Next September will mark the 20th anniversary of Bob Rae’s election as Premier of Ontario and the 43rd anniversary of the beginning of his tenure at The Varsity. Our conversation began here, as I asked him to share some recollections from his time at our newspaper and as a student at University College. Like most U of T students in the late 1960s, Robert Rae was intensely political, involving himself in local and national politics and organizing teach-ins on campus. Going through our paper’s archives I found, among other things, his review of George Grant’s book Technology and Empire, a report about his election to the student union with the headline “SAC Consolidates to the Left,” and a piece by some character called Mike Ignatieff entitled “Apocalypse” predicting the end of civilization as we know it.

There were also several pictures of the old Varsity team outside the office (a wondrous architectural artifact from U of T’s past which has since transformed into that crater across from Robarts). Bob and Mike are instantly recognizable although the former is smoking and hunched over with a Humphrey Bogart-esque detachment. Despite their intense involvement in writing and politics, the pair were mischievous by all accounts. Sitting across from me, Rae recalls bringing the Mothers of Invention to Convocation Hall: “We had to pay for removing the confetti from the organ pipes,” he recalls, then amends, “…no, it was shaving cream.”

The pair worked on Pierre Trudeau’s first campaign in 1968, although their opinions quickly split on Canada’s philosopher king. In October of that year, Ignatieff wrote an enthusiastic endorsement, comparing the Trudeau phenomenon to a scrumptious meal consumed over and over again. Rae, meanwhile, dismissed him as an intellectual conservative bereft of substance: “But the victory of style has been an empty, if not totally disillusioning one. The conservatism and legalism of this swinging new government have become an almost unbearable reality,” he wrote at the time.

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Upon reading these words aloud for their author, I think instantly of Barack Obama, whose irresistibly exciting presidential campaign has quickly become a distant memory obscured by a year of tea parties and legislative languish. Rae acknowledges the parallel, but notes: “Obama’s problem is that he’s dealing with a very obstructionist and conservative political environment and that’s very limiting. Mr. Trudeau didn’t have that problem. […] One could argue that between ’68 and ’72 [his] problem was that he could have done anything he wanted and it wasn’t entirely clear what he wanted to do. […] But you can see the same thing with the illusion, the belief, and the disillusion.”

I go on to ask Rae about digital and social networking media, both of which have been critical tools in organizing grassroots protests against the prorogation of Parliament. The MP is himself an avid Facebook user who posts new status updates daily from his BlackBerry. “I don’t know what you do with Twitter”, says Rae. “My status updates on Facebook are downloaded onto Twitter so I have people allegedly who follow [me but] I don’t know who they are! I use Facebook a lot and I have fun with [it] and try to engage with people. […] But I have this crazy problem that I’ve been keeping my site as a friend site rather than a fan site but I’m only allowed 5,000 friends and I have about 2,000 people on the waiting list to become friends. I’ve been talking to my staff about it and we’re going to have to decide whether we just forget about the friend site and just [put] everybody into a fan site in which case you have a little less [opportunity for] dialogue and a little less chance to engage with people.”

Our conversation soon turns to the topic of recession, and that combination of erratic and often spontaneous economic forces that so often become the graveyard of governments on the right and the left. Rae’s own experience is a case in point: “When we went into recession in the early ‘90s we were hit harder than anyone else. Politically we were more isolated.” To a much greater extent than other governments in Canada or around the world, the Ontario NDP decided to spend its way out of the recession by “priming the pump,” as Rae puts it. The finance minister at the time, Floyd Laughren, argued that such spending was necessary because the government refused to “fight the recession on the backs of the poor and the most vulnerable.”

The media response was less than flattering, with commentators raging against “those tax-happy, spend-thrift socialists at Queen’s Park.” Mike Harris would win two majority mandates in Ontario using this very message and similar charges now echo daily from David Cameron across the New Westminster chamber at the dented but not yet defeated Gordon Brown.

Yet governments across the globe circa 2008 reacted to the recession with the same Keynesian impulse taken by Rae’s NDP during its 1990-1995 mandate. As he emphatically points out, politically “the stars were aligned differently.” The current Conservative government (with a little help from its friends) has spent unprecedented sums on economic stimulus, and one rarely hears the Prime Minister referred to as “Harpo-Marx” or “Socialist Steve,” amiable titles both.

Yet there is another sense in which the political stars are now aligned differently. Towards the end of Rae’s mandate as premier, his government alienated much of its traditional base in the public sector through the unpopular Social Contract, something he notes many state governments south of the border have implemented and something Dalton McGuinty is seriously considering. Yet in the 1990s, Rae’s government found itself between a rock and an even bigger rock, resorting to measures which left a sour taste in the mouths of both labour and business. Rae’s writings reveal he is acutely aware of this social-democratic dilemma. In his autobiography From Protest to Power he describes the predicament: “I had long felt that I was in the unenviable position where the left felt my brain had been captured by Bay Street, and Bay Street thought I was some kind of Maoist.”

We end on the return of Parliament which is set for just over a week after our conversation. With a budget expected to paradoxically contain both aggressive cuts to spending and the continuation of an expensive stimulus program, Bob Rae may finally have his day.