Fight the Right by Warren Kinsella

Author:Warren Kinsella [Kinsella, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36167-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2012-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Define or be defined.

That is the truest political truism of them all. It is the principal reason Ignatieff was eviscerated in the election campaign, and it is why the once-great Liberal Party was reduced to a rump and third-party status in the House of Commons in May 2011. Ignatieff let his Conservative opponents define him before he could define himself.

In politics, in communications, definition is something—it’s everything. And the Conservatives know this best.

Consider the NDP race to replace the late Jack Layton. It felt like the New Democrats had more leadership candidates than they did caucus members. The race was boring as a dog’s arse. Most of the contestants were nobodies, and that’s putting it nicely. And all of them, to a one, lacked Layton’s charisma. Why would anyone bother to pay a lot of attention?

Well, if you didn’t, don’t worry: the Conservative Research Group was happily paying attention on your behalf. The CRG consists of dozens of neatly barbered young Conservatives who toil in a government office building on Queen Street in downtown Ottawa, not far from Parliament Hill. They’ve been around since 2006, when Conservative boss Stephen Harper set up the office under the tutelage of his capable communications director-to-be, Sandra Buckler.

From the start, CRG apparatchiks did a really good job. They were swift, they were deadly, and they were relentless. Most notably, they made miserable the lives of various Liberal leaders—Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff in particular. And after Jack Layton died, the CRG got to work on the many unknowns who were vying for the NDP leadership. Evidence of this was found, early on, in the much-read Parliament Hill weekly, the Hill Times. In a semiregular column, the Conservatives’ Tim Powers, the New Democrats’ Karl Bélanger or Brad Lavigne, and I go at each other. For years, the CRG’s talking head, Tim Powers, naturally targeted my Liberals. In 2011, his focus necessarily changed, and he started to fling mud at the Official Opposition New Democrats. What Powers said in the Hill Times wasn’t all that novel—he correctly pointed out that the willingness of the top Dipper leadership candidates to tax us more isn’t much of a get-elected strategy. What was interesting, though, was how early the CRG started defining the next NDP leader, long before he could define himself.

A few weeks later, the Conservatives fired off another shot at the listing New Democrats. One of the front-runners in the quest for the party’s leadership, Thomas Mulcair, was revealed to have dual Canadian and French citizenship. The CRG-led Conservatives had a great old time with that one, poking fun at Mulcair and pointing out that Harper’s passport was all-Canadian—and would ever be thus. The New Democrats squirmed in embarrassment. (They should have: a few years earlier, Layton and his NDP had hypocritically lambasted Dion for possessing French citizenship.) It all followed a tried-and-true conservative methodology. For months, the CRG threw punches at the various contenders for the NDP leadership, but nothing lethal. Mostly, they just clipped and catalogued every word the candidates uttered (and fabricated more than a few that they didn’t).

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