Bob Rae’s belief in democracy is so great that he won’t dare suggest that he’s guaranteed to win Monday’s by-election to replace Bill Graham as the Liberal MP for Toronto Centre. Bob Rae’s belief in democracy is also so great that he joined the Liberal Party despite five mostly beleaguered years as an NDP Premier of Ontario from 1990 through 1995. Bob Rae’s belief in democracy is especially so great that he deferred to Liberal leader Stéphane Dion at a flash-mob rally last Friday afternoon (March 7) at St. Lawrence Market — until Rae was forced to take charge.

“Liberals believe so strongly in democracy that we’re willing to lend our microphone to anyone who has a different opinion than ours,” he elucidated for the cameras capturing dissent from representatives of EndIt.ca — who commandeered the photo-op to call for Canada to pull out of Afghanistan rather than extending the mission to 2011. Rae promises more of the same dialogue, “If we win the by-election on March 17.” That’s right, emphasis on the “if.”

Deputy Premier George Smitherman gets a stage turn, too, summing up the current storyline for Stephen Harper’s government: “From scandal, to scandal, to scandal.” Sounds just like a Conservative melody from three or four years ago. But it’s Dion who is the headliner of this quick charade, since he’s got four contests across the country to sell at this event, including the Willowdale candidate Martha Hall Findlay — one of the seven contenders (including Rae) he defeated for the top Liberal job in 2006.

“Only one thing is mounting faster than the snow in Toronto,” exclaims Dion in his distant-second language. “The scandals that Stephen Harper won’t investigate.” Turnouts are low in by-elections, he admits. “But why not turn out for Bob Rae?”

Not the most persuasive pitch, really. But some interesting questions have emerged in 59-year-old Rae’s bid to return to a seat in the House of Commons. As a former NDP leader, has he turned his back on social democratic voters or is he somehow still leading them where they need to go if they want to have a voice in government? Is he a canary in a unite-the-left mineshaft or has he left progressives behind in a midlife conversion to the middle? And does a candidate’s party affiliation represent anything anymore?

Rae is on the line for a lecture on the advantages of his new political home. “By instinct, the Liberal Party wants to govern,” he explains. “We understand the responsibility of being in power. The party has a deeply progressive foundation, a dedication to human rights, strong social programs, a strong commitment to a strong economy. The party doesn’t need to rebrand. Rather, just remind people who might’ve gotten lost along the way.”

For a fleeting by-election campaign, there’s been more than enough farce. Mark Warner, the initially acclaimed Conservative candidate with a background in international law, spent much of 2007 gearing up to snatch Toronto Centre back from the Liberals. (Graham lost the riding on his first two tries in the 1980s.) But then Stephen Harper caught wind of Warner’s strategy, which deviated from the national playbook by reflecting a socially liberal perspective combined with a right-leaning economic agenda.

Parachuted in to replace him was Don Meredith — a black Pentecostal minister from Richmond Hill who shares Warner’s skin colour, but was shown to have little else on his mind except the threat of gun violence. Campaign literature lambasting Dion for being “SOFT ON CRIME” prompted Rae to blow a gasket during an all-candidates meeting at Rosedale United Church last month.

“These are all tactics learned from Karl Rove,” Rae says, alluding to George W. Bush’s former chief of staff. “They want to mislead, create fear and further that Republican agenda. The fact that they’re not doing an effective job of getting that across just shows how clumsy and ham-fisted they are.”
On March 10, Warner publicly endorsed Rae, the man he’d planned to run against. (A breaking point for him was Meredith telling a St. James Town crowd that bedbugs were a matter of hygiene. “Telling your potential constituents ‘you stink, you don’t wash, you live in filth’ probably isn’t the best way to win an election,” Warner says.)

Debates throughout the campaign have found Rae talking as much about Kandahar as Cabbagetown — he’s been the Liberal foreign affairs critic since October. But, if not for the heft of issues related to the Middle East and how the US presidential election may affect free trade, it would be round after round of auditing out Rae’s past missteps as Premier of Ontario. The thing is, if the NDP get too deep in discrediting the guy who ran the province on their behalf, the party is stating a case for its own demise.

For a debate last month at Saint-Simon-the-Apostle church on Bloor Street — while right across the street from Rosedale, the attendees were largely residents of less affluent St. James Town — Rae faced off against a member of his long-ago provincial steering committee: Olivia Chow. (El-Farouk Khaki, the NDP candidate running against Rae, was distracted by a mishap involving a plate-glass window that will find him sporting a left-hand cast until two days after the by-election.)
Chow didn’t lack the feistiness that has made the NDP the de facto federal party across all the other downtown Toronto ridings. She asserts that the case against Bob Rae, and his failure to draw provincial parliamentary support — for, well, just about everything that the lefties supported — sunk in within his first year or two as premier. Rae has written extensively about the lessons learned, the bruises sustained and how complex the challenge was. 

So, with those lessons in mind, why doesn’t the entire New Democratic Party follow Rae’s lead and join the Liberals? The far-right elements of the Reform and Alliance parties seem to be alive and well within the Conservatives — witness their changing of the guard in Toronto Centre because of their distaste for an urban-minded candidate — so couldn’t the Liberals absorb a more left-wing element?

Three out of three policy wonks contacted for this story think the idea is preposterous. Yet, uniting the left was an idea floated by pundits and politicians alike last year, most notably Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert. With the melodrama of the American run-off surely drawing more interest in Toronto Centre than this by-election, why not streamline the Canadian federal system to a Democrat vs Republican model? Perhaps surprisingly, even Rae himself doesn’t think it’s time to make that leap.

“I don’t think we’re there yet at all,” says Rae. “At least as far as a change in formal support. There are too many differences of opinion in issues right now.

“What I do think is that people who voted NDP in the past will go our way in Toronto Centre, and that Martha Hall Findlay will get the same kind of support from people worried about the Harper agenda. The time to get together is now.

“Jack Layton’s message in the last election was that he’d like to borrow your support. And now, we’d like to get it back.” 

The problem with the federal NDP isn’t much different from the problem with the Conservatives, according to Rae. “Don Meredith is limited in his vision, and point of view. But that’s kind of what’s happened to both parties. The NDP has an allergy to the centre, and that push to extremes is unhealthy. Pulling out of Afghanistan yesterday would be an incalculable disaster — and that’s the kind of thing the NDP want to do.”

Back in the game for last week’s debates, El-Farouk Khaki vowed to lead the LGBT community at the 519 Church Street Community Centre in confronting Rae, 14 years after his “betrayal” in rejecting same-sex adoption rights and spousal recognition for same-sex couples. Rae basically shrugged it off, with words of contrition for a strategic mistake, and countered such accusations with a hearty endorsement from the riding’s gay City Councillor (a former NDP member who quit the party in the 1990s), Kyle Rae.

Green Party candidate Chris Tindal benefits from a growing appetite to discuss environmental issues and the votes of those wanting a change from the status quo, but the 26-year-old’s platform is lost somewhere in his effort to impress Rae with his witticisms and cultivate soundbites to blog about.
Ex-Conservative candidate Warner wonders why the NDP didn’t recruit a higher-profile candidate than his friend El-Farouk, just to make an example of Rae. But, the former premier considers Khaki a formidable rival — it’s Layton’s party as a whole he finds fault with. Don’t ask Rae to suggest they all join him in jumping ship to the Liberals, though. “There’s no need for us to do that,” he says. “It would be a serious mistake, because the Liberals aren’t an ideological party. And, today, the NDP are skittish about their responsibility. Who knows what these people would do?”

With ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY heather Marrin, Alex laws and Gilberto Zambrano. Email letters@eyeweekly.com