Queen’s Park Ont
Bob Rae’s shocked attitude towards his recent electoral defeat had him wringing his hands and asking how could they do this to me after all I’ve done for them?
This has been the longest time in between elections that I have ever experienced. It has only been four and half years since David Peterson’s Liberals bit the dust but it feels like forty and half years. (Make that four hundred and fifty years!)
Rae was never really elected premier of Ontario. We just angrily threw out the Ontario Liberals for arrogantly going to the people early in their mandate. When we woke up the next day we discovered that some university egghead who had never even run a corner store was our new premier. It was like asking a heckler in the stands to come down on the field and play quarterback.
You have to admit that, before he came to power, Bob the Heckler was a witty and charming person who was positive that he knew what was the matter with the other team. Yeah, sure.
When it came time for Bob the Heckler to call the plays with nasty 300 pounders ploughing into him from every direction he found that it’s a different kind of perspective one gets from ground level than one gets from in the stands.
Rae took the easy way out—he blamed everybody but himself. He blamed Peter Kormos, Mike Farnan, Peter North, Shelley Martell and a herd of other cabinet ministers for botching things up and hurting the NDP’s image. He blamed the media for constantly bad mouthing his government and stayed away from Queen’s Park almost the whole of his last year in office in order to avoid them.
It was Rae who should have been fired, not Kormos, for backtracking on the NDP’s big election promise to provide government-run auto insurance. After the first two years the NDP caucus should have seen that Rae was leading them into the ranks of the unemployed—along with a lot of others and tossed him out as premier. Rae proved to be a quarterback who was on his back more than he was on his feet.
The hard evidence was in front of them all the time but the NDP caucus choose to ignore it. Bob had almost singlehandedly helped elect most of them and they were loyal to him to the bitter end.
With the advent of “Rae Days,” the fans began to stop cheering. Supporters began jumping ship, starting with organized labour, then the teachers, then the doctors and nurses, then the government workers.
At the very end he was left with the pro-aborts, homosexuals, a hard core of unenthusiastic trade unionists, government flunkies, a few academics, and some old Fabian socialists who, like old soldiers, never die.
Rae’s enemies grew like dandelions in the spring There are too many to mention here—unless this column becomes a book—but we’ll try the main ones.
There were the family-minded who didn’t favour Sunday shopping or casinos, and felt that homosexuals should not be given special privileges and certainly not the right to adopt.
There were the pro-lifers who must have felt like early Christians. They survived until election day and rose up to hand most of their votes to the less-antagonistic Harris candidates.
There were the business leaders, tired of being whom they should hire.
There were the young people, victims of Rae’s job equity reverse-discrimination, who just couldn’t find work.
Finally there was the Ontario Citizens for Responsible Government. Their clever billboard campaign summed it up for about 80% of us and spelled Rae’s epitaph: “Bye Bye Bob – Socialism doesn’t work.”
Rae won’t be happy back being a heckler in the stands—he needs a job where oratory is praised to high heaven and firm action deplored.
Ah, I’ve got it. I’ve said it before: it’s the UN for Rae. He’ll be in good company—following in the footsteps of another vacuous word merchant—Stephen Lewis.
