inning elections, of course, is what the Liberal Party used to be good at. It held power for almost sixty-nine years in the twentieth century, making it the most successful political entity in the developed world. Its principal opponent was seen as disputatious, mutinous, and self-destructive. Now the roles are reversed. It’s the Conservatives, with their iron communications discipline and relentlessly strategic leader, who seem unbeatable. And it’s the Liberals — still not fully recovered from a decade-long tribal war, and seeking their fifth permanent leader in eight years — who appear doomed. The morning after election night, one former Ignatieff staffer shook her head in wonder. “Harper was popular for two years,” she said. “Why did Ignatieff’s senior staff think he would suddenly stop being popular in a campaign? Were they insane?”There are multiple reasons for Harper’s strength and popularity. For a decade and a bit, the Liberals kept Harper and his cronies far from power by publicizing every boneheaded and bigoted utterance by members of the now defunct Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, depicting their members as Alberta-centric rage-aholics. When Harper became leader of the merged Conservative Party, he purged most of the homophobic, xenophobic, red-necked mouth breathers and cultivated a phony (but effective) Tim Hortons, Everyman populism, reminding anyone who would listen that he grew up in Etobicoke, not Calgary. Once he was elected prime minister, his social conservatism was further curbed by the exigencies of minority governance. We still have abortion, gay marriage, and separation of church and state. (Though, now that the Conservatives have secured a majority, I expect those rights to come under a vigorous assault, likely through the sleight of hand of a private member’s bill.) On the economy, circumstances also obliged Harper to eschew his Reform Party roots. The great global recession saw the prime minister — the one-time president of the National Citizens’ Coalition, no less — transformed into a conventional pork-barrelling politician, merrily dishing out billions on hockey rinks and road paving. All of these factors combined to greatly limit the Liberals’ and NDP’s prospects. But few have been as damaging as the Conservative Party’s advertising campaigns.
If someone tells you political attack ads don’t work, you are either talking to a liar or a fool. I’ve written two books on political advertising and have never minded “going neg” about an opponent’s public record. Ignatieff was wary of me at the start, and that was fine by me; no party leader should ever know everything that his or her war room is up to. With Davey’s approval, my team in Ottawa and Toronto produced a series of nasty anti-Conservative Internet ads under the name “Grit Girl,” in the spring and summer of 2009. The idea was to give the Reformatories, as I called them, a taste of their own medicine, and to do to Harper what his black-hearted admen had done to Paul Martin and Stéphane Dion. The “Grit Girl” ads depicted the Conservatives as corrupt and confused.
One sunny day, Ignatieff spotted me outside his parliamentary offices and expressed his concern about the ads. I sighed. The Conservatives’ barrage of “Just Visiting” commercials, which questioned Ignatieff’s loyalties after his years spent abroad, hadn’t aired yet. But we had heard they were coming, soon, and would be bolstered by a huge ad buy. “Listen, sir,” I told him. “These bastards are getting ready to rip your face off. So I want to rip their faces off first.”
In the end, we dialed down the “Grit Girl” campaign, and very soon the “Just Visiting” spots had accomplished what they were designed to. Ignatieff’s personal numbers were an unmitigated disaster, and whatever honeymoon he had enjoyed was undeniably over. Ignatieff, like Dion, had made the fatal mistake of letting his opponents define him before he could define himself.
y November 2009, with the Liberal Party continuing to slump in the polls, Davey and others had been summarily (and shabbily) dismissed. I wasn’t fired, but I didn’t like the newly minted chief of staff, and he didn’t like me. In May 2010, I emailed Ignatieff and told him I was quitting. “My reasons are myriad,” I wrote. “Chief among them is the regrettable state of the party, and also the appalling way in which my friends have been treated.” Ignatieff sent back a nice note, saying that he would miss my help, but that he understood.The phrase “the regrettable state of the party” was a bit of politesse. My list of frustrations included the undeniable rightward tilt of the party — on Afghanistan, on the oil sands, on health care — and its yawning policy vacuum. It included the collapse of whatever election readiness we had built up, and the fact that Ignatieff hadn’t been cured of any of his bad habits: namely, always talking tough about the Reformatories (for example, calling them corrupt, incompetent, and bullies, blah-blah-blah) but never actually acting on these criticisms by voting against them.
Unencumbered by duties in Ottawa, and worried about the possibility of a Conservative majority, I started talking to other Liberals about finding a fix. The source of our inspiration was an unlikely one, to say the least: Stephen Harper. We had noticed that even with his principal opponent down on the mat, he kept going on about the looming Liberal-socialist-separatist coalition, in his attack ads, in the House of Commons, in every focus-grouped talking point. Harper’s criticism of coalitions was peculiar, because the Conservative Party was itself the result of a successful merger, and he had been its chief architect. In fact, if history is to remember the prime minister for anything, it would be for bringing together the warring factions on the right.
We knew why Harper fulminated against a coalition on the left: he feared it. Polls indicated that Canadians were mostly supportive of the concept, provided it didn’t involve the Bloc. And a coalition on the left could defeat Harper, just as one on the right had taken down Paul Martin in 2006. It was simple — or maybe not. It took three election losses (in 1993, 1997, and 2000) before the Reform, the Alliance, and the Progressive Conservatives realized they would benefit from a merger. Would it take just as long for the Liberals and the New Democrats to come to the same conclusion? Based on our own recent experience, probably.
Here’s a little history: At a provincial Liberal fundraiser at the Royal York hotel in Toronto in November 2008, Brian Topp, an adviser to several federal and provincial NDP leaders, approached me and Paul Zed, the former Liberal MP who would soon become Ignatieff’s chief of staff. Topp said he needed our help to form a coalition to topple the Conservatives. We thought he was kidding.
“Mr. Dion and Mr. Layton have spoken,” Topp said, not sounding the least bit drunk. “And Mr. Broadbent has spoken to Mr. Chrétien. There are others.” Topp wasn’t bullshitting. We continued our chat in the Royal York’s bar. By early the next morning, news of the coalition talks had spread to other Liberals, and most of us were decidedly unenthusiastic. We wanted to form government the old-fashioned way: by winning a general election. Harper, we felt, would depict the coalition as an undemocratic plot to overturn the election result, and the Liberal Party would pay dearly. In the end, Topp’s overture was declined. And that, as it turned out, was a mistake.
n the spring of 2010, a number of eminent Liberals (among them Jean Chrétien) and New Democrats (Ed Broadbent, Roy Romanow) started musing, once again, about bringing the two parties together — through co-operation, or a coalition. The impetus was simple: Harper and the Conservative Party were getting stronger; Ignatieff and the Liberals were getting weaker. Grassroots progressives were worried, too. After four years of a Conservative minority government, many in each party’s base were prepared to consider a coalition, despite concerns by some about the suitability of the right-leaning Ignatieff as its leader.
