Dion embraces blame but claims clean-up cred
Mon Oct 20, 6:30 PM
By Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - It was one of those disorienting Stephane Dion displays of brutal honesty, naivety, optimism, defensiveness and self-assurance.
"The factor why is because I failed," the Liberal leader stated Monday - in typically befuddling English - when asked how he'd been persuaded that a change of party leadership is necessary.
"In my consultations it became very clear that in the door-to-door (election) canvassing, my colleagues, my friends were told 'We don't like your leader,"' Dion matter-of-factly explained.
At the back of the over-capacity national press theatre, tears welled in the eyes of a Dion policy adviser and she snuffled and glanced at a colleague for support.
"When they asked why, they (said) well, they have saw, again and again, that they have seen the propaganda of the Conservatives. And it's the way they saw me."
Dion was wrapping up a brief, 24-minute news conference he'd called to announce his resignation after a brief, 22-month tenure as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
However, as with all things Dion, it wasn't quite that straight-forward.
Dion, who loped into his resignation news conference wearing a puppy-dog grin, announced he'll be sticking around as party leader until a leadership convention "to ensure a smooth and successful transition."
He brushed off questions about whether his fractious parliamentary caucus had agreed to this extended farewell, saying only that he'd "informed" both the Liberal party president and caucus chairman Anthony Rota.
"Well, why not?" Dion added as an afterthought, as if his continued interim leadership was a no-brainer. (The rumblings of dissent began almost the moment he left the building.)
Dion said he had run a great campaign on a great policy - notwithstanding his party's worst share of the popular vote since 1867 and a paltry 76 seats that included just eight west of the Ontario border.
As for the Green Shift carbon tax proposal, Dion defended it as the right policy for Canada but "a mistake" as the central Liberal campaign plank, "because we are not equipped to explain what it was."
"I am proud of the proposals that I made, of my policies. But I'm not proud of not being able to sell them."
The leader who was too often stilted and almost incomprehensible reading scripted announcements on the campaign trail delivered a coherent and impassioned critique of the current political landscape, in which Conservative fundraising prowess gives the governing party a massive communications advantage.
"Of course, the Conservatives win in the way that they imported from the United States," Dion added with a twist of the partisan knife.
"We're all very aware of it. If it's not just importing it from Australia." Another twist.
"I wouldn't want to see Canadian politics degenerate to that point."
Twist and withdraw.
There was no direct acknowledgment by Dion that he could not possibly win the automatic leadership review that would have taken place at the Liberal party national convention next May in Vancouver.
But he conceded he could not turn around a dismal public image that Dion claimed was manufactured by the unprecedented deluge of negative Conservative advertising over the past 18 months.
"It is cemented in the minds of Canadians too much what I represent and what I have proposed - according to the Conservative version of all this," said Dion.
"And to try to change that would be a tremendous effort and a risk. And that I don't need to impose on my party."
He proposed another "solution."
"It is to prepare the ground for a new leader and to make sure that he will not be vulnerable to the same kind of politics, to be able for us to compete on the same (financial) footing," as the Conservatives.
And in Dion's world, who better to steer that preparatory work than himself?
All the preconditions of political success were not put in place during Dion's first two years as leader, but he maintained his party was just a 'what-if' away during the five-week campaign that ended last Tuesday.
"I still think that if we would have been equipped to explain why I'm fighting for my country - what kind of leader I would have been, what kind of prime minister I would have been and what kind of policy we are proposing - we would have won this election."
Copyright © 2008 Canadian Press
