OTTAWA — When he last sat in Parliament, Bob Rae was a young, brash New Democrat star who seemed destined for greatness.
After 26 years – and a brief, turbulent stint as Ontario's only NDP premier – Mr. Rae will return to Parliament, this time as a Liberal star whose destiny may yet lead to greater things.
The 59-year-old cruised to an easy victory Monday night in Toronto Centre with 59 per cent of the vote. Conservative candidate Donald Meredith came in at a distant fourth, trailing with 12.5 per cent of the vote.
“We didn't quite believe we were going to do this well,” Mr. Rae told reporters.
At one point during his victory speech at his campaign headquarters, Mr. Rae spoke emotionally about the ups and downs of his long political career.
“This is a hell of an ‘up' tonight I can tell you,” he said.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion was on hand to congratulate Mr. Rae on his win.
“A young man will have a new career in the House of Commons,” he joked.
Liberals predict Mr. Rae will bring both steak and sizzle to their team. He's a polished political performer but also a statesman, having spent his years out of politics writing three books and advising governments – both at home and abroad – on everything from native rights to post-secondary education and the Air India tragedy.
It demonstrates the “heft and quality” of the Liberal team, compared with “the robots on the other side with the gaffer tape on their mouths and the wind-up (keys) at the back.”
Some Liberals, however, are privately uneasy that Mr. Rae's arrival might herald an unhealthy round of leadership jockeying among Mr. Rae, Leader Stephane Dion and his deputy, Michael Ignatieff, all of whom were rivals during the party's 2006 leadership contest.
They're particularly concerned that Mr. Rae and Mr. Ignatieff – one-time college room mates whose competitiveness polarized the leadership race and allowed Mr. Dion to slip up the middle – will resume vying for the title of heir apparent.
Conservatives have already begun gleefully exploiting the potential for Liberal infighting. Tory MP James Moore last week predicted it will be harder for Mr. Dion to demonstrate that he's the leader with “enemies” like Mr. Rae and Mr. Ignatieff out-performing him in the Commons.
Mr. Rae shrugs off such predictions. He insists there's no tension between him and Mr. Ignatieff and that his only goal is to help Mr. Dion become prime minister. Liberals, he says, need to understand “there's no ‘i' in team and that we all have to work to get Mr. Dion elected prime minister, which is the name of the game.
“I really think it's a huge mistake to do anything else.”
Nevertheless, in finally deciding to run for election as a Liberal –something he twice declined to do in the past – Mr. Rae is eliminating one of the primary obstacles to his leadership aspirations in 2006: his status as a “tourist” in the party.
And if his victory in Toronto Centre is as crushing as expected, he'll allay doubts about his ability to make Ontario voters forget his trouble-plagued rein as premier from 1990-1995, a period that included a severe recession.
Of course, both New Democrats and Tories are primed to remind voters of Mr. Rae's baggage.
NDP Leader Jack Layton last week depicted Mr. Rae as an opportunist who “abandoned his principles” when he defected to the Liberals.
And Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty have recently taken to raising the spectre of Rae-era deficits and tax hikes to slag both Mr. Dion's alleged fiscal imprudence and the economic policies of Ontario's Liberal government.
Mr. Rae dismisses Mr. Layton's barbs as “a sign of desperation” but seems fully prepared to confront what he predicts will be a Tory onslaught. If Conservatives want to dwell on the past, he says, he's ready to remind voters of Mr. Flaherty's slash-and-burn record as Ontario finance minister under Mike Harris, leaving behind a $5-billion deficit at a time when “the economy was doing well.”
“If the Tories want to turn this into a seminar on what happened in Ontario between 1990 and 2000, I'm happy to do that. But I think they'll get tired of it after a while.”
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