National Affairs
Harper should like the Liberal result
Claire Hoy

In early October, when the Liberals announced the results of delegate balloting - locking delegates to a particular candidate for the convention’s opening ballot - Stephan Dion, the eventual winner, was in a virtual tie for third place with Gerard Kennedy, well back of the front-runners, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae.

Few people gave him a chance.

But, as you likely know, a funny thing happened last weekend, and Dion ended up by soundly defeating Ignatieff in the fourth and final ballot. Not long after his victory speech, Dion took a congratulatory call from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And so it begins; the quick-time march to an inevitable spring election.

While Harper, as you’d expect, said all the polite things in lauding Dion’s i m p r e s s i v e achievement, there is little doubt that Harper, next to Dion himself, is the happiest politician in the land today.

Why? Well, arithmetic being what it is - and with all due respect to Atlantic Canada and the West - winners and losers tend to be determined in Central Canada, i.e. Ontario and Quebec, which together hold well over half of the total Commons seats. Ontario alone, with 106 seats, have more than one-third of the federal total.

The Liberals won all those majority governments under Jean Chretien throughout the 1990s and beyond by doing okay in Quebec and practically sweeping Ontario. All the other seats were pure gravy.

At the same time, the Conservatives - wracked by internal dissensions - won nothing in Quebec and very little in Ontario.

But that changed in 2004 - the Tories not only won 40 Ontario seats, their highest total since Brian Mulroney won 46 in 1988 - but they even won 10 seats in Quebec, even outpolling the Liberals overall (although the Liberals won three more seats.)

So which of the top four Liberal leadership candidates - i.e. Dion, Kennedy, Rae and Ignatieff - was least likely to turn things around in those two key provinces?

You guessed it. Stephan Dion.

For starters, let’s dismiss that silly public opinion poll run by CTV and the Globe and Mail purporting to show Dion and the Liberals well ahead of Harper’s Tories. Oh, please. That’s just a classic example of the irresponsible use of polls by the media. Of course a party which has spent the previous week dominating the newspapers and airwaves will show well in an instant snapshot. So what? That poll should be on the entertainment page, not the front page.

Meanwhile, back at reality, the truth is that Dion, a decent and honorable man to be sure, is nonetheless an extremely unpopular figure in his home province - he couldn’t even beat the outsider Ignatieff in delegate selection - and he will not play well in Ontario either, where even Liberal delegates had him a distant fourth, well behind the three other major candidates.

During his final convention showdown with Ignatieff, in fact, the bulk of the party’s Quebec delegates support Ignatieff, not Dion. If even his fellow Quebec Liberals don’t support him, what chance does he have of restoring the lost Liberal glory in there?

Dion in Quebec, has the same problems that Rae had in Ontario. Rae likely lost his leadership bid because so many Ontario Liberal delegates, the largest single block at the convention, could not forgive him for his NDP background - and his years of vicious attacks against them - so they didn’t vote for him.

To his credit, Dion, Ottawa’s pit bull during the referendum debates, stood firmly for a strong Canada, but in the process he offended not only the hardcore separatists - Hurrah! Hurrah! - but also all those soft nationalists who the Liberals need to attract if they are to return to glory. He’s not the guy to do it, period.

Nor is Dion likely to prosper in Ontario. He’s dull and relatively unknown. And, like it or not, his heavy accent makes his message hard to follow, hardly a formula for success. (Yes, Chretien overcame that, but then he had the luxury of no serious competition in Ontario. Dion doesn’t have that luxury, alas.)

One person who should worry, however, is NDP Jack Layton, Given the recent strong showing of the Green Party in a London by-election - which siphoned NDP votes - and Dion’s emphasis on his record as environment minister -he boasts of signing Kyoto (and even named his dog Kyoto), but doesn’t mention the fact he failed to meet its’ promises - all those green scarves around the necks of Dion’s convention supporters couldn’t have been a pleasant sight for Layton.

Obviously, in the afterglow of their leadership convention - and further buoyed by that aforementioned poll - Dion and the Liberals now see themselves solidly back on their way to power.

As for Harper, he must be quietly raising a glass himself.

He couldn’t have hoped for a better result.