National Post
Saturday, January 18, 2003


Copps: An unlikely success
Her Liberal leadership bid will fail -- but then, what else is new? She'll win by losing


People have been asking Sheila Copps about her leadership ambitions almost since the time, nearly 20 years ago, when she first arrived in Ottawa. Like all good politicians, she has learned to disavow any such aspirations, without entirely closing the door.

"I don't know if I could be capable," she told an interviewer in 1988. "If I thought I were capable of meeting the responsibility, I wouldn't say never. But now, I don't even know if I could run a department."

Besides, she said, politics is a fickle game. "I don't want to be so tied to politics I could never leave. I don't want to be here at 50 saying I want to get out but I don't know what to do."

Well, now it's 2003, Ms Copps is 50, still in politics, and, to no one's surprise, running for leader. And the suspicion is it is because she doesn't know what else to do.

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Successful female politicians have tended to fall into one of three categories.

There were, first, the brassy, ballsy "dames," old-fashioned "I'm as good as any man" feminists who prospered mainly on the appeal of their larger-than-life personalities. Think Judy LaMarsh, Grace McCarthy or, in our time, Deborah Grey.

Second, there are the machine pols, cautious centrists who learned to survive in a man's game by working within the system, yet with a twist: In recent decades, their unwillingness to take a definable stand on any issue can be cloaked in pseudo-feminist jargon about women as "listeners" and "doing politics differently." Think Kim Campbell, or Lyn MacLeod.

Last, there are the activists, who rely on a network of cronies built up in various government-funded endeavours and on their own supreme self-confidence to browbeat their way to power. They are accustomed to deference, and distinguished by a taste for expensive scarves. Think Jean Augustine or Hedy Fry.

Copps does not fit neatly into any of these categories. She has the outsized personality, to be sure, but not one most people find appealing. She is a machine politician, but without all that guff about listening. And while she has the support of many activists, she has never been one herself: But for a brief, early stint as a journalist, politics is all she has ever done.

The best comparators, rather, are men. She has the shameless showmanship of Brian Tobin -- or indeed, of her father, the former radio announcer, advertising salesman and 14-year mayor of Hamilton, Ont., Vic Copps. There is the empire-building of Lloyd Axworthy, the ward-heeling of David Dingwall, the vulgarity of Mel Lastman. And of course there is Jean Chretien.

Like the Prime Minister, Copps comes from a world that views politics as a spoils system, a matter of our gang against their gang, in which loyalty is the first, the last, the only virtue.

Yet for all that, Copps's candidacy still represents something of a breakthrough for women in politics. For, with the departure of Allan Rock from the race, she will now be the uncontested representative of the Liberal party's left wing.

Rather than her personality, her network or her ability to "work with people," Copps seems set to launch a campaign whose appeal will be frankly and refreshingly ideological. That she is unlikely to succeed is not the point. Another female candidate, with another message, might. The notion, reinforced by too many Kims and Lyns and Audreys and Alexas, that women can aspire to leadership positions only by being the compromise choice, the least offensive to all, would be destroyed. Instead, they might stand for something, for a cause other than their gender. They might attempt not merely to occupy the post, but to stamp the party in their image.

Of course, no one would mistake Copps for a policy wonk. The things she stands for -- nationalism, identity politics, activist government -- are less a matter of mature reflection or deep reading than of instinct, as even her defenders would acknowledge. Whatever may be said of Copps, no one has ever accused her of being an intellectual. Like many in her party, she sees politics and, by extension, government, as essentially a free-for-all: The job of MPs is not to govern for the country, but to shout the loudest, push the hardest, and hope to shake the money tree for the benefit of their constituents.

That is how things are done in Hamilton, where the Liberals have ruled since Sheila Copps was a little girl. It is the system she grew up in. It is the only system she knows.

Unfortunately, it is not a system that works, least of all in the Cabinet. Copps may be unbeatable in her riding. She may control the city of Hamilton. She may be a media favourite. But her bullying, confrontational style of politics has proved remarkably ineffective around the Cabinet table.

That many of her fellow ministers cannot abide her is well known: Paul Martin's distaste is so great that when she was chair woman of the Cabinet's social policy committee, he refused to attend the meetings. But it has also translated into a record in office that is, to say the least, undistinguished.

As Environment minister, she is remembered chiefly for two ill-begotten schemes: First, to ban imports of the additive MMT from gasoline, notwithstanding the absence of evidence that it was an environmental hazard; the second, to forbid the export of PCBs from Ontario to a disposal site in the United States, allegedly on environmental grounds, though she was willing to see the same hazardous waste material trucked across the country to a rival firm in Alberta. The first was later overturned by John Manley, when he was at Industry; the second was ruled out by a NAFTA panel, together with an order to pay compensation to the U.S. company.

At Heritage, she again ran into trouble, this time over an attempt to prevent U.S. magazines from soliciting advertising in the Canadian market. Once again, the policy died, in the face of pressure from international trade tribunals and Cabinet colleagues. Oh, and there was the free flag initiative: a scheme to hand out thousands of flags across the country, complete with a 1-800 number. Other than that, she seems to have occupied her time mostly by feuding with Brian Tobin over whether the Internet should be regulated by Industry, as a piece of telecommunications infrastructure, or Heritage, as a conduit of culture.

Such an error-strewn record would normally disqualify a minister for a shot at the leadership --as in Rock's case, for example. But to Copps, failure is merely the precursor to greater triumphs.

The same, indeed, has been true throughout her career. She lost her first race, in the Ontario election of 1977 -- but she was 24, and only entered the race with three weeks to go, drafted to run on the strength of her family name. When she came within 14 votes of winning, it assured her of a future in politics.

Elected for the first time in 1981, to the Ontario legislature, she promptly ran for provincial party leader, and lost. But the sheer audacity of her bid made her someone to watch. Elected to Parliament in 1984, she ran for federal leader six years later, finishing third behind Chretien and Martin. But that only cemented her reputation as future leadership material. She became Deputy Prime Minister, for a while.

Even the fiasco over the GST, in which she first promised to resign her seat if the tax was not abolished, then tried to back out ("a fast-lip comment in the course of an election campaign"), then was forced by public pressure to honour her original pledge ("I've always been a politician of integrity"), simply set her up for a triumphant comeback in the ensuing by-election.

The moral of the story? "I don't think I'll ever be putting my seat on the line again if the voters are generous enough to reinvest their confidence in me."

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Ah, but you know what all this is, don't you? It's the backlash. Men, male journalists in particular, just can't handle a strong woman.

From the first, she has had to deal with this. Her failed provincial leadership bid, at the age of 29? "I was OK as a token woman, but it all changed when I was seen as a potential threat to the power structure." Her hot-headed antics in Opposition, where she made her name as a member of the Rat Pack? "If she were male," a sympathizer commented at the time, "all this would have been forgiven long ago." Her decision to appear in black leather, astride a motorcycle, on the cover of Saturday Night magazine? "I don't think it's the kind of question that would have been asked of a man."

But in fact Copps is where she is today not in spite of being a woman, but because she is a woman. A man who waded about in Hamilton harbour, dressed in a wetsuit, to "prove" the water was safe, would be dismissed as a showboat. (Where are you, Stockwell Day?) The male MP who suggested to his caucus mates they should fly a hang-glider into the Super Bowl to protest against free trade would be told he needed some rest. And a man who was known for shouting down his opponents, for issuing brusque orders and playing power games -- well, there's only one word for that sort of behaviour: macho.

Yet Copps retains a hard-core following, for whom all her faults are golden. Allan Rock was forced to pull out of the race because he could not persuade enough people to his side. Copps's supporters do not need persuading: They are impervious to reasoned argument.

She cannot win. But she can hope to force Paul Martin to keep her in Cabinet, a prospect that would otherwise seem remote. If she has little chance of winning herself, she can still do him much harm. A nasty, divisive race, in which Copps plays the identity card, savages Martin as a dead white male, toady to the Americans, captive of business, hostage to the party's right wing, would leave Martin much diminished at the end. What must he promise her to avert such an outcome?

And there is always the next race, after Martin retires. Could she divide the party this time in such a way as to be positioned afterward to pick up the pieces? Could she, in effect, win by losing?

Why not? Copps has been failing upward her whole career.