Bob Rae deserves a misdemeanour, or more, for his foolish, immature and damaging behaviour in Mississauga yesterday. And The Globe and Mail should be correcting its false and misleading headline. Ontario federal Liberal party executives invited the three declared leadership candidates, Rae, Ignatieff and LeBlanc, to speak a long scheduled business meeting in a “get to know you” session. It was never planned as an open meeting and all three agreed to attend more than a week ago. It was never, as The Globe describes it, a “leadership forum“. It was a leadership discussion tacked-on to another meeting because a group of interested Liberals happened to be all in the same place at the same time.
For Rae to show up and have a hissy fit because media were not invited to sit-in on the session was nothing more than a childish attempt to get some press coverage when most eyes were on the Ignatieff campaign. It was damaging to his own campaign and. more importantly, the the Liberal Party (which can ill afford more damage). As a tactic it was suggestive that Rae has been spending too much time around the inflated drama drag-queens in his gay-village constituency
It can be debated whether the business meeting was the ideal place for the first joint presentation, but it was in no way a slight to Liberal Party members in general. The campaign is less than a week old, we have only a rough idea of who the candidates will be and none of them have fleshed-out their positions on the issues that will be the focus of their campaigns There will be many, many more opportunities for party members to hear the candidates - in public – between now and April 30.
If Rae thought it was wrong for the first ”all candidates“ discussion to be in private, he should not have agreed to attend in the first place. The rules did not change suddenly; he attempted to change them without prior notice and, in the process, made an ass of himself and helped reinforce, in the public’s mind, an image of a bumbling party still operating in the back-rooms. This is not a way to rebuild the Liberal brand. Shame on you, Bob.
And if Bob thinks he is any closer to winning this party members support as a result of this antic, he is dead wrong.
As a post script, Dominic LeBlanc’s flip-flop, first agreeing with Rae and then attacking both Rae and Ignatieff, shows his candidacy has a lot of maturing to undergo. Michael Ignatieff’s failure to see how the media could spin the forum also may be a sign that he is a little too close, still, to the back-rooms, a position that drove too many delegates to a choice they now regret.
