After colouring Ontario’s political landscape red with a decisive victory over the ruling Tories in the provincial election, Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty will be sworn in as premier today. But according to several party insiders, McGuinty is lucky to even be the Liberal leader at all.
In fact, the man who was expected to win the Liberal Leadership in 1996 and become our next premier was not McGuinty at all. Before Dalton came Gerard.
Gerard Kennedy dominated the Liberal Leadership campaign right until the end, when party members wary of Kennedy’s “lefty” campaign forced the election to nearly split right down the middle and give McGuinty the Ontario Liberal Leadership by a mere 140 votes.
Kennedy, an MPP from Rosedale-High Park, was a young renegade from the start, fighting for the rights of some the poorest people in Ontario. His political background was very different from that of the average politician. As former director of Toronto Food Bank he was responsible for distributing $30 million dollars of food, working with no support from the government. He got involved in politics because, as he notes, “I was dissatisfied with what I saw happening. The cuts to welfare showed me there was something wrong with the way politics work and the way the public feels…something needed to be done.”
Kennedy’s credo is all about respect, dignity and diversity. He says, “the best politics you’re going to get is when you bring in people with diverse views. We don’t have a sufficiently diverse table yet in politics.” In fact, when he was director of the Toronto Food Bank, he learned “to [use] business methods for social ends,” and according to Kennedy, “that’s a similar thing that Canada needs to have in government.”
Imagine: suggesting to businesses that they must re-define their profit–to give back, so public good can become a part of the economic equation. For most Liberals this made good sense, but for others, this was beginning to sound too revolutionarily, too left wing.
Kennedy admits the announcement of the winner that night at the Liberal Leadership Convention in 1996 was a surprise, but he still smiles, noting “you can talk to Dalton, but I think he was more in shock than I was because he went from fourth place to winning.
“I think the way we did our campaign was a step in the other direction, against all that cynicism [in politics]…we had such a good team, we thought we were going to win right until the end. Most people believe it was a very unusual convention in terms of how many people stuck with their candidates when they crossed the floor…there was a much stronger relationship between the delegates and their choice and that became a real factor.”
Unusual it was, but not if you hold politics up to its dirty name. While the new kid on the block (Kennedy put in his leadership bid just months after being newly elected as an MPP for the first time) had a huge following, a group of more conservative Liberals thought this new “star” was a threat to the party. According to one Liberal who worked on Lyn McCloud’s leadership campaign in 1995, “Kennedy rubbed some people the wrong way… they resented him because he was new and his style was different.” He had an independent streak and that scared some Liberals. In fact, an “anybody but Kennedy movement” arose: T-shirts and literature were quickly printed screaming damning anti-Kennedy slogans. One Liberal in favour of Kennedy’s loss said, “the voting was all strategically done”: one by one, as the leadership candidates fell to Kennedy, each gave their support to the “anybody but Kennedy” candidate, and lucky for McGuinty, that was him.
This group of blue Liberals desperately worked to change the tide of liberal support for Kennedy. Evidently, they may have just barely pushed Kennedy out of the premier’s seat, but they were unsuccessful in pushing him out of the picture completely.
In fact, during the night of the leadership convention in 1996, after the first ballot was called Kennedy says “what people don’t know is [Dalton] turned to me and said: we have to talk.” Since that talk, the two have been able to collaborate together on many ventures. As Kennedy explains: “I was in charge of [the Liberal] Party Renewal after election, in charge of putting together some membership development for our party [and] headed the Communications Committee and [worked on] the organization for Policy Committee.
“We co-wrote the education platform together [and] I had some input in health care.” When asked about McGuinty’s overall policies, Kennedy says “I can’t think of a thing that I wouldn’t agree with…by large I support his policies quite well.” After some teamwork, McGuinty and Kennedy’s policies do seem to be in sync. Essentially McGuinty was able to collaborate and work with Kennedy’s ideas.
On the surface Kennedy doesn’t seem to be bitter about his loss to McGuinty. He graciously accepts his defeat, saying, “I think I’ve done what I think was important at the time. The government needed to be opposed, and I think we stopped them when we were in opposition and now we’ve thrown them out and that’s a great accomplishment.”
