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.
Liberal leader Stephane Dion speaks during Question Period. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
Photogallery
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?
The immigration issue will be the litmus test. His image as a leader of high-minded integrity will be badly bruised if he does not – as he has hinted – force an election over immigration legislation: The minority Conservative government is proposing to give the minister powers to decide which immigrants to fast-track into the country.
Then there is Afghanistan. Environics pollster Michael Adams says that Mr. Dion allowed himself be convinced that he could not be the peace candidate in anglophone Canada, thereby denying himself the mantle of Lester Pearson.
He was then outmanoeuvred by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who appointed former Liberal minister John Manley to inquire into Canada's continuing role in Afghanistan, and he was subsequently neutralized by the joint Conservative-Liberal resolution to extend the Afghanistan mission to 2011.
Finally, his appointment of Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette as his lieutenant in Quebec – where, not uncoincidentally, open rebellion against his leadership has broken out – has been described by party insiders as a maladroit act of political judgment matched only by Ontario Conservative Leader John Tory's fatal decision to enter the last provincial election promising to extend public funding to faith schools.
Ms. Hervieux-Payette, in addition to being labelled by her party critics as intolerably abrasive, has been fingered by at least one senior party source as the loose cannon who sought a court injunction to prohibit Montreal's La Presse from publishing a list of party candidates. Moreover, many anglophone Liberal delegates to the leadership convention now realize that they may have underestimated Mr. Dion's personal unpopularity in Quebec.
Former Liberal prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien were disliked by the Quebec intelligentsia, but there was always a degree of respect for Mr. Trudeau and, among ordinary Quebeckers, a significant amount of affection for Mr. Chrétien. Mr. Dion appears to be liked by neither Quebec elites nor ordinary people.
WHO'S THE MAN
But it's Mr. Dion's comportment that is considered the black hole of his problems.
Environics' Michael Adams puts it bluntly: “This man has to be more masculine. He has to think about how to be more masculine.” And the behavioural scientist who characterized Mr. Dion as a “risen not-someone” agrees: “Primitive leadership – you've got to have it.”
In politics, strong but wrong beats weak but right. And it is Stephen Harper, not Stéphane Dion, who is seen as having carved out the territory of the archetypal male. Mr. Dion, up close, looks untouched by life – not boyish but untouched. A too-smooth face.
Bryant Boulianne, a graduate student in immunology from Halifax, says of the Liberal leader: “I liked his emphasis on the environment, I liked that he was from Quebec, and I liked his stance on federalism. However, he has seemed to be weak and ineffectual. He is meek and fails to stand up to the Conservatives, and he lacks the charisma and passion that a politician needs to get people excited. I think he can be summed up in one word: lukewarm.”
And Natalie Papoutsis, a doctoral student in drama at University of Toronto, says, “Maybe it's just the theatre kid in me, but I like a leader with character, charisma and evident guts. While this could probably also describe most of the dictators in history, I think we know that when we look back at the history of our nation, it's the leaders with these qualities who we remember. We need someone who we can trust, admire and like, but also someone who can get us fired up.”
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Mr. Dion's language difficulties cannot be overstated. He may be the worst speaker of English of any major party leader in Canada's history, which should help anglophone Canadians understand why politicians who are poor French-speakers go over badly with francophones.
Mr. Chrétien may speak equally fractured English. But whether it is because he uses shorter, less complex sentences, or because he throws so much passion into what he's saying, many anglophones gloss over his actual words and syntax, and get the message. With Mr. Dion, the lack of clarity throws up a wall between him and anglophone Canadians. Bruce Anderson, president of Harris/Decima research, says that in contemporary politics, “you need great communications skills – so much depends upon how crisply and memorably you can get across your point of view – and he doesn't meet that test.”
A perfect example of how a successful communicator can attract support is U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. His eloquent speeches, Mr. Anderson notes, are stirring emotions on both sides of the Canadian-American border. People are looking for visions of optimism, he said, and Mr. Dion has difficulty conveying eloquently what his vision for Canada might be.
THE FIXERS WEIGH IN
His friend Peter Russell, professor emeritus at University of Toronto and one of Canada's outstanding political scientists – the two fish together – says he is puzzled by the media images of the Liberal leader, citing Mr. Dion's impressive effectiveness at meetings.
Prof. Russell says part of Mr. Dion's problem is simply that of being opposition leader in a minority Parliament, dealing with highly complex problems of how long to let a government live.
Mr. Anderson says most of the “tendencies” in Mr. Dion are fixable.
For example, Mr. Gregg suggests that he could address his image of nerdyness and blandness head on – as former Ontario premier William Davis once did, with his famous line: “Bland works.”
If he can't be the tough-guy leader, Mr. Gregg says, he can talk about a leadership of values. Or, Mr. Adams says, he can have himself photographed doing things physical. The Liberal leader fishes. His Facebook site says he also cross-country skis.
Mr. Adams says he has to work on telling jokes, on showing more interest in people and he must run, not walk, to language school.
Mr. Anderson suggests the anti-politician, full-of-integrity image is still within Mr. Dion's grasp. For one thing, he remains the Liberal leadership candidate who most clearly emphasized the urgency of environmental issues. And the Liberal Party brand, he adds, remains surprisingly strong – for all Mr. Dion's perceived problems, the Conservatives aren't profiting from them. The two parties are in a virtual deadlock, he says, and Conservative support looks to be softer than Liberal support.
Mr. Dion can still increase his appeal to Quebec, Mr. Anderson says, because he is more in line with Quebec views than Mr. Harper on matters such as Afghanistan, the environment, social issues such as same-sex marriage and curbing the excesses of a laissez-faire economy.
Influential Saskatchewan Liberal Tony Merchant is convinced that Mr. Dion will “wear well with the voters” once he is on television every night during an election campaign. Echoing Peter Russell, Mr. Merchant says Mr. Dion will be “liked by crowds.”
He says: “I regret the decision that has been made to hold off on an election. That's not really playing to Dion's strength – his passion over issues. The waiting hasn't been helpful to him.” As an opposition leader, Mr. Dion has to wait until an election is called before he can vend his issues to the public. Otherwise he won't get the media's attention.
But Queen's University political historian and vice-principal David Mitchell isn't sure that Mr. Dion can be reinvented.
At one point, Prof. Mitchell says, he thought the duo of Mr. Harper and Mr. Dion in the House was potentially exciting. They represented generational change, they were both very bright.
Now, he says, “I'm not as excited. Stéphane Dion is not fulfilling any kind of role. He doesn't appear to be an obvious leader, he doesn't inspire confidence” – he's not Chrétien, a Trudeau, a King or a Laurier.
Mr. Dion has been compared to John Turner, who was once described as having so many party knives stuck in his back that he could never get through airport security. Moreover, Mr. Turner, like Mr. Dion, felt alienated from a lot of the party's establishment. Although, unlike Mr. Dion, Mr. Turner had an intensely loyal cadre of supporters.
THE LEGACY OF JOE
Where the similarities are “overwhelming” – to quote pollster Allan Gregg – is between Mr. Dion and former Conservative leader and short-lived prime minister Joe Clark.
Mr. Clark was a man who was consistently underrated, says Geoffrey Stevens, former managing editor of The Globe and Mail and Maclean's magazine who now teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and the University of Guelph.
Mr. Stevens recalls that immediately after mr. Clark's election as party leader in 1976, he was portrayed in the media as coming from the wrong part of the country (Alberta), as someone who had never held a real job, a fumbling incompetent several litres short of testosterone – an image he couldn't shake.
He submitted his leadership to party review in 1983 and even though two-thirds of Conservative delegates endorsed him, he decided the support was insufficient and called for a leadership convention – where he was replaced by Brian Mulroney.
It's safe to say Mr. Clark's departure 25 years ago is on some Liberals' minds today.
The senior party member who has described Mr. Dion's leadership as a “frightening litany of errors” says there will be no coup against him. “Because a coup is not a solution.” The optics would be terrible.
But a noble call for a leadership review followed by a dignified leave-taking?
Then again, it may not need ever come to pass. An election campaign could reveal Mr. Dion to be the shiny 21st-century leader many Canadians thought the Liberals chose 16 months ago.
Michael Valpy is a Globe and Mail writer.
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