The Book of Bob

Reviews The Book ofBob FROM PROTEST TO POWER: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON A LIFE IN POLITICS. Bob Rae. Toronto: Viking/Penguin, 1996. At the Ontario New Democratic Party leadership convention in June 1996, the departing leader's name was invoked, if memory serves me right, by none of the four contestants in their speeches to the delegates. Frances Lankin, who entered the race as the anointed successor to Bob Rae, lost, in some considerable part, because she sensed too late how much of a liability that was. So sayeth his party on his legacy. Rae bas good reason, then, to plead his case to a broader public.This bedoes in his memoirs From Protest to Power: Personal Reflections on a Life in Politics (Viking/Penguin) - with telling turns ofphrase ("Clyde Wells went back to his constitutional fetal position"), self-deprecating humour and a love of family that shines through. But that public to which he appeals, to the extent that it resides in Ontario, disowned him in the last election. That would seem to leave him two options. The first would be to cite the many accomplishments of his government, confident that history will be his saviour. Up to a point he can, and does, do this - notably the telling of the stories of saving Spruce Falls Pulp and Paper in Kapuskasing, Algoma Steel in the Sault, and de Havilland in Toronto. He reminds us of the leadership role be played with respect to aboriginal rights, and of the efforts his government made to improve living conditions in Native communities, and for these he deserves our plaudits. But the overall sum of the parts is modest and the whole seems to be even less. The Rae government did too little, and too much of that, like the labour legislation outlawing replacement workers (or scabs), was quickly undone by the new Mike Harris government. Imagine if Harris had to dismantle a functioning public day-care system! Rae's lasting legacy is depressingly slight. His second option would be to claim that somebody did him in. Here there are further possibilities. The obvious one for a socialist would be that business did it but, tellingly, 176 Rae does not so insist. A second would be that the media destroyed him, that being the argument that Mike Harcourt makes (convincingly ) in his memoirs, but this too Rae does not claim. Rather, he says, he was stabbed in the back from within the left itself, by all those in the party and in the labour movement (here he names the names: Bob White of the Canadian Labour Congress, Buzz Hargrove of the Canadian Auto Workers, Judy Darcy and Sid Ryan of Canadian Union of Public Employees), who would not accept the reality of hard times. Indeed, that is the refrain of this book to the point that this reader was left feeling that Bob Rae is, as politicians go, a rather nasty one, all too adept at passing the buck. He says he derives no satisfaction from the hurt being done to those who nevertheless "asked for it" by destroying him and opening the door to Harris, but he says it once too often, rousing the Dr. Freud in me. There is no doubt that times were hard, and Rae recognizes how the electorate's knowledge, on the ground, that the economy was moving into a recession contributed to his being elected premier in the first place. The problem is that when the orders came down from on high - in this case, from the bond-rating agencies - Rae's response was to salute and pass them on. As a practitioner of the dismal science I know there is not much room to manoeuvre, but I would not be a socialist if I thought there was none at all, that protest was to no avail, and that power was about doing what the powerful say must be done. It is striking that when Rae writes that he bad to impose the infamous Social ~ontract on public sector workers in Ontario to cut yet another $2 billion from the deficit, be says simply "We were too far committed to the principle of shared restraint to pull back...