Michael Ignatieff is gradually bringing his Bay Street posse to Ottawa and, with it, concerns that he's just too Toronto.
His latest recruit to the Opposition Leader's Office is Dan Brock, a 44-year-old Toronto lawyer. The announcement was made just after the news that New Brunswicker Paul Zed, who served as chief of staff, was departing. A former MP who played a senior role in the Chrétien government, Mr. Zed knew how to manoeuvre around political Ottawa. More important, his politics were not framed by the borders of the Greater Toronto Area.
Indeed, at a time when the urban-centric, regionalized Liberal Party needs to reach out beyond the big city's borders to win a general election – one that could come as early as the fall – Mr. Ignatieff's hand-picked inner circle is almost uniformly 416.
But there may be a method to the apparent madness. It's likely that Team Ignatieff is more conscious about party dynamics than office demographics. “In the old Chrétien and Martin days there had to be displayed inclusion from all parts of the country, even though much of it was token,” says a veteran B.C. Liberal. “Right now, the party is looking firstly at competence, and geographical representation falls down the list a bit.” But the question is, is the gamble worth the risk?
Within the party, some skeptics are voicing their concerns. “You end up with not having any breadth of the country,” says a veteran Liberal strategist who is concerned about the Toronto-heavy crowd in the OLO.
That danger became clear last week while Mr. Ignatieff was on tour in Nova Scotia. There were some rocky moments, rookie mistakes perhaps, but ones that no one would want repeated in a national election campaign.
His handlers pulled him out early from an event, before he'd had a chance to meet a number of potential voters there. “They don't understand that there are labour leaders, there are teachers, there are community activists, municipal councillors that they are not connecting with,” says the strategist, suggesting that Mr. Ignatieff was not well-served that day in Nova Scotia because the Toronto types didn't know who and what were important to that event.
Mr. Brock is yet another Torontonian, albeit one who frequently reminds people that he grew up in Quebec. Adding him to Mr. Ignatieff's inner circle will do little to broaden regional connections and contacts.
Mr. Brock is a good friend of Mr. Ignatieff's chief of staff Ian Davey, 51, a former Toronto filmmaker, and the son of the “Rainmaker,” former Senator Keith Davey, architect of the Trudeau majority governments. The younger Mr. Davey and Mr. Brock, along with Alf Apps, the party president and a successful Toronto partner in the same firm as Mr. Brock, persuaded Mr. Ignatieff to come back to Canada from Harvard University and run for politics. That troika has been successfully reassembled.
Add to that four young Toronto lawyers: Sachin Aggarwal, director of operations; Leslie Church, deputy director of strategic communications; and directors of political operations, Mark Sakamoto and Alexis Levine. Then there is his party team: Mr. Apps, the president, and Rocco Rossi, the party's national director and a Toronto businessman, who was most recently the head of the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Jill Fairbrother, a former Toronto communications consultant who is also Mr. Davey's partner, rounds out the very tight group.
So does that leave Mr. Ignatieff, in the words of one key Liberal francophone, with “a bunch of inexperienced Toronto guys” in his inner circle? Traditionally, a leader has a senior Quebec adviser in his office. “Considering the importance of Quebec in the next election, one has to wonder how come there is not even one senior Quebec adviser in the OLO. They should have at least three or four. The warm-up is over, it's game on,” says the francophone senior Liberal.
