The anti-Rae TV barrage did nothing but remind voters that the Harper Conservatives are always on the edge of being angry about something, hardly ever cheerful and never at ease, even now when they have a majority.
The Harperites should be enjoying political nirvana at present. They are kings of the Hill and have decimated their life-long enemies, the Liberals. You’d never guess, looking at the grim faces and drooping heads of the Cabinet this week as they hopelessly tried to unsnarl the F-35 mess.
Mr. Rae, however, has no confusion. He knows that Canadian politics is different now. And he knows it’s the NDP, and particularly its leader, that are the new and challenging factor. The holiday that the NDP race gave the Liberals is over. The Liberals and their (it is to be presumed) interim leader will have to struggle for every morsel of publicity and airtime they can get.
The one exception is Justin Trudeau, who inhabits a singular world all his own — that of Canada’s number one celebrity-politician, who can summon the cameras and laptops anytime he wishes to take a shave or clobber a Senator.
Just how parlous Mr. Rae’s circumstance has suddenly become can be divined from the language he directed toward Thomas Mulcair. He reached for the heaviest, hardest rhetorical stone: He called Mr. Mulcair — brace yourselves — a “mini Harper.” Apart from sprinkling Mr. Mulcair with Holy Water, identifying him as Beezelbub, and summoning the Saints for aid in exorcising him from the Commons, Mr. Rae could not have hit any harder: In Liberal circles, “Harper” is a synonym for every mean and nasty thing under the sun, and a few that the sun has lacked the courage to look at.
He went even further, when he tried to turn the legacy words of Jack Layton, about hope and optimism, into a parody insult against Mulcair. That was harsh and meant to wound. Said Mr. Rae, of the NDP under Mulcair: “We’ve now moved to a world where anger apparently is better than love, arrogance is now better than humility and petulance is much stronger than respect.
What all this tells us is that at least one leader in the House of Commons has sized up the new reality. Thomas Mulcair is the real and serious challenge. And he is not in the mold of the opposition panda bears with whom Stephen Harper was blessed in previous outings. This is neither Dion nor Ignatieff.
Mulcair, in fact, has very much of Mr. Harper’s own style. He is not unequipped with self-esteem, has a bristling, prickly way with opponents, and would rather hit hard than not hit at all. If the Tories launch ad drones against Mulcair, they will find themselves equally under fire.
There is another element to Thomas Mulcair we have not really seen in a while. He actually wants, deep in his heart, to replace Stephen Harper. Really. In the days of Dion and Ignatieff, the wish to beat Harper was there, but it was somehow a timid thing, half-way between a whim and “it’d be nice.”
There’s no equivocation now. There’s nothing lukewarm about Mulcair’s determination. He knows the job he wants. The Harperites have a dedicated and intense opposition on their case and a leader who really understands that the only purpose of an opposition is to turn it into a government — an insight not really on display in the last five years or so.
All this should really worry the Harper administration, for they have coasted with weak opposition for a long while, and not paid a heavy price for having so unimpressive a front bench. The period of laziness without cost, and mediocrity making do are over. With this new opposition under a new leader, the Liberals will have to fight for their political lives, and the Conservatives will have to give up their useless games and conduct politics as adults for a change.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Rex Murphy
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