Once Upon a Country

Dion’s party was at the Hotel Place d’Armes, where 150 people had wedged themselves into a meeting room off the lobby. It had the atmosphere of a smalltown wedding. Dion had raised the least amount of money among the front-runners, and his campaign was a clever, earnest shoestring operation. There was one free drink per person, and a woman marked every hand with a red felt pen to ensure no one got two. The deal with Kennedy was coming together: the fourth-place finisher would support the third. Dion’s campaign organizer for Ontario said some of Ignatieff’s ex officios were going to Dion after the first ballot. She said the Ignatieff people were drifting. Forty percent of the delegates still hadn’t committed to a second choice. Dion arrived to cheers and announced that their chances were good. “What do you think about that?” he asked, his schoolboy face beaming.

Two blocks away, a crowd of several hundred waited for Ignatieff in the ersatz streetscape of the long, nine-storey atrium of the InterContinental Hotel. This was the hippest-looking crowd, youthful, dressed darkly, laughing brightly, drinking wine as a band played on stage. Ignatieff descended a stone staircase, narrow-shouldered, well-tailored, his natural stoop in check, shaking hands as he moved toward the stage. “What you feel is momentum,” he told his delegates. “What you feel is confidence. And what you feel . . . is happening. The momentum is with us. But you have a job to do. You have to get out of the tent. Get out. Get out. Don’t stay with the true believers. You’ve got a job to do. You’ve got to go out there and talk to all of them. To those who support Bob. To those who support Stéphane. To those who support Gerard, and you’ve got to persuade them that this is their chance to beat Stephen Harper. C’est nous. C’est nous! You can go to them and say we’re in the same family of faith, the same family of hope, and you can tell them that there is one candidate who can take them over the top!” It was a military speech, delivered by a general who was hampered by a cold and who was aware that his numerical advantage was fragile. Others were massing against him, but on this night he looked like a man of action.

In the bars afterwards the young delegates mingled and tried to dissuade one another from their various positions. They floated through the night on a wave of free drinks, remembered undergraduate rhetoric—“Politics is organized corruption, live with it”—and free condoms. When the morning came, not much had shifted.

Friday was the first ballot, and Ignatieff ‘s people took early control of the north foyer, a thousand strong, their placards pumping, wearing red Ignatieff scarves and T-shirts with Michael’s face repeated in Warholian colour washes. Three hours later the other, smaller armies moved onto the abandoned plain, chanting and marching (“Kennedy, Canada, Kennedy, Canada!”}. Scott Brison’s surprisingly large group chanted, “We want Scott!” a cry that was co-opted by Kennedy’s people, who responded, “We want Scott!” Dion’s people took the high ground, marching up the escalators and descending the wide staircase in a continuous circle of red T-shirts. It went on for ninety minutes while they waited for the ballot-room doors to open, a rhythmic pulse where all the chants finally blended and it was difficult to move.

The speeches began, with each candidate retailing his or her vision for the New Liberalism. Had there been Surtitles, as at the opera, that showed the subtext of every speech, they might have shown that Martha Hall Findlay was positioning herself for a run at a federal seat and a possible cabinet post, that Volpe and Dryden had miscalculated, that Kennedy was positioning himself as the next leader, that Rae was offering cabinet positions to Brison and Dion if they came over.

Stéphane Dion began his speech by invoking Laurier and reciting his own commitment to public service, though he knew, as every circuit preacher knows, that God brings them into the tent but the devil is where the money is. Three minutes into his speech, he told the delegates, “Something is wrong . . . Canada has a prime minister who thinks that the United States is not only our ally, but also our model . . . . We have a prime minister who thinks that child care is delivered through the mailbox . . . a prime minister who tore up our climate-change plan.” Dion outlined Harper’s flaws to great applause but was careful not to linger. “To win,” he cautioned, “we must offer our own project to Canadians.”

He outlined his environmental plan and stressed national unity. His delivery was efficient but without drama, and he was cut off before the end of his speech, denied the rousing finish. In Academy Awards style, music swelled, giving him the signal, and he moved to bring it home, but his microphones cut out, and there was that earnest face, with a look of anger and betrayal blown up on the giant screens, his lips moving, the sound of an anonymous orchestra playing.

Seated in front of him was Jean Chrétien, the purest politician the country has produced in three decades, an instinctive fighter who had delivered three majorities and who looked, in the unflattering, changeable light of the convention room, darkly reptilian, his limbic self revealed as he watched his creation onstage. He had plucked Dion from academia to use him as an attack dog for unity. Dion was not a natural politician, and ten years later he still isn’t. He is the antithesis of Chrétien, a shy, rigorous thinker. A reporter asked Chrétien what a good leader was. “A good leader,” answered the pragmatist, “is one who wins elections.”

Bob Rae was the closest to Chrétien in terms of presenting a purely political campaign. His most thorough policy document had only arrived that day, the first concrete glimpse of what he would do after eight months of campaigning. He eschewed the lectern and wandered the stage with a handheld microphone, a life coach telling us of his troubles and how he overcame them. Liberal ideas were easy to find, he told us; his colleagues had good ideas, there were ideas on the Internet, the Google Liberalism approach. What was needed was a politician, an experienced leader who could implement them. He was politics.

After Rae came Ignatieff ‘s patrician speech, polished, safe though with a bit of fire, the most prime ministerial, and, in the homely hearts of the assembled, the most presumptuous. He was a divisive force in a still-divided party and he tried to bring everyone together tonight. “Tous ensemble!” he repeated. “Tous ensemble!” He outlined his Canada and its specific greatness. Ken Dryden had already given the crowd the grassroots Canada that he had seen while driving across the country, staying in people’s guest rooms, and visiting folk festivals and methadone clinics. Scott Brison sketched the Canada of Big Dreams, Dion the country as environmental world leader. Everywhere there was a sense of scope and grandeur. In a Maclean’s article a month earlier, Ignatieff had described Canadians as “less than the sum of our parts,” perhaps the fairest assessment, but not one for this night.