Think the Liberals triumphed on by-election night? Think again
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
March 19, 2008 at 4:16 AM EDT
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion tried to spin Monday's by-elections into some sort of party triumph and, for the most part, the media fell for it. The facts, as opposed to the spin, suggest otherwise. The Liberals retained two Toronto ridings where, with due respect to the party's candidates, proverbial yellow dogs could have won.
That an already Toronto top-heavy party held two Toronto seats was no news at all; that the Liberals nearly blew a safe seat in Vancouver and lost one it shouldn't have in northern Saskatchewan represented the serious news of the night.
Perhaps because the media are concentrated in Toronto, or because the two successful Liberal candidates - Bob Rae and Martha Hall Findlay - had profiles, or because Mr. Dion, by his presence in Toronto, wished to associate himself with victory, or because Toronto is in the Eastern time zone and thus presents its "news" earlier, the story got turned upside down. It was a dispiriting night for the Liberals, nationally speaking, which means for Mr. Dion, too.
The Liberals had captured Toronto Centre (Mr. Rae's riding) with 52 per cent of the vote and Willowdale (Ms. Hall Findlay's) with 55 per cent in the 2006 general election. For the Liberals, they were the equivalent of Alberta rural ridings for the Conservatives. The only issue, therefore, was whether the Liberal candidates would hold the party's share of the popular vote from the general election - which they did, and more, pushing that share to 59 per cent.
But in Vancouver Quadra, a silk-stocking riding held by the Liberals since John Turner's leadership, the 2006 election result that gave the Liberals 49 per cent to the Conservatives' 29 per cent dropped to 36.1 per cent versus 35.5 per cent on Monday night. The Greens improved to an impressive 13.5 per cent; the Conservatives' share rose by six points.
Stephen Owen had been the Liberal MP. He was respected and popular and a former provincial ombudsman, so some of the general election margin was an "Owen" vote that would disappear with his departure. But still, for a party in between elections, when the opposition usually does well, losing 13 points spells disappointment, if not trouble.
The most interesting riding of the four by-elections was also the most complicated and, for the Liberals (and maybe Canadian politics as a whole), the most depressing.
Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River runs north from Prince Albert into Saskatchewan's forbidding Canadian Shield country. It's roughly divided, ethnically, into one-third white, one-third Métis and one-third aboriginal. For the Liberals to win, they need aboriginal votes to offset the big Conservative advantages among non-aboriginals.
That is what happened in the general election, when a grand chief, Gary Merasty, took the riding for the Liberals by 67 votes. He did it by getting aboriginals to vote, so he carried Indian communities such as Buffalo Narrows and Pelican Narrows by huge majorities.
Mr. Merasty was something special: a young but experienced, highly articulate and intelligent leader who, had he stayed in national politics, might have had a big future. He certainly would have been an excellent role model and spokesperson for aboriginal issues. He was exactly the kind of aboriginal person national politics desperately needs.
But, disillusioned with Ottawa, Mr. Merasty quit. He was never mentored properly by Saskatchewan's Liberal kingpin, Ralph Goodale, and felt aggrieved when Mr. Dion passed him over as aboriginal affairs critic. Maybe the adjustment from being a grand chief to opposition backbencher was a step down. Maybe Mr. Merasty felt Ottawa a cold and remote place. (He wouldn't be first person to think so.) Whatever, the party leadership should have bent over backward to help him. But Mr. Merasty left, causing the by-election, which, in turn, produced a mini-fiasco when Mr. Dion hand-picked a former provincial NDP minister as the candidate, thereby annoying David Orchard, a renegade Liberal who had backed Mr. Dion and had wanted to run. The results: an internal Liberal mess, aboriginal voters who stayed home en masse, and an easy Conservative victory by 16 points, 47.8 per cent to 31.4 per cent.
The Saskatchewan riding, not the easy Toronto ones, required skillful handling by the leader and his advisers. The thumping Liberal loss spoke volumes.
