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‘Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.’ — Napoleon Bonaparte
“I’ve learned a long time ago that when your opponents are busy beating themselves up, it’s best to leave them alone,” says Outremont NDP MP Thomas Mulcair. “Right now the Liberal party is imploding. But to use another more prosaic aphorism that we were all taught when we all learning how to drive, if you pay too much attention to the crash and burn on the other side of the road, you might be distracted from what’s in front of you. What’s in front of me is a lot of work organizing the NDP in Quebec and continuing to watch our vote grow. That’s what we’re working on, both in the party and in my riding office.”
Grits still divided
Mulcair was reacting to the Liberals’ latest series of problems, which were set off several weeks ago when an internal dispute broke out publicly among Liberal insiders over who would have the right to run for the party in the riding of Outremont. Mulcair, who had been a member of Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s Liberal cabinet up to 2006, but made the controversial decision to resign rather than accept a lesser cabinet posting, ran in Outremont in the 2007 federal election and succeeded in routing the Liberals who had been able to count on Outremont as a stronghold since 1935.
In a widening rift that may be leading towards yet another leadership crisis within the Liberal party, Bourassa MP Denis Coderre, the Liberals’ point man for Quebec, resigned his lieutenantship after Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff decided last month to override Coderre’s privilege of having the final say as to who would run for the Liberals in Outremont. Coderre had chosen businesswoman Nathalie Le Prohon, but Ignatieff subsequently ordered an open nomination process, which cleared the way for former Liberal cabinet minister Martin Cauchon as the mostly likely candidate to be chosen for Outremont. The dispute is taking place along previously unhealed fissures in the Liberal party.
Cracks resurface
During the turmoil that simmered internally when leadership hopeful Paul Martin was clandestinely competing for the leadership against then-leader Jean Chrétien, two factions formed. Coderre sided with Martin, while Cauchon remained loyal to Chrétien. Cauchon had been touted as a successor to Chrétien as Liberal leader. Coderre is said to regard Cauchon as a rival, since Coderre is rumoured to have his own aspirations for the leadership. Despite the insistence of Liberal organizers that the party is united under Ignatieff’s leadership, his recent actions are seen as the continuation of an unsettled feud still dividing the Liberal party. Coderre added fuel to the fire when he publicly accused Ignatieff of relying on political advisers in Toronto for the party’s decisions in Quebec.
Following an announcement by the Liberals last month that they would no longer be supporting the minority Conservative government, the party triggered a vote of non-confidence. Although the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois voted in favour of the motion, the Tories survived when the NDP abstained. “If Mr. Harper wants an election, he can provoke it either directly by going to the governor-general and asking for a writ, in which case there is an election, or he can also do it indirectly,” says Mulcair. “For example, last year when he came in with a statement that he made a confidence motion on, that eventually provoked the creation of the coalition, he started attacking women’s rights, he started attacking the environment.
Voters fed up: Mulcair
“So obviously he knows that the NDP would have no choice but to vote him down, and if the other parties vote him down then we have an election. But my overarching concern is to make Parliament work, because I also think that the Canadian voter is fed up with having a federal general election almost every year. In my riding of Outremont, believe it or not, if we had had an election this fall, it would have been the fifth election in five years. We had the ‘04 election, the ’06 election, the ’07 byelection, and we had the ’08 general and we would have had the ’09 general. People are fatigued. Election fatigue is setting in with the public. And I also think that any party that provokes an unnecessary election is going to pay a very heavy penalty at the polls.”