Rossi's leap: in politics, worry is constant, happiness elusive

By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 20 Comments

Interesting to hear former Liberal Rocco Rossi, on announcing that he’s switching teams to run for the Ontario Conservatives, describing the province’s Liberal government as pursuing a “don’t worry, be happy” strategy. That’s supposed to be bad, right? But I looked it up and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was a Number 1 single in 1988, and garnered best song, record and male pop vocal Grammys for Bobby McFerrin (who’s gone on to be welcomed as serious fun in interesting places). Not bad. Meanwhile, the provincial Conservatives have seen their polling lead shrink from wide to thin.

Two appendices to 'The coming Tory majority'

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:06 PM - 0 Comments

My story for print Maclean’s on Conservative fortunes in provincial politics is now on the web. As is often the case, I had help with the story from lots of people who didn’t make it into the finished version, and gathered information and had thoughts that didn’t quite fit.

1) A lot could still happen to derail or deplete the in-progress “blue surge”, but the mere possibility does create problems for the folk wisdom that the party in power in Ottawa tends to lose in the provinces. Trudeau’s dynamic personality had completely wiped out the Liberal brand in provincial politics by 1980; the Mulroney years left the Conservatives barely hanging on in the Prairies; Chretien’s brought them back, in ’04 and ’05, to the peak they’re now trying to re-climb. Wouldn’t we expect the Harper government to create costs for Conservatives like David Alward?

The thing is, if you ask a political scientist about this folk wisdom they’ll make an unsweetened-lemonade face. Despite the apparent trends of the last 30 or 40 years, there’s still a sizable controversy about how independent the federal and provincial political scenes are.

A couple of years ago, UBC’s Fred Cutler made a close study of Ontario’s 2003 election and found that the decisions of Ontario voters were dominated by “arena-specific factors”. Cutler’s analysis confirmed what I suppose we all imagine to be true of ourselves: we mostly aren’t blind automatons who adhere to national brands. Knowing a voter’s national-level identification gave you surprisingly little additional information about how he would vote in Ontario in ’03, even though there was a perfect one-to-one mapping between federal and provincial ridings and the same parties were contending in both arenas. Voters chose their party pretty strictly on within-Ontario criteria, especially economically. Their degree of satisfaction with the federal government didn’t affect their Ontario decision.

Cutler has been building and juggling a dataset that contains every provincial and federal election since Confederation, and he has ransacked it for several different types of effect of federal politics on provincial ones. He says you can find evidence for common forces in the background—policy fashions, economic factors—that predispose voters to choose the same party on both levels. At the same time there is also evidence the other way, for the folk wisdom that voters act to “check” the party in power at the top—particularly after three or four years in office. “But electorates,” Cutler told me, “neither check nor balance the federal government when it is a minority. They don’t need to.”

2) There’s a passing mention in my story of new Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Canada’s one-man tea party. I was talking to people a full week before the election, and I had to be careful about presuming a particular result. But the writing was on the wall. Ford’s name came up a lot; he could easily have been the whole story.

Ford terrifies all the right people. How he will perform as mayor, God knows. But his triumph has relevance for provincial and federal politics. Graham Murray, editor of the Inside Queen’s Park newsletter, was the first to talk to me about how a Ford win would affect the prestige of “strategic voting”. We agreed that it is hard to say exactly how.

Some people think Ford’s win is so overwhelming that a concerted push behind one candidate of the left could never have mattered. I wonder what Linda Duncan thinks about that? Ford didn’t win half the vote, and the next two candidates’ combined votes would have beaten him—even though Rocco Rossi dropped out (or was forced out by defecting advisors) so late that his advance voters weren’t available to help anybody. It seems to me, from a very distant vantage point, that Ford couldn’t have arranged the campaign any better to suit himself. In the debates he almost seemed to take on the heroic aspect of a Roman gladiator fending off concerted attacks from a half-dozen smaller animals—ocelots? Weasels?

For many Torontonians, particularly the ones most inclined to think of themselves as representing the spirit of the city, the idea of Ford bedecked in the velvet-lined chain of office may be an ongoing torture. That, in turn, could encourage strategic voting and even overt trade-offs on the polite left—which has always found such affairs distasteful, because its adherents see politics as a means of self-expression and cosmic justice rather than a method of selecting managers and keeping them appropriately off-balance. The idea of voting for the least horrible bastard who can actually win isn’t very romantic. But maybe it has a certain appeal today that it didn’t before?

Toronto Gay Pride—politics, drag and dancing

By Mitchel Raphael - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

Politicos and celebrities marched with drag queens in this year’s Pride parade in Toronto. Some were armed with water guns. Below, Rick Mercer and Belinda Stronach.

.

Proud Liberals carry the Liberal banner, while Bob Rae carries the Canadian flag.

Continue…

MPs attend ACTION party

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 10:09 AM - 6 Comments

The politicos came out for the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) annual ACTION party in Toronto.  (Left to right) Bernie Farber, Nathan Jacobson and Transport Minister John Baird. Behind Farber is Jamie Ellerton, aide to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

.

Baird and Toronto mayoral hopeful George Smitherman.

Continue…

Lisa Raitt and the tiger at the Dragon Ball

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Labour Minister Lisa Raitt and her partner Bruce Wood pet a small Siberian tiger at this year’s Dragon Ball in Toronto. The mega gala, which celebrated the Year of the Tiger, raised money for the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care.

.

NDP leader Jack Layton and his wife, MP Olivia Chow.

.

Continue…

The Liberal Christmas party

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 11:53 AM - 11 Comments

(Left to right) MPs Navdeep Bains, Mark Holland, Martha Hall Findlay, Mario Silva, Gerard Kennedy and former MP Omar Alghabra.

.

MP Mario Silva (centre) with Navdeep Bains (right).

.

Continue…

The Commons: Who is this man?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 5:37 PM - 68 Comments

The Scene. Near the end of his visit to the National Press Theatre the other day, having completed his prepared statement and having finished his response to the last of two dozen questions from the assembled reporters, Michael Ignatieff was afforded a chance to make an exit. But he was not ready to leave. He had one last answer. To a question that hadn’t been asked.

“If you’ll allow me to conclude on one note,” he said. “My stake in this is actually proving to Canadians, who are very skeptical about politics and our political system, that we can make this system work for them. That we can hold a government to account, get them to improve their performance, get good government for Canadians. That’s the big prize here actually. Make Canadians feel we got a pretty good system here and it works for Canadians and it delivers results for them. We get that, good result.”

He then turned to his right and walked away from the podium, a pensive look on his face—perhaps considering his own words, perhaps worrying that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, perhaps wondering if he’d made much sense to anyone in the room.

It is dangerous to believe what a politician says, or even to believe that he believes what he says. It is impossible, ultimately, to separate the individual from his stated purpose of persuasion and his unending pursuit of public approval. But it is tempting to believe Mr. Ignatieff genuinely believes this much. If only because, in relative terms, it sounded so odd. So out of sync with everything else, simultaneously quaint and precocious, alluring and disorienting.

Continue…

Exclusive: The Liberal plan to respond to the Harper ads

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 1:43 PM - 327 Comments

The Conservative advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff has spurred the federal Liberals to sharply accelerate their fundraising activity so they can pay for a “focused response to the personal attacks” on the new leader, Maclean’s has learned.

The Liberals are rushing ahead with a major change to the party’s organization, which only two weeks ago they had planned for the autumn, so they can be ready for a much more robust summer of activity. Emergency meetings of the Liberals’ various governing bodies are underway, with more planned for next week. The goal: a $25 million annual war chest and a vastly expanded grassroots organization to pay for it. Continue…

Rocco Rossi on bringing (heavily discounted) Obama support numbers to Canada's Liberals

By John Geddes - Friday, May 1, 2009 at 4:21 PM - 2 Comments

Rocco Rossi is one of the key figures in the new Michael Ignatieff coterie that’s now running the Liberal Party of Canada, a crew many rank-and-file Liberals are getting to know for the first time at this week’s party convention in Vancouver. (We profiled him Maclean’s early this year, soon after Ignatieff recruited him to be the party’s new national director.)

Tall, voluble, and gleaming of pate and tooth, Rossi is impossible to miss in the corridors at the Vancouver Convention Centre. I buttonholed him outside a policy session earlier today to ask about his priorities as the party’s national director, which focus on upgrading Liberal software for tracking supporters and voters, and ramping up fund raising. After the jump, an edited transcript.
Continue…

What's up at the Liberal convention. (Or should that be "Liberalist"?)

By John Geddes - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 1:56 PM - 5 Comments

As delegates assemble here at the new Vancouver Convention Centre for the Liberal biennial convention, chatter in the hallways suggests to me that five points (itemized after the break) are worth watching over the next three days.
Continue…

Indomitable showman

By John Geddes - Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 3 Comments

Rocco Rossi, the man Michael Ignatieff has chosen to restore the Liberal party’s financial health, might just be the reason Ignatieff is the party’s leader. The link goes back to 1998, when Ignatieff, then a globe-trotting author and broadcaster, gave a talk at the University of Toronto on the future of liberalism. Attending together were Keith Davey, the Liberal backroom icon, and Rossi, a young businessman and party stalwart. Davey was so impressed he told Rossi afterwards that Ignatieff might make a future Liberal leader.

Six years later Rossi was lunching with Davey’s son Ian. They were bemoaning the state of the party, which was then being battered by the sponsorship scandal. Who, they wondered, could revive its fortunes? Rossi recalled the elder Davey’s instinct on Ignatieff. Ian Davey soon led a small delegation to visit Ignatieff, who was by then teaching at Harvard, to try to coax him home. The rest is recent history.

Continue…