Who is Bob Rae?

Is it unfair to hold Bob Rae’s record against him? Is there a statute of limitations on bankrupting a province? Then why is the former NDP premier of Ontario, by every measure a catastrophic failure in government, the odds-on favourite to win the Liberal leadership race?

If Mr. Rae were running for re-election as premier, you’d best believe his record would be held against him -- or not so much held as applied with great force. But that was a decade ago, and besides, the likeable Mr. Rae has long since disavowed his NDP past as a youthful indiscretion. You don’t like my record? I don’t like it either!

Except he hasn’t disavowed it. Not really. What he’s disavowed is responsibility for it. To hear Mr. Rae talk, the fiscal and economic wreckage left in his wake were not Ontario’s misfortunes, they were his. They did not happen to Ontario. They happened to him. It was, he will allow, a difficult time. There was a painful recession. Perhaps, he might concede, mistakes were made. But it is better to err on the side of compassion.

In other words, he might very well do it again. Or, he might not. It’s impossible to tell. Mr. Rae has famously decided that most of the things he believed for the first fifty years of his life were in error. But as for just what beliefs he has put in their place, well, it’s hard to say.

We can take him at his word on the first part. Mr. Rae was wrong about deficits, wrong about inflation, wrong about NAFTA, wrong about the GST, wrong about racial hiring quotas, in fact, wrong about just about everything. It speaks well of his character that he should have been able to recognize this, still more to admit it. But is it really something to boast about?

"I don't think Stephen Harper's views have changed very much since he was 21 and frankly that worries me," he told my colleague Don Martin. "People say to me, 'You've changed'. I say, 'Yeah and thank goodness because it's not a bad thing to see the world differently at 58 than you did when you were 25.'” No it isn’t. But if you had to choose, whose judgment would you trust more: the guy who got it right at 21, or the guy who took 37 more years to figure it out?

And it was an expensive education. Let no one pretend that the signature achievements of the NDP years -- a near quadrupling of the deficit in one year, doubling the debt in three -- were some sort of accident. They were deliberate creations of policy. Of the more than $5-billion in additional spending that first year, just $1-billion was recession-related. The rest was discretionary -- such as the hefty pay hike for the province’s civil servants.

And the recession wasn’t all that awful. The previous decade’s was sharper: a 3.1% drop in real output, from 1981 to 1982, versus 1.9% in 1990-91. What distinguished Ontario’s experience was what came next -- that is, after that first budget: while the rest of the country recovered, Ontario languished for another two years. The Rae government raised taxes, repeatedly, in a desperate attempt to restore order to its finances. Yet revenues, as a share of GDP, were higher under the tax-cutting Harris Tories than under the NDP.

What, precisely, has Mr. Rae learned from this experience? We know that he now thinks that deficits are to be avoided -- as a matter of preference. But as a rule? What if compassion came calling again? To this day, Mr. Rae boasts of his decision to bail out Algoma Steel and De Havilland, seemingly oblivious of the opportunity costs of these decisions -- the jobs that were destroyed in unseen ways across the economy to save the jobs that were right in front of his nose. This is what worries me: not that Mr. Rae is an unreconstructed socialist, but his pragmatism. I don’t have the first clue what he would do in a given situation, and I suspect neither does he.

Mr. Rae has a favourite rhetorical trick, which is to set up preposterous caricatures to his left and right, the dreaded “ideologues” against which he contrasts himself as the sensible centrist. It is a reputation he obviously cherishes, and does much to encourage. Readers of The Three Questions, his 1998 political testament, will learn that “governments should not do too little. But we do pay a price when they try to do too much.” His campaign literature this time around is noticeably light on specifics.

So: if not his record or his program, by what criteria are Liberals to assess his candidacy? Simply, for who he is. Mr. Rae’s chief selling point in the campaign is his skill as a campaigner, his ability to counter-punch, his unflappability in a scrum. That’s all very well. But should he not be asked to explain what he would do once in office, and what he did when he was last there?