Angry in the Great White North

As premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1993, Bob Rae was a miserable disaster.  He took an economy that was entering into a recession, and applied solid NDP economic theory to the problem.  Spend, spend, spend.  The province went billions into debt as Bob Rae lavished money on public programs, and in the end, Rae was forced to compel public employees to take unpaid days off as a cost saving measure.  You see, the recession was still there, even after the billions in spending.  And now a big deficit that needed to be paid down.

No one looks back on Bob Rae's turn as premier with anything but disgust.

That's not exactly true.  Some people thought he did ok.  James Laxer, a major player in Canada's left, thinks Bob Rae's problems were no fault of his own, and that what Bob Rae needed was another five years as premier:

The point here is not to rehash arguments that have been rehearsed a hundred times, but to stress the truly dire situation in which the Rae government found itself through no fault of its own. Ironically, had Rae stayed in power for another five years, the province would have returned to fiscal health and a balanced budget. Instead the people opted for Mike Harris whose Common Sense Revolution handed huge tax cuts to the highest income earners, and imperiled the government’s recovery and its ability to undertake new social programs. Ontario has still not rebounded from the nightmare of the Harris-Eves years.

Note that former NDP leadership candidate James Laxer wrote this in 2006, after Bob Rae had become a Liberal.  Indeed, Laxer mutes is criticism of Bob Rae's shift from the NDP.  I find that interesting.

Why does this matter?  Consider this observation in the Globe and Mail by Lawrence Martin concerning the baggage from Rae's turn as premier of Ontario that is holding Bob Rae back:

The economic upheaval couldn't have come at a worse moment for the Rae bid as it rekindles memories of his recession-management difficulties as Ontario premier. In the early going, the tumbling economy is sucking the air out of his effort like it did John McCain's presidential bid. It's hardly fair to suggest Mr. Rae would be the same type of economic manager today as he was 16 years ago...Bob Rae should have had no problem making the case he has changed. What better evidence is there than that he has switched parties - abandoning his NDP affiliation? It's a point he has not made emphatically enough.

So why isn't Bob Rae making that point emphatically enough?  I wonder if the clue is in people like James Laxer.  We know that Bob Rae would continue to lead the Liberal Party from the left, as Stephane Dion did (though with far less focus on the environment) compared to Michael Ignatieff's desire to pull the party back to the centre.

If Bob Rae is still firmly on the left side of the Liberal Party, he has to be careful in repudiating his own left-of-centre history.  Indeed, he tries to talk of those years as a good experience, and avoids saying flat out that socialist economic theory is inherently dangerous:

Facing his biggest liability head-on, Liberal leadership hopeful Bob Rae told a business audience today that he learned major lessons and would do things differently than he did as NDP premier of Ontario during the recession of the early 1990s.

Rae says he learned the hard way the speed with which a falling economy can cause government revenues to evaporate and the need to pull industry, other governments, labour and community leaders to the table to build consensus for tough action.

"To lead a government in 1990 was a challenge," Rae (Toronto Centre) told about 300 people at the Canadian Club of Toronto, reiterating his theme from his official launch into the race yesterday. According to Rae advisers, the idea is to try and turn a potential liability into an asset.

Which brings me to considering what Bob Rae's plan really is?  How does he plan to reinvigorate the Liberal Party?  Where is this new blood coming from?

He has a fan in James Laxer, who is not giving Bob Rae too much grief for switching to the Liberals, and who thinks Rae was on the right economic track in 1990.  How many other fans of Bob Rae are there in the NDP? 

Would Bob Rae as Liberal leader make a play for the NDP, promising that as Liberals, they could actually win power?  But then that would only work if Bob Rae could convince people like Laxer that the Liberal Party would be the new NDP (or something close enough).

And for that argument to work, Bob Rae has to be very careful not to be too strident in his criticisms of his own NDP policies.  Those are policies that still resonate with NDP supporters.  People Bob Rae is hoping to make into Liberal supporters, and that has limited Bob Rae's range of action in the way that has puzzled Lawrence Martin.

It's just a theory.

Update: A theory that might be full of hot air, thanks to Gayle pointing me to this editorial in the National Post:

"I concluded after my time in office that it was very, very tough to convince a whole section of the party that the market was a great thing and it was something to be celebrated and it was not something to run away from, and that we had to recognize that the world had changed all around us and globalization was here to stay. I find that resistance to those ideas is still pretty strong in the NDP when you actually look at it. I mean the resistance to any tax cuts ... the way in which they look at business with a sort of skeptical eye all the time, the assumption that business is bad and government is good and private is bad and public is good. That still lies pretty deep in a lot of sections of the NDP, and I frankly just decided that I wasn't going to spend my life inside trying to fight that -- that I was really fundamentally going to be happier in another political party."

Such sentiments are no less stirring to the conservative ear than the best of Michael Ignatieff's writings on human rights and the international order. A Bob Rae-led Liberal party would be one that, at the very least, pays lip service to the idea that we must grow and not spend our way out of economic trouble. And that would be a marked upgrade from the Stephane Dion model.

So maybe Bob Rae is really reformed...but I still think part of Bob Rae's plan is to act as a magnet for some segment of the NDP, and that means treading carefully when it comes to sounding like a fiscal conservative or being too harsh with his own self-criticism.