. I think that’s the minimum Canadians expect.”

Mr. Harper’s own historical attitude toward Quebec politics might be said to be somewhat complicated. The NDP says, for instance, that there are two ministers in Mr. Harper’s cabinet who were previously associated with sovereignists. There is, as well, whatever he and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe discussed in 2004 and what he and Tom Flanagan wrote in 1997 about the role Quebec nationalists might play in bringing a conservative government back to power.

This week: Newsmakers

By Ken MacQueen, Nicholas Kohler, Jason Kirby and Nancy MacDonald - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Mike Hewitt/FIFA/Getty Images

Hollywood’s high rollers

His day job is playing such film roles as Spiderman and Nick Carraway, in the upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation. But incredible as it may seem, Tobey Maguire’s hobby—high-stakes poker—may be even more lucrative than the silver screen. Maguire’s winnings, which could amount to as much as $30 to $40 million over three years, came to light in a lawsuit filed against the 35-year-old actor by a group of investors attempting to recoup money lost to Brad Ruderman, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for operating a $5.2-million Ponzi scheme. Ruderman lost much of the money playing Texas Hold ’em, including over $300,000 to Maguire, in an exclusive poker ring that drew players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Now, Ruderman’s investors want some of that cash. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon aren’t being sued, though. “Matt never won,” a whistle-blower said.

One for the lads

As contingencies go, this one was a doozy. David Hart, a 23-year-old Royal Marine killed by a bomb blast in Afghanistan last year, earmarked $160,000 from his life insurance policy for an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas for his best friends and their girlfriends—32 people in all. “In a letter, David said he had had a great life and had no regrets about anything,” one friend told a reporter. “He said, ‘Go and have a good time and spend all this money.’ ” He left a second portion to his family, and the rest to charity. Hart, who died a day short of his 24th birthday, had always dreamed of a Vegas weekend. When his pals return to England they will continue training for a 275-km bike ride to raise money for the Royal Marines Charitable Trust.

Stick with a bike

The 911 call to police in Caseville, Mich., went something like this: “Believe it or not, I just passed about a five-, six-year-old flying down the road with a red Pontiac Sunbird.” Actually, Chief Jamie Learman discovered that the driver, who stood on the floorboard of his stepfather’s car to see over the steering wheel, was a pyjama-clad seven-year-old. He hit speeds of 80 kph during a 32-km drive across Huron County, north of Detroit. Police gingerly boxed him in, stopping him without incident. “He was crying, and just kept saying he wanted to go to his dad’s,” Learman said. “That was pretty much it: he just wanted to go to his dad’s.”

Quit that racquet!

There are tasks where a grunt or two are justified. Piano moving or childbirth come to mind. But tennis? It’s all a bit much, says Ian Richie, head of the All England Lawn and Tennis Club. “Whether you are watching it on TV or here, people don’t particularly like it,” he told Britain’s Telegraph, with precisely the sort of understatement he’d like to see on Wimbledon’s grass courts. Jimmy Connors was a pioneering grunter back in the 1970s. Women then took it up with great enthusiasm. Maria Sharapova was recorded at 105 decibels in 2009—as loud as a car horn from three feet. Portugal’s Michelle Larcher de Brito and Serena Williams have also employed the tactic as a weapon of mass distraction. Richie has made his concerns known, but certain fans find the sound effects appealing. Former Wimbledon Champ Michael Stich accuses the women of trying to “sell sex.”

#DMFail

Think a weakness for sexy social networking, à la Anthony Weiner, is a purely American failing? Turns out the language of <3 knows no borders. Xie Zhiqiang, a health bureau official in the Chinese city of Liyang, set up an account with Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, early this year believing it was a private chat tool. “Please marry me if there is a second life, so that we can live in romance until we are 100 years old,” he wrote to a married woman on the site before the pair were able to follow through on a planned tryst. Xie learned of the mistake after a reporter called about the exchange. “How can you view our messages on Weibo? It is impossible, isn’t it?” He has since been suspended from his job.

Captain courageous

For more than a half-decade, she has been the face of Canadian women’s soccer—though perhaps never more so than now. Christine Sinclair wrote herself into the country’s sports lore for refusing to leave the field after her nose was broken in the opening game of the women’s World Cup at Berlin’s Olympiastadion. “You can’t play on,” Canada’s team doctor, Pietro Braina told her, trying to corral her onto the bench. But the Canadian captain turned, teary-eyed to Italian-born coach Carolina Morace who shrugged, palms up, and nodded to the field. Sinclair, of course, went on to score Canada’s lone goal, on a beautifully executed free kick in the dying minutes of the gutsy 2-1 loss—the first goal the two-time defending champion Germans have allowed since 2003. Sinclair, after having her nose resculpted by a German doctor, took to Twitter to opine on the new appendage: “amazing,” she wrote—joking, of course.

How to lose a billion dollars

It takes a lot to go from “the wealthiest divorcée in history” to bust in two decades—a lot of waste, that is. Patricia Kluge landed a $1-billion settlement when she split from media mogul John Kluge in 1990, only to blow the lot on parties for royalty, a 120-hectare estate in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains and a private winery. Kluge and her third husband, William Moses, have racked up $46 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy last week. Her antiques, and her personal jewellery collection have already been auctioned off, and the Kluge winery was sold at auction—to none other than Donald Trump, her old friend, for $6.2 million. But Kluge isn’t the only one exiting the billionaire club. Research in Motion’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis lost their status after a sharp drop in RIM’s share price cut their personal net worth to around $800 million each, down from $1.8 billion in March.

The Doc returns

After 12 years on the mound for the Toronto Blue Jays before he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, star pitcher Roy Halladay is set, this week, to make his long-awaited return to the mound at Rogers Centre, where he earned both a reputation and a nickname. The two-time Cy Young winner, Toronto’s first pick at the ’95 draft, was set to pitch against the Jays last year, but security concerns around the G20 summit forced the series to be shifted to Philadelphia instead. “Doc,” as he’s known around the league, was calm before the game: “I feel like it’s any other start.”

Tears of joy

“Alec! Now we can get married!” Steve Martin tweeted to his Oscar co-host, after New York legalized gay marriage in the state. “Ok,” Alec Baldwin responded, “but if you play that effing banjo after eleven o’clock…” Lady Gaga, meanwhile, was a bit more emotional: “I can’t stop crying,” said the staunch gay-rights activist. “We did it kids. The revolution is ours to fight.”

Life out of office

It was a good week for Gordon Campbell, who is off to London as Canada’s high commissioner to the U.K.; the plum posting comes with a chauffeur, a chef and an official residence in swank Mayfair. In London, the former B.C. premier, who always resisted the temptation to bash the feds, will further hone his diplomatic skills among royals and the global elite. Gilles Duceppe, an Ottawa basher par excellence, had a big week too, granting his first televised interview since the Bloc’s stunning collapse in the last federal election. Unless Quebecers choose sovereignty, they’ll be “eating gumbo” in 50 years, he told Radio-Canada. He went on to hint at a return to politics, likely at the helm of the PQ, which appears to be imploding, a mere two months after the Bloc. He may well return to helm a sovereignist party, but the better question may be whether anyone will still be interested in the idea.

No medal for the penguin?

Dozer, a three-year-old goldendoodle from Fulton, Md., now merits his own runner’s page on the Maryland Half Marathon website, after escaping his masters Sunday and running the race. He crossed the finish line at the 2:12:24 mark, limping and exhausted, and received a medal from organizers after they discovered he was running solo. Truth is, Dozer probably slipped into the run several miles into the event. Far more impressive is the emperor penguin who swam an astonishing 4,000 km from Antarctica to New Zealand. Happy Feet, as he was nicknamed, was operated on at the Wellington Zoo to remove the stick and pebbles he’d eaten on Peka Peka beach. A committee has been struck to decide whether he should be returned home.

Building ships, and political futures

After a week in Ottawa spent championing the province’s bid for part of an estimated $35 billion in federal shipbuilding contracts, B.C. premier Christy Clark returned home to announce a major investment in a new marine trade training facility on Vancouver Island, sweetening the pot. If successful, the contract, which could create thousands of new jobs and raise millions in spinoffs, could also help Clark in a possible fall election, which could come as early as September.

Returning the warm embrace

Michelle Obama was hailed as a queen in her first solo trip to Africa this week. There, the U.S. First Lady spoke passionately to students, danced with African youth, met with Nelson Mandela and even squeezed in a dinner with her gal-pal Oprah Winfrey, a queen in her own right.

Where are the documents?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 4:24 PM - 38 Comments

On April 14, midway through the election campaign, the two judges involved in the review of Afghan detainee documents wrote to Messrs Harper, Ignatieff and Duceppe to explain that nothing could be released because the House had been dissolved and, thus, the ad hoc committee of MPs no longer existed. Both the Conservative and Liberal sides expressed their desire to see documents released, but nothing more came of it.

On May 6, four days after the vote, the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that the government supported the release of the judges’ report.

On May 17, John Baird, at that time still the government House leader, stated that a number of documents “should be able to be tabled in short order.”

The 41st Parliament was opened on June 3 and has now conducted nine days of business. Nothing has been tabled. In response to questions about when something might be tabled, the Prime Minister’s Office says that the “government will honour its commitment to table the report.”

Assuming the House must be in session for anything to be tabled, there are four days next week to do this before the House breaks for the summer, not due to return until Sept. 19.

How in God’s name do you explain?

By Rick Mercer - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 111 Comments

Rick Mercer

Having led the Conservative party to a majority government, with the Liberal party lying bloodied and dying at his feet, Stephen Harper saw the breadth of his domain and wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer.

Twenty-four hours before Canada went to the polls, I went on BBC Radio International to explain to a very pleasant radio personality with excellent diction why Canada was having yet another election.

Now it’s one thing to go on the radio and blather about politics in Canada—the audience knows the cast of characters and it’s safe to assume they are somewhat familiar with our recent history. But when you go on BBC International, the audience is in the tens of millions worldwide and you have to bear in mind that the average listener is likely tuning in from a shantytown in Nigeria or a loft in Oslo.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 6

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 59 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead

In the end, Stephen Harper’s party won 167 seats and 39.62 per cent of the popular vote. The players in the Conservative war room betting pool guessed low. But then conservatism is sometimes associated, even by conservatives themselves, with pessimism: it holds that human nature is not perfectible on this Earth, and that it rarely does any good to sit around hoping for the best. Harper marked his victory by receiving congratulatory calls from Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The laconic accounts of these calls from Harper’s spokesman mentioned that the current shooting wars in Afghanistan and Libya, where Canada still has soldiers risking their lives, were among the subjects of conversation. Silver linings always come tucked into clouds.

At its worst, Harper’s pessimism about human nature hurts the country and discourages his own government’s political staff. They believe they are doing good work for Canadians. They would like to say so. The layers of threat and secrecy Harper has relied upon feel silly to them. Harper has pursued free trade with Europe without talking about the merits of trade with Europe. He wants to redefine Canada’s border relationship with the United States a lot more than he wants to explain what that would entail.

The budget he will now use his majority to pass listed, but did not describe, more than $2 billion in cuts to government spending. On many days during this campaign, a bored reporter could amuse himself by seeking an explanation for those very considerable cuts from incumbent Conservative cabinet ministers or senior staffers. Not a peep. Now we will all find out. The two drafts of Sheila Fraser’s G8 audit that leaked during the campaign were not the final draft. Now we will get to see the final draft. What the French call “l’usure du pouvoir”—the wear of power—will continue.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 5

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 38 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises

“It’s whether we elect parliamentarians to bicker or build that will be the defining issue of our time,” Jack Layton said at the Toronto convention where he became NDP leader on Jan. 26, 2003. “And we say, let’s build.”

Kudos for prescience, then. (The same weekend, Layton also said, “Canadians must rise up.” Spooky.) But when the building finally paid off and the rising began, it was in Quebec. There are reasons for that. Neither the weakness of the Bloc Québécois nor the NDP’s ability to capitalize on it came out of nowhere. Indeed, the NDP’s attempt to reach out to Quebec francophones is as old as the party itself.

Since the 1930s, the party’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, had support only among Quebec’s anglophone Montrealers. Francophones saw it as a creature of English Canada. The archbishop of Montreal warned Roman Catholics not to support this socialist menace. So at the NDP’s founding convention in 1961, organizers were so happy to see a few francophone nationalists show up that they basically let them write the party’s constitutional policy. The results included very Quebec-friendly language on “co-operative federalism, equality of rights for the French and English languages, the right of a province to opt out of joint federal-provincial programs within provincial jurisdiction without financial penalty, and the recognition of French Canada as a nation,’’ Michael Oliver and Charles Taylor wrote in a 1991 book, Our Canada. The party’s first president, associate president and vice-president were Quebec francophones.

Continue…

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 4

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 25 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat

The Government Congress Centre across from the Château Laurier used to be the old Ottawa train station. In the 1960s, government planners decided they had a better idea and moved the trains out to a secluded corner of southeastern Ottawa. As is often the case with government planners, this was not, in fact, a better idea. They made taking the train a pain and left one of the grandest buildings in the Parliament Hill precinct nearly derelict. Sometimes men in suits shuffle in for conferences. Once a year, reporters are locked up in the old building for a few hours with sandwiches and copies of the federal budget. And for two nights in April, Stephen Harper faced his tormentors for the nationally televised leaders’ debates.

“There was a sense coming out of the debates last time”—in 2008—“that it was a four-on-one ambush,” a Conservative strategist said later. “Harper was under attack from all sides, and our positioning in the last debates was too defensive and we didn’t look our best. We knew that we would still face that three-on-one or four-on-one dynamic this time.” In the end it was three. Green party Leader Elizabeth May wasn’t invited. “The goal was to try and recast or reframe it so that rather than looking like we were the ones under attack, there would be a pivot away from the others, into the camera, to use the opportunity to drive the ballot question with the viewers at home. Number one, don’t make a mistake. Number two, try and strategically minimize the others by making a more direct connection with the viewer at home.”

And indeed, Harper spent the debate’s first night physically pivoting away from whoever was accusing him of something and staring into the camera. Angry Harper would come out if he fought back at his opponents, so he basically didn’t engage. “That’s simply not true,” he said again and again, before telling the home audience a tale of modest, responsible government that had not very much to do with whatever the other guy had just shouted at him.

Continue…

How Justin Trudeau could have changed electoral history

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 5 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters; Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Victory moustaches!

At the Toronto NDP victory celebration, which was filled with people sporting fake Jack Layton moustaches, the partiers kept the music playing over Michael Ignatieff’s concession speech as it was broadcast on giant screens. They turned the music down for all of Gilles Duceppe’s, and for half of Green Leader Elizabeth May’s. When Layton acknowledged the campaigns of the other leaders, May got the most applause. Layton was happy about the re-election of his wife, Olivia Chow. There had been a huge battle to keep her riding safe. The week before the vote, Liberals Bob Rae (who won) and Gerard Kennedy (who lost) went to Chow’s riding to support the Liberal candidate there. The NDP claimed it was an attempt to get at Layton by doing everything they could to take down his wife. Chow had her stepson, Toronto city councillor Mike Layton, helping her with door knocking, since the area he represents overlaps with hers. For his efforts, he ended up with a pile of complaints from constituents about local problems, mostly broken sidewalks and potholes.

Mulcair’s strategy

Each day during the election campaign, Thomas Mulcair would have a conference call with all the other Quebec NDP candidates. There were ridings they knew they could win, ridings in which they thought they had a chance, and ridings where the odds were against them. When candidates would report suspicious things like a large number of their signs being removed, Mulcair said that was their way of knowing the competition must be worried and they took it as a signal they should up their game in those areas.

Continue…

The real reason this election will go down in history

By the editors - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 5 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP; Photograph by Chris Bolin

When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff triggered a federal election by bringing down Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority government in March, he called it “a historic day in the life of Canadian democracy.” It certainly was, though not in the way he might have hoped.

This week’s stunning election has completely rewritten Canada’s political map, and marks a milestone in the country’s history.

The biggest news is Harper’s long-sought majority government. Three consecutive victories is a substantial accomplishment in Canadian politics, and this win—the first majority for a Conservative leader in over two decades—is particularly noteworthy given the fragile beginnings of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Jack Layton and the NDP have seized the title of official Opposition after running a picture-perfect campaign heavy on Layton’s personal appeal and light on traditional NDP policies. The Liberals, meanwhile, have been relegated to third-party status for the first time in history, and the Bloc Québécois, which many saw as a roadblock to coherent national politics, may now be a spent force.

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The West is in and Ontario has joined it

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 147 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Democracy, great and terrible as the sea: unknowable, implacable, irresistible, destroyer of parties, deliverer of others, humbler of leaders, elector of bricklayers and assistant pub managers. Tremble before it, and stay out of its path when it moves.

Five parties were picked up, shaken out and tossed aside by the voters in this astonishing election, but of all the many implications one is fundamental: the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada, as dominant, potentially, in the 21st century as the Liberals were in the 20th. This isn’t just a victory, the first Conservative majority in a generation. It is (at least under the terms of the current electoral system) a realignment. Simply put, the West is in—and Ontario has joined it.

The temptation, looking at the wreckage of the Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties and the meteoric rise of the NDP, is to compare this election to 1993, which shattered Brian Mulroney’s old Conservative coalition into its Bloc and Reform party fragments. But it’s much more consequential than that. In retrospect, 1993 changed very little. It handed power to the Liberals, but it did nothing to alter the long-term dynamic of Canadian politics: the remorseless shrinking of the Liberal base.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 3

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 42 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation

Later, when everything went crazy and pollsters started projecting 100 seats for the NDP, the people running the other parties’ campaigns were still mystified about how it happened. Was it the debates? That’s when the New Democrats began a long, steady climb in the polls. But debates don’t usually blow a campaign wide open, and there wasn’t much in Layton’s performance that anyone could point to as a hall-of-fame moment.

Layton’s breakthrough had its roots in events long before the debates. By the campaign’s end, voters who had never expected to abandon their old allegiances were swinging toward Layton. His performance at the debates, and in the days after, scratched a very specific itch for those voters: a growing frustration with the politics of allegation and accusation that dominated Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. That frustration had been building before the campaign even began, and the 10-day period before the debates was just more evidence that something had to change.

For the Liberals it began on a bright note, with the release in Ottawa of the party’s electoral platform. Two years earlier, Ignatieff had told a reporter that the party’s next platform “is not a Red Book.” Now here he stood, waving a red book. Reaffirming basic principles might not be such a bad thing for a party that had taken a beating. This event played to several strengths of the current Liberal team. Ignatieff spoke off the cuff, and well. The event was webcast on the Internet (the party said nearly 10,000 people watched), so it felt modern. The platform’s themes and the event’s tone were reminiscent of the discussions during Ignatieff’s April 2010 thinkers’ conference in Montreal, so the Liberals looked like an organization with an attention span and some follow-through.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 2

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 25 Comments

Jason Ransom/PMO

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

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Chapter 2: Not feeling the love

If everyone involved is telling the truth about what happened on budget day, then the election happened because the Conservatives and New Democrats didn’t understand each other.

Brad Lavigne is a former chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. Since 2009 he’s been the national director of the NDP, appointed with a mandate to make the party ready for an election at any moment. On March 23 he and Jack Layton read the budget Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was about to table. “It became obvious very quickly that the Conservatives wanted an election,” Lavigne said later.

In fact, Flaherty had told a news conference a few hours before his budget speech that he had made specific concessions to obtain NDP support. So the Conservatives thought they were being conciliatory, and the New Democrats didn’t see any sign of it. Stephen Harper’s government fell into the gap between those two viewpoints.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Introduction and Chapter 1

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 82 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Introduction: Politics turned over

“What a great night! Quelle belle soirée!”

By now Stephen Harper is getting used to making these speeches on the floor of the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary. This was his fourth since 2004, his third as Prime Minister-elect since 2006. Canadians have been watching this man for nearly a decade: his cadences, his body language, his preferred topics and the terms he uses to discuss them are familiar.

It’s just everything else that has changed.

“Friends, I have to say it,” the modern architect of Conservatism as a durable governing force in Canada said. “A strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government.”

It was what he had asked for, in those words, on every day of this astonishing campaign. By now it was an inside joke. But it was also a totem of victory, because for the first time Stephen Harper had won clear command of a Parliament within which no coalition could block or replace him. He is the first party leader in the history of the country to fall short of that goal three times and then succeed. By now the victims of his resilience are stacked outside like cordwood, and it may at last be getting hard for them to hang onto their easy dismissive smirks.

He thanked the voters of Calgary Southwest for returning him—and “for giving me the honour of following in the footsteps of Preston Manning,” a bit of family detail that has been true since he first represented the riding in 2002, but which he had not mentioned in front of a national audience until this night. He spoke of his love for his children, Ben and Rachel, and for his tearful wife, Laureen. He thanked the voters, who “chose hope, unity of purpose and a strong Canada.”

Hang on. Unity of purpose? Six voters in 10 did not vote for his party. Those who voted against him were so desperate for an alternative that more than a million of them abandoned once-sturdy vessels, the Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party of Canada, in favour of a bicyclists’ party led by a former city councillor with a bum hip.

Jack Layton is the evening’s second great story, in some ways fresher: a career politician with a Ph.D. whose opponents, and some of his allies, wrote him off for years as a naïf or a citified bumpkin. Harper himself would say in private that he had urged Layton to take a chance from time to time, but then the Conservative leader would always shrug: “You can’t teach an elephant to dance.” That’s okay. Elephants don’t have to dance. They just walk right over things.

Every election comes down to a choice between “change” and “more of the same.” But in a parliamentary system we get to have both. Harper set the terms for this election two years ago. His agenda was never secret. He would propose stability and warn against risk. He knew the choice would split the electorate, and hoped only for the larger part.

In the end, those Canadians who wanted stability have it. Only seven incumbent Conservatives were defeated on Monday night, compared to 82 incumbents from other parties. The Conservative vote keeps growing, but most of the voters who supported one of Harper’s candidates were doing so for the fourth time. As they head back to the drawing board, Harper’s opponents should start by admitting to themselves the extraordinary buyer satisfaction Harper provides his supporters. He is becoming what he has hoped Conservatism could become in this country: a familiar habit.

But even the voters who rejected Harper’s stability proved him right by preferring risk—and taking a big one. A vote for the Bloc Québécois has, for 20 years, been a respectable way to wave the home flag and choose, in other important ways, not to play with others. A vote for the Bloc combined pride and safety, and why would anyone ever give up a blanket like that? Unless they started hoping for more. Quebecers did. Monday’s awesome swing in that province is many things, but among them it is an expression of hope. So Jack Layton became the first anglophone leader of a national party to win in Quebec when a francophone was on offer. Half of his caucus will now come from Quebec, so he will need to put more French into his speeches than he did in accepting the people’s verdict on election night. He’ll adjust.

Sixty-four per cent of the NDP vote on Monday came from outside Quebec. Layton has MPs from eight provinces. In Saskatchewan, where a trick of the electoral system locked him out, his party won nearly a third of the vote. He is a truly national Opposition leader, facing a truly national Prime Minister, and that alone is good for the country. So it was not mawkish but accurate of the Prime Minister to say Canadians “chose hope” on Monday, even if they chose such starkly different kinds of hope. Even if the results throw some into despair. But we’ll get to the Liberals in a minute.

“Because Canadians chose hope, we can now begin to come together again,” Harper said. “For our part, we are intensely aware that we are, and we must be, the government of all Canadians, including those who did not vote for us.”

This will be the test of the next three or four years in this country. Will Canadians judge that Harper has listened to them? Will he take his majority mandate, as his opponents always warned he would, and take such radical action that Canadians feel betrayed? Or do his opponents now have something worse to fear: the possibility that more Harper will mean more support for Harper, as has been the case now for four elections in a row?

The Prime Minister offered a few hints. “Friends, hear me on this. All those lessons of the past few years—holding to our principles, but also of listening, of caring, of adapting—those lessons that have come with a minority government, we must continue to practise as a majority government.”

So he plans, or says he plans, to stay the course. “Our first job will be to implement what we set out in our budget.” The budget the other parties, including Layton’s, said they would oppose, a budget they cannot now block. The months ahead will show both the extent and the limits of Layton’s new clout.

So the Harpers move back to 24 Sussex, but little of what lies ahead is familiar. The story of how we got here is one of the most amazing stories in the annals of Canadian politics. Once again, Maclean’s has deployed all the resources at our disposal to tell that story. A team of Maclean’s reporters, led by myself, John Geddes and Aaron Wherry, travelled the country to cover the 2011 campaign. We interviewed key members of every leader’s campaign staff, often on the understanding that nothing we were told would be revealed until after Canadians had voted.

Here is that story. In part it is the tale of an election strategy decided by Harper himself in the days after the 2008 coalition crisis nearly took his job away. He announced his plan as soon as he concocted it—a clear choice between a majority and a reincarnated coalition—in the first week of 2009, in an interview with the publisher of this magazine. Michael Ignatieff had two years to prepare but he never found a persuasive answer.

This is also the story of a party, the NDP, that has courted French-speaking voters in Quebec for literally half a century, through good days and bad, and of a leader who has been written off as an also-ran for every one of the four elections in which he improved his party’s standing.

But the story has to begin with Michael Ignatieff. To understand anything else in this election, we have to understand how he became the leader of a once-great party, and how Stephen Harper took him apart, piece by piece.

Chapter 1: The first mistake

Photograph by Christopher Pike

Michael Ignatieff’s gaze drifted upward, past the ceiling of the foyer of the House of Commons and, as it seemed, toward heaven.

It was Friday, March 25. The House of Commons had just voted, by 165 votes to 145, in support of this Liberal motion: “That the House agrees with the finding of the standing committee on procedure and House affairs that the government is in contempt of Parliament, which is unprecedented in Canadian parliamentary history, and consequently, the House has lost confidence in the government.” Tomorrow, an election campaign would begin. Now, the Liberal leader had come out of the Commons chamber into the grandly decorated foyer, backed by a handful of his most telegenic MPs and faced by a pack of reporters and cameras.

The press wanted to know whether he would conspire with the other opposition parties to take power from Stephen Harper after an election, just as Stéphane Dion had tried to do in 2008. Ignatieff was trying to explain that if he had his wish, there wouldn’t even be any other opposition parties. He just wanted a fair fight between his Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. His attempts to make this argument were not going well.

“Let me make it more clear: if you vote for the NDP, if you vote for the Greens, if you vote for the Bloc, you’ll get more of this,” he said, tilting his head back toward the Commons chamber, where the Harper government had so vexed him for two years now. “And Canadians are saying, ‘Enough.’ I can’t be clearer than that.”

Tonda MacCharles, who writes for the Toronto Star and does not like vague answers, cut in. “No, you’re not clear at all. You’re not clear at all, sir, actually. Do you believe that a coalition is a legitimate parliamentary option that you will pursue?”

Ignatieff smiled wanly. Go talk to the Governor General if you want to debate “abstract constitutional principles,” he said. His formidable eyebrows arched up, then pressed downward and together, like twin dolphins at yoga class. He rambled on a bit more.

There is a 2004 novel by the Toronto journalist and author Patricia Pearson called Playing House. Its main character runs into the dashing Harvard academic and essayist Michael Ignatieff at an Italian restaurant in New York City. She’s briefly smitten. “He was, I mused, everything that I’d ever dreamed suitable,” Pearson’s narrator says. “Accomplished, bold, socially gracious, a touch mischievous, emotionally pent-up in a wonderfully provocative way. One could sense real excitement within that crumpet. I was half in love with him by the time he’d analyzed the Middle East and the tartufo had arrived.”

But that was seven years ago, in the pages of a novel. This was right now under TV lights. The leader of the oldest political party in Canada looked as though he might turn to salt.

Finally, Terry Milewski from the CBC put Ignatieff out of his misery and into some deeper misery. “Surely this coalition monkey is going to stay on your back every day of the campaign,” the veteran broadcaster scolded him. “Because people will assume that if you don’t rule it out, that’s because you’ve got something to hide.”

Ignatieff’s forehead was shiny as he started to perspire. “You’re buying the Conservative line here. There’s nothing to hide. I am saying as clearly as I can to the Canadian people, looking them straight in the eye”—here he focused his gaze into the TV camera directly in front of him, so it would seem to a television viewer that Ignatieff really was looking him in the eye—“if you want to replace the Harper government, you’ve got to vote Liberal. It can’t be clearer than that.”

With that, Ignatieff wheeled 90 degrees and fled to the safety of a nearby corridor, his telegenic MPs marching briskly in his wake. The beginning of the election was still a day away. The Liberal leader was already fighting ghosts. He couldn’t get a clear shot at Harper because he had to wrestle with something he might someday do, or not do, depending. It was like struggling in molasses.

A week later, with the campaign under way, a senior Liberal campaign strategist sat in a leather chair in a Toronto office tower and looked back on that scrum as the first sign of trouble in the Liberal campaign. “I thought it was a terrible day,” the strategist said.

“I thought he didn’t answer the question right on the coalition thing—a total Ottawa issue which I hadn’t heard a single person outside of Ottawa talk about. But anyway, I understand why it is what it is.

“But I thought he looked bad; he looked evasive answering the question. He was sweaty. I don’t think he was dressed properly. Other than that, I thought it was a terrific day.” The strategist paused to consider whether he had laid on the sarcasm so thickly that his meaning might be obscured. He decided clarity would be best: “I thought it was just a shitty day.”

Oh, well. The campaign hadn’t even started yet. Five weeks of rallies and speeches lay ahead. Ignatieff had trained for this for a year. No opposition party leader could choose, alone, the moment a campaign began. But right now, hard on the heels of a deeply unimpressive Conservative budget, was the moment the Liberals had used for months as the basis of their election planning. Ignatieff had the best staff, the best equipment, the most up-to-date software, the most motivated troops any Liberal leader had brought to a fight in at least a decade.

But there was something big he did not know, or maybe he knew it in his heart but still hoped it wasn’t true. The something big was this: this campaign had started long ago. Its central target was Ignatieff himself. He and his party had already taken hits so severe that he could not now recover.

Not a politician

Most stories about Michael Ignatieff’s return to Canada after many years abroad begin with three Liberal activists—Ian Davey, Alf Apps and Dan Brock—visiting him at Harvard University in early 2005. But the story really begins a little earlier, in December 2004, when Ignatieff was in Toronto to deliver a dinner lecture. Apps invited him to the boardroom at his law firm, Fasken Martineau, with Brock, another Fasken lawyer, and a few other Liberals. Ignatieff showed up with his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar. Ignatieff said he felt his roots were with the Liberals. His hosts said the party, after only a year of Paul Martin, needed fresh leadership. The meeting ended with Ignatieff saying he was flattered and he had been thinking about Canadian politics for years—especially since the close call of the 1995 referendum.

What was the selling proposition for a guy like this? “Not a politician,” Brock said this spring. “Not part of the internal struggles in the party in the previous decade. In a curious way, a liability of being away, we thought, could be converted to a positive: somebody coming in with a different perspective. Fluently bilingual. Notwithstanding having been away, had a good understanding of the country. And was a risk-taker. Bold and provocative.”

His admirers wrangled an invitation for Ignatieff to deliver a keynote speech at the national Liberal convention in early 2005. Peter C. Newman, the patriarch of Canadian political journalism, wrote a week earlier in the National Post to explain what it all meant. Here was a leader born and bred, Newman wrote, for a party that has often preferred to “pluck from obscurity an untried but inspiring outsider.” King! Pearson! Trudeau! All had come from outside to shake up the party. And now this crumpet. “Even those untutored Liberal apparatchiks who think charisma is a brand of French perfume will recognize his magnetism,” Newman wrote.

At the convention, Ignatieff fumbled for a bit on the podium after realizing he had lost a page of his prepared text, then delivered a very loose-fitting vision of Liberalism built on national unity, Canadian sovereignty and social justice. Less than a year later, he was a candidate for the party’s leadership after Paul Martin managed to lose to Stephen Harper. The timing wasn’t ideal. “None of us thought it was a good idea for him to be in the leadership race after his first election,” Brock told Maclean’s.

But you play the hand you’re dealt. Ignatieff’s CV made him the 2006 leadership campaign’s front-runner. His fondness for freewheeling conversation made him an easy target. He said he wasn’t losing sleep over the war that erupted that summer between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, then overcompensated by calling the Israeli bombing of Qana “a war crime.” “In the high relief of media reporting and then the dynamic of a leadership race, it was incendiary,” Brock said. “So did it need fixing? Listen, you can’t succeed in politics if you have a propensity to light yourself on fire.”

Ignatieff set about learning how to douse flames, and then to avoid igniting them. After he lost the December 2006 leadership vote to Stéphane Dion, he worked methodically on rehabilitating his image. He wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine recanting his support for the Iraq war. He visited Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto to try to correct the impression he was anti-Israel. He muzzled his earlier support for constitutional reform as a remedy to Quebec nationalism.

His admirers worried he might become too bland. “So many people in the party said, after the first leadership race, ‘He needs to become a better politician. He needs to be better at politics,’ ” Brock said. “And our sense was, that’s a mistake. The moment he becomes a good politician, he loses the sense of being kind of over politics.”

Late in 2008, Dion lost the next federal election badly. Ignatieff announced again for the Liberal leadership. But then, weeks after the election, the Harper government delivered a fall economic update that threatened to end public funding for political parties; the great coalition crisis of 2008 was on. Dion and Jack Layton organized an alternative government with Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe’s support. Ignatieff was a reluctant conscript—the last to sign the letter to the governor general that every opposition MP signed, as if his place on the document made any difference.

The coalition effort collapsed. Dion resigned. Ignatieff’s opponents in the leadership race threw in the towel. The dejected Liberals handed him the leadership months before any formal mechanism could ratify the coronation. Still a rookie in federal politics, Ignatieff had become the third Liberal leader, after Bill Graham and Dion, in three years.

The party had never known such frequent turnover at the top. Pierre Trudeau led it right through the ’70s, Jean Chrétien for all of the ’90s. You used to be able to build your life and career around that party. Now the whole organization was buffeted and exhausted by wave after wave of defeat and failed renewal. A few hawks around Ignatieff, including Ian Davey, wanted to provoke an election immediately and take the idea for a coalition into an election in early 2009. It would split the country, but Ignatieff and Layton might take the upper hand. Party veterans, including the aging Sen. David Smith, told Ignatieff the party was in no shape for such a fight.

Ignatieff, unready for the top job and unsure of himself, decided he needed a pause. He extricated himself from the coalition with Layton by supporting Harper’s January 2009 budget. But he tried to look tough by demanding updates every four months on the budget’s progress. “We’re putting Stephen Harper on probation,” he told the cameras. What he had done was give Harper an excuse to spend millions bragging that he was spending billions.

“You make a deal that says every three months they’re going to issue a report on how they’re doing on the recovery plan,” Brock said. “And every three months they do a major media show to talk about all the great things they’re doing. So I don’t know where that idea came from, but it was a colossally stupid one. We had let the PM off the hook.”

Stephen Harper on the rebound was a dangerous character. On May 13, 2009, the Conservatives launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign against the new Liberal leader. The long-time expat bon vivant was “just visiting,” the ads warned. “He didn’t come back for you.”

The architect of the campaign was Patrick Muttart, a soft-spoken political consultant whose fastidious market research and flair for communication made much of the difference between Harper’s 2004 defeat and his 2006 victory. Muttart had the party register a website in Montenegro so its URL could be www.ignatieff.me, reinforcing the notion that the Liberal was “just in it for me.” They stuffed it full of embarrassing old quotes. Ads ran for weeks on television and radio.

“I don’t think we really understood how effective it would be if done over a sustained period of time between writ periods,” Brock said. “We thought, ‘Canadians are going to reject this, because this is just over the top. Canadians are going to say, “You shouldn’t be doing this.” ’ And that’s exactly wrong. Canadians aren’t going to say that. They’re too busy living their lives. They pay a little bit of attention to [politics], and if that little bit of attention is dominated by a particular message, effectively delivered and repeated over and over again, it’s going to sink in. And it did.”

The ad barrage must have felt like a carpet bombing, but in many ways it was more like a surgical strike. Halfway through the 2011 campaign, a Conservative war room operative sat down in an Ottawa pub to discuss the party’s entire strategy against Ignatieff.

“They say that we try to portray Ignatieff in our ads and so on as a weak and flailing professor,” the war room staffer said. “No, that’s how we portrayed Dion. Dion was weak, you know, Dion was ‘not a leader.’ We’ve never said Michael Ignatieff isn’t a leader. We’ve never called him weak. And we’ve never called him a flip-flopper. Even when he changes his mind, we don’t say he’s a flip-flopper. Michael Ignatieff, in our narrative, is a political opportunist who is calculating, who will do and say anything to get elected.

“He’s a schemer. When he says one thing and then he changes his mind the next week, it’s not because he’s indecisive and a flip-flopper. It’s because he’s an opportunist who will say different things to different people. I don’t think we’ve even used the phrase, even internally, ‘He’s a malicious human being.’ But that’s kind of the sentiment we’re getting at. With Dion, we were trying to portray him as weak. You can’t trust him to lead us out of the economic recovery because he’s a weak man. With Ignatieff, it’s ‘He’s a bad man,’ right? He’s someone you don’t want your daughter to marry, right?”

The Conservative staffer’s laudable effort to specify the precise nature of this sustained assault on the character of a national party leader brought to mind a passage from former British prime minister Tony Blair’s 2010 memoir, A Journey. Blair explains how he did away with a succession of Tory opponents.

“So I defined [John] Major as weak; [William] Hague as better at jokes than judgment; [Michael] Howard as an opportunist; [David] Cameron as a flip-flop, not knowing where he wanted to go,” Blair writes.

“Expressed like that, these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring—but that’s their appeal. Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain, or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground-floating voter kind of shrugs their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument. Whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick. And if it does, that’s that. Because in each case, it means they’re not a good leader. So game over.”

‘It was Bob Rae’s idea’

In September 2009, Ignatieff arrived in Sudbury for the annual Liberal end-of-summer caucus retreat. He was in a fix. He had spent the spring demanding changes to Employment Insurance to make it easier for jobless victims of the recession to get benefits. This was worth fighting an election over, he said. Harper sent emissaries to discuss the notion, but negotiations had come to nothing, and now Ignatieff had to decide what to do about it.

At this sort of event, the leader always gives an opening speech to his assembled MPs and senators. “In June, we set out four tests for Stephen Harper,” Ignatieff said. “Mr. Harper, you’ve failed all four. After four years of drift, four years of denial, four years of division, four years of discord”—here he stared right into the camera facing him—“Mr. Harper, your time is up.” The caucus applauded. “Give ’im the boot!” a voice from the crowd said. Ignatieff did a nervous little fist-pump thing to demonstrate a simulacrum of enthusiasm.

Ignatieff’s staff was quietly appalled. “None of us thought that was a good idea. We didn’t have the tools to bring the government down on our own,” Brock said. Then whose idea was this? “Bob Rae’s.”

A couple of days before the speech, Ignatieff convened senior members of caucus to discuss the meeting. “Bob’s exact line was, ‘You can’t be half-pregnant. Either we’re taking these guys on or we’re not. And if we’re taking them on, say so.’ Seems sensible, except it completely ruins your room to manoeuvre.”

As a reward for acting bold, Ignatieff failed to defeat Harper in the Commons. Jack Layton and the NDP supported the Conservatives. For trying to force an election, the Liberals sank in the polls while the Conservatives soared. “People were getting disheartened. The poll numbers were discouraging,” Brock said. “And Ignatieff personally just completely lost his confidence. Completely lost his confidence.”

Four days before Halloween 2009, minutes before 5 p.m., rumours started flying around Ottawa that Ignatieff had fired his chief of staff, Ian Davey, his communications director, Jill Fairbrother, and Brock, his principal secretary. Peter Donolo, who had served as Jean Chrétien’s spokesman through most of the 1990s, was the new chief of staff. It was a desperation move. According to one rumour, the party of Chrétien and Trudeau had sunk to 18 per cent in internal overnight polls.

Patricia Sorbara, a long-time Ontario Liberal organizer, was reading about Donolo’s appointment online when her phone rang. It was Donolo. “Are you calling to talk about how crazy you are?” she asked him.

“No,” Donolo said, “to talk about how crazy you’d be to come with me.” The two had dinner at Terroni, an Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. Neither knew Ignatieff well. Neither had worked hard for the national party for more than a decade. But lifelong partisans hear calls of duty where others might hear only cries of despair. Donolo would be the ideas man. Sorbara would bring discipline and order. Most of the bright young staffers Davey had hired would stay.

The party they were going to help Ignatieff run was in lousy shape. It needed fresh policy and a campaign-ready leader, but most of all it needed an organization on the ground. Donolo and Sorbara visited meetings of the party’s provincial wings, where they spotted riding presidents who’d held the same jobs 30 years earlier. They’d stepped back into their old roles because there was nobody else around to do them. It was hardly a sign of strength.

A thinkers’ conference in Montreal helped refresh the party’s storehouse of ideas. A summer-long bus tour by Ignatieff was obviously designed to get him used to the rigours of campaigning. The tour’s less obvious purpose was to give Liberals on the ground a reason to pick up their game. “So where we had a candidate, for example, in London West, we would call the candidate and call that person’s team and say: ‘Okay, you’ve got to build us a 400-person summer event,’” a senior Liberal organizer said. “And if they could do it, you could get a sense that they were ready.”

For every stop on Ignatieff’s bus tour, teams of local Liberals had to have a venue and a crowd waiting. They were practising for a campaign, along with Ignatieff. The goal: “Get the leader ready, but at the same time get the ground realizing that we’re in a fight,” the organizer said. At one stop on the endless and encouraging Ignatieff bus tour, Sorbara turned to Donolo and said, “The Liberal party is not dead. The Liberal party was just having a little nap, and we’ve managed to wake it up.”

When Ignatieff hired them, Donolo and Sorbara had asked for a year to get ready for the next election. By the fall of 2010, the year was up. Liberals started to tell one another it would soon be time for an election, and then, being Liberals, they began to tell reporters. Late last fall, La Presse ran a column by Vincent Marissal in which he quoted senior Liberals who said they didn’t intend to let the next Harper budget pass a confidence vote if they could help it.

The Conservatives took Marissal’s column as gospel, and pounced. “If the Conservative party wins again, I think the single biggest strategic mistake the Liberal party made was telegraphing their intentions to bring down the government in the fall of 2010,” a senior Harper strategist said. “This basically gave the Conservative party and the operatives and the people who control the money licence to do two things: one, delay the budget as long as possible; and two, start an attack-ad campaign as early as possible and run it as long as possible.”

Jim Flaherty had delivered the 2009 budget on Jan. 27, a not unusual time. This year he waited and waited before finally admitting he would deliver one on March 23. The Conservatives filled the space with by far the longest and heaviest anti-Ignatieff advertising barrage they had ever run. Earlier campaigns had run a few weeks. “This one went on for part of January, all of February and almost all of March,” the Harper strategist said. “And the Grits actually did that to themselves.”

Of course, whenever the Conservatives started a new ad barrage, the Liberals debated about how to respond. Bob Richardson, a Toronto lobbyist who would be in charge of campaign advertising, figured the campaign was on as soon as the Conservatives fired a shot, and was eager to fight back. Donolo had the same instinct.

Gordon Ashworth was Ignatieff’s campaign manager, a role he had played every time Jean Chrétien ran for prime minister. He was more worried than his younger colleagues about the cost of an ad war before an election. Down in the polls and saddled with a leader still learning the craft, the Liberals were not an effective fundraising organization. Ashworth also insisted the Conservative ads wouldn’t do lasting damage, although that attitude may have been influenced by the cost of a real fight back, even if Ashworth had wanted one. “It was a fight that we simply could not win,” a participant in those debates said, “because [the Conservatives] had more resources than we did.”

In the end, the Liberals and NDP finally produced some ads to counter the Conservative barrage. But only the Conservatives had the resources, thanks to effective fundraising, to fund more than a token display. In the weeks before the budget, a Liberal strategist said, the Conservatives bought airtime to run 1,600 ads. “We had 131, and the NDP had, like, 25 or something,” the Liberal said. “It was a massacre.”

Duceppe hands Layton the reins to Quebec

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 1:18 AM - 31 Comments

Gilles Duceppe took all of five minutes to run through the history and victories of the party he led has led for 11 years before announcing he was stepping down as leader of the Bloc Québécois. “I respect the choice and I assume the responsibility in the name of the Bloc Québécois,” Duceppe said serenely. “As a result, I’m quitting my functions. In the next few days, the party’s leadership will figure out what happens next.”

It will be a rough hangover for Bloc supporters tomorrow morning. Having lost official party status, the Bloc is now in for a reckoning—official “long walk in the snow” territory, to borrow a line from the Bloc’s First Nemesis, Pierre Trudeau. Continue…

The Bloc's reckoning

By Martin Patriquin - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 9:48 PM - 8 Comments

I’ve remained resolutely bearish on the NDP’s prospects during this campaign. I wasn’t hatin’, I swear. I think Jack Layton has done an incredible job of filling the vacuum left by Gilles Duceppe’s phone-it-in, entirely middling campaign; I think by using his aw-shucks, joual-inflected French, he did a marvelous job of appealing to those whose vote for the Bloc have become similarly phoned-in over the last two years for more than two decades. And I’m thrilled to bits at the possibility of having a genuine right and left in this country without the latter inevitably coloured by the debate over Quebec separation.

It’s just that there was a hell of a headwind. First: no real ground game to speak of off the island of Montreal; candidates who were, let’s face it, considered fencepost furniture no more than two weeks ago; and this stream of wildly optimistic seat projections, each more crazy than the last. Optimistic winds of change that blow right to the ballot box? Or opportunistic piling on that starts and ends with the call from the pollster? The cynic inevitably believes the latter.

Then, there’s the history: given its support amongst off-island francophones, the Bloc has always had less of a problem with ‘junk vote’ that helps with vote percentage numbers but not in actual seats. (The Bloc tends to win its seats with less of a majority than, say, the Liberals.) It’s why Jean Charest won the popular vote in 1998, but lost the election to Lucien Bouchard.

But here’s the thing: that support has hardened in Montreal and spread significantly off-island, making Jack all the more bulletproof as a result. The sudden switch to the NDP more or less shows how the Bloc no longer has the monopoly on virtue it has enjoyed for over 20 decades. And whether or not the party suffers an out-and-out drubbing tonight, and I still have my doubts despite the buckets of orange paint threatening to spill all over the place, the Bloc is in for a long-overdue reckoning hinted at midway through the campaign.

Former NDP war room guy Robin Sears, with whom I share camera time on Power & Politics, had an interesting point the other day: In 1988, when Ed Broadbent seemed to be coasting into official opposition thanks to a now-familiar wave of goodwill in Quebec, Jacques Parizeau et al. came out en masse against him. Result: the PQ “machine gunned the NDP support,” as Sears put it. They lost something like two-thirds their vote in a matter of weeks. Poof.

Thing is, when the Bloc tried the same thing a few weeks ago—trot out Parizeau for a barn stormer—it utterly fizzled. “He looked like a bitter old man,” Sears said.

Which brings me to the Bloc’s curious mid-campaign switcheroo. Right around the time of the NDP’s bolt in the polls, the Bloc began this back-to-the-roots, proto-sovereignist tack that, on the outset, reeked of desperation—and it may well have been, since the party was basically telling the entire province that they could no longer take the hardcore sovereignist vote for granted.

But I think it might be something other than straight up fear. It hints at what’s to come for the Bloc. Having already lost that monopoly on virtue during the campaign, and with a possible drubbing coming in a matter of hours, the Bloc will retreat and renew. It will turf the mushy and disingenuous mantle of “defending Quebec’s interests” and return to its roots of promoting Quebec sovereignty in Ottawa.

The party that started as a coalition between Progressive Conservatives peeved at the failure of Meech Lake, Liberals peeved at Jean Chrétien and sovereignists peeved at everything will flush the vestiges of the former two from its ranks and its thinking and represent the enduring hardliners in the province. In short, it will become the party it should have always been.

Election night in Canada

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 6:33 PM - 90 Comments

Greetings from a couple floors underneath the Sheraton in downtown Toronto. The stage in the grand ballroom is dramatically lit and the large Canadian flags hang in place. Several hours from now Michael Ignatieff will arrive at the podium and try to find a positive word or two to describe tonight’s results.

Numbers can’t be published until 10pm EST, but we’ll start the three-hour pre-game show shortly.

7:00pm EST… Three questions which may or may not end up being relevant to tonight’s final results. Will the Conservative vote out-perform opinion polls like it did in 2008? Will the Liberal vote collapse any further than it already has? Will the NDP vote realize its potential? Here are Renard Sexton’s thoughts on that last question. Recalling the Liberal-Democrat experience in Britain, he figures it’s coming down three to five points nationally.

7:24pm EST… For whatever they may turn out to be worth, a few of the final seat projections. DemocraticSpace: Conservatives 155, NDP 86, Liberals 47, Bloc Quebecois 20. Election Prediction: Conservatives 146, NDP 65, Liberals 63, Bloc Quebecois 33, Independent 1. ThreeHundredEight: Conservatives 143, NDP 78, Liberals 60, Bloc Quebecois 27. Continue…