Just one, big, happy family. That’s what the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party is pretending to be after its biennial convention in Quebec City on Sunday.
But to believe the Liberals’ show of unity, you have to ignore a few things.
One of them is the report on the LCN news channel during the convention by well-connected analyst Jean Lapierre, who also happens to be a former Liberal member of Parliament and minister.
Lapierre said delegates were divided over the Coderre affair and didn’t want the early election that Michael Ignatieff has been threatening. And, he said, they had been asking him whether he thought Ignatieff “has it” as leader.
Then there’s the conspicuous absence of Denis Coderre himself, who preferred to profess his loyalty to the party and its leader in a pre-taped television interview to be shown later that evening, instead of in person.
And finally, there’s what Coderre actually said in the interview on Radio-Canada’s popular weekly talk show Tout le monde en parle, which was somewhat different from the pre-broadcast spin.
As it was, merely by appearing on the show Coderre kept alive the controversy resulting from his resignation last Monday as Ignatieff’s Quebec lieutenant and his blaming the leader’s Toronto-based advisers for undermining his authority.
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Ignatieff was so worried about what Coderre might say on the show that the day before the taping, he publicly warned Coderre of possible “consequences.”
And, reported the ruefrontenac.com web site of le Journal de Montréal’s locked-out journalists, Ignatieff’s staff tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to have a spy infiltrate the Thursday taping.
The release of a clip from the interview on Friday led some people to conclude too hastily that Coderre had been conciliatory throughout an entire interview they hadn’t actually heard yet.
But even in that clip, in which Coderre lauded the “strength” of Ignatieff and the Liberal Party, he also said there is a “problem” at a level other than Quebec.
And in Ignatieff’s closing speech to the convention a few hours before the whole interview aired, he felt compelled to remind Liberals that “I am the leader”of the Quebec wing and to call for “fidelity and loyalty” to the party.
But in the interview, Coderre told the show’s audience (1.2 million the previous week) that he had no regrets about his actions of last week, which included saying the Quebec wing has fallen under the control of “the leader’s Toronto palace guard.”
And he implicitly criticized the leader himself, making Ignatieff sound too weak, indecisive, and unable to stand up to pressure to be trustworthy.
Referring to Ignatieff’s reversing himself and overruling Coderre’s choice of one candidate, Coderre said that “if I have an agreement with the candidate and a handshake with the leader, in my mind it’s settled.”
Host Guy A. Lepage asked whether that meant Ignatieff had gone back on his word. “No, not in that sense,” Coderre answered – but Lepage had heard him correctly. “There were pressures, and the leader had to make a decision,” Coderre explained. So the decision was to cave in.
And responding to anonymous criticism of his style from within the Quebec executive, he said that “everything that was done since the beginning was concerted and approved by the Quebec team and then by the leader.” So it’s ultimately the leader’s fault.
So now, having warned Coderre of “consequences” and demanded his “fidelity and loyalty” to the party, how does Ignatieff respond to Coderre’s latest salvo, this one fired in his direction?
Does he discipline Coderre by suspending him from the Liberal caucus, prolonging the controversy and risking making Coderre a martyr in French Quebec to his “Toronto palace guard?”
Or does he even things up by caving in to Coderre, too?
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