Although I’m a life-long Liberal, I was happy when the Tories came to power – under Chretien the Liberals had become accustomed to power, and had grown self-indulgent and mediocre. And I’d never been impressed with Mulroney or his government. Frankly, I’d always believed that both Mulroney and Chretien saw themselves more as Kings than Prime Ministers. To be fair, both of them governed through some very difficult episodes in Canadian history, but I didn’t ever think either of them especially competent at governing. Very good at being a party leader, but of course that is far from being the same thing (as Mulroney’s recent autobiography, which attracted so much attention for its own Trudeau score-settling, would suggest).
While I was wary of Stephen Harper’s government – the Reform Party being too close to its history of intolerance and too shallow on the bench – I was glad for the change, at least in part because I thought that being in the Wilderness would teach humility to the Liberals and the Tories seemed to have been revitalized. I thought that the party infighting that followed Liberal exile was a good thing – it would force renewal and revitalization. Dion’s ascension was a sign, I thought, that the Liberals still had much work to do before they were ready to govern. They were too eager to cling to memories of the Chretien Years, and still very much out of touch with the Canadian public.
How unsurprising now, therefore, to see that when the going gets tough, the weak turn on each other. The early reviews about Chretien’s new book suggest that it’s spiced up with all matter of self-indulgence and score-settling, and that it tells us far more than we want to know, and exactly what we suspected to be true, about the heritage the modern Liberal party is having so much difficulty leaving behind. How unsurprising then, that the main preoccupation of this man seems to be himself, and not his Party’s future. For the life of me, I cannot understand how a man concerned about his party and its political legacy would indulge himself in this kind of nonsense. And it seems plain to me now that the Liberals, stuck as they seem to be in the Chretien Years, will remain unfit to govern until they are ready to move on and leave him behind.