You might think it’s a bit premature to render a judgement from Brain Topp’s admittedly one-sided view of last year’s Coalition. But his third installment of the Coalition history, published in the Globe, is quite revealing — and a bit disturbing when it comes to revealing the Librano mindset.

The passage I’m thinking about is here, when Mr. Topp and NDP MP Dawn Black start serious negotiations about the NDP sitting in cabinet:

Metcalfe seemed to steel himself. I wrote down what he said next in my notes:

“Some players are questioning the number of cabinet seats,” he said. “Some are proposing an accord instead of NDP seats in the cabinet – or an election, instead of doing this agreement.”

Katie Telford, Dion’s deputy chief of staff, weighed in. She said that the idea of NDP cabinet ministers was just not selling in the Liberal caucus and that it would be more productive for us to work on a different model. The Liberals, she informed us, were now prepared to consider negotiating an accord with us.

So the anvil had dropped. Mr. Dion’s team was reneging on the key element of the agreement we had the previous day, the core concept that we were forming a coalition government with a joint cabinet.

Okay, look. How you feel about the above passage will depend greatly on whether you can live with the idea of the federal NDP given cabinet responsibilities — and cabinet power. If you don’t like the idea at all, you may be tempted to cheer for Ms. Telford and the Liberal negotiating team for trying to keep them out.

I, on the other hand, can sympathize with Mr. Topp. The Liberal position here really boils down to “just support us, and we’ll let you know what we want to do before everyone else.” Which adds up to a load of nothing. There’s also no indication that this was meant as a starting position for serious negotiation; it would take an incredible amount of arrogance for the Libranos to think they could get the NDP to swallow it.

Mr. Topp then characterizes Marlene Jennings’ reaction to a counterproposal (she was also part of the negotiating team) as an explosion:

. . . the coalition proposal was not selling well with her Liberal colleagues because it implied that NDP Members of Parliament might gain access to cabinet jobs. Liberal MPs had been waiting for many years for those positions, she explained, and they did not accept that people from some other party might take their places in line.

Ms. Jennings defended the entitlements of her caucus colleagues. Only Liberal MPs, she tried to get us to understand, were qualified for and entitled to cabinet positions.

Yes, it’s rather telling that Mr. Topp uses the world “entitlement.” We can see, quite clearly, that Ms. Jennings was representing the Liberal caucus rather than the Liberal leader; and it’s the Liberal caucus that sees its ambition potentially thwarted.

Oddly enough, Mr. Topp’s presentation is actually reinforced by a second Globe story:

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, who sent out flyers criticizing the HST as the “Harper Sales Tax,” also said candidly that at least four of the five Liberal MPs from B.C. wanted Mr. Ignatieff to come out against the tax.

Mr. Dosanjh said he was not alone among B.C. MPs in wanting to oppose the HST.

When asked if the five B.C. Liberal MPs were unanimous in wanting to oppose the HST, he said: “I believe so.”

What we have here, then, is a caucus that (a) is motivated more by self-interest than by the collective good, and (b) is more likely than not to act independently of the leader’s direction. Normally I like the idea of individual MPs shaking off the cuffs of party discipline, but these people are acting more like the smug back bench of the Chretien-Martin years — they don’t particularly care about using power, just so long as they’re the ones who have it.

Not exactly the quality needed to persuade The People, now is it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 16:46 and is filed under Libranos, Media Watch, No DiPsticks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.