The playground bullies are waiting for him.
It is the first day of the resumption of Parliament, this Monday just past at 2:15 p.m. Stéphane Dion stands up in the House of Commons to ask the traditional first question afforded the Leader of the Opposition.
He begins in his awkward, heavily accented English: “Mr. Speaker, Canada is a country – .” And he gets no further, his words drowned out by braying male laughter from the Conservative MPs across the aisle, by their mock thunderous applause and chants of “More! More!”
It happens again the next day. Mr. Dion rises to his feet at the commencement of Question Period. “Let me read – “ he begins, and the rest of his sentence is obliterated by the same shouts of “More! More!” until the Speaker comes to his rescue.
He doesn't once look at his tormentors. His expression is wooden, devoid of emotion. His head bobs slightly, as if he's in a conversation with himself. Stéphane Dion does not engage with this cheap dramaturgy of parliamentary democracy.
But the question increasingly amplified over the past 16 months since his election as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and prime-minister-in-waiting is who does Mr. Dion engage with?
Although increasingly unlikely, there remains the possibility of an election mere weeks from now, and the jury is still out on who Mr. Dion is. Is he a capable leader challenged by the difficulties inherent in being a new opposition leader? Are his problems, for the most part, fixable and will they largely evaporate once an election is called? Or is he an out-and-out disaster for the Liberal Party?
What stacks the decks against him is his legacy of having been the compromise candidate at the December, 2006, Liberal leadership convention, the first choice of fewer than 18 per cent of the delegates.
“I have seen a number of people like him rise because they're not someone,” says a behavioural scientist who studies politicians, and who spoke on the condition that his name not be used. “It's because they offend the least number of people and they're almost always bland.”
In other words, the Liberals might have been more careful about what they wished for.
Whatever support he may have had in Montreal, Dionistas in the influential suites of the party now are as scarce as Beothuks. And, says Toronto pollster Allan Gregg, “he came in with a pretty small tent to begin with.”
The scarcity of Dion loyalists has led to what one senior Liberal calls “an intractable paralysis between leadership and followership.”
It's almost impossible, the senior Liberal says, to find people working for him who are not on the leader's office payroll. “He's built up no loyalties. He's raised no money for the party.”
Mr. Dion has forged few, if any, new bonds with influential party members, one of whom described meeting the leader for the 17th or 18th time and still being asked what his name is. Moreover, Mr. Dion has not asked for help from the backroom technicians and none – according to the protocol that no one pushes himself in on the leader uninvited – has been offered.
The result is that he's been left twisting and isolated.
What a change from the image he started out with. Mr. Dion emerged from the leadership convention in Montreal as a fresh-out-of-the box anti-politician of integrity and high-minded values who had brilliantly seized the number one issue in Canada – the environment – and made it his own. A bit nerdy, yes, but Canadians found that appealing. At first.
But looking back over the past 16 months, a senior Liberal today characterizes Mr. Dion's leadership as a “frightening litany of errors.
LOSS LEADER?
