Chances are high that interim (long-term?) Liberal leader Bob Rae will spend his 63rd birthday Aug. 2 stuck somewhere in out-of-the-way Canada trying to breathe the breath of life into his flat lining party.
Most sensible semi-senior citizens would spend their 63rd with family and friends and in Rae’s case, in his downtown Toronto home.
But such is the life of a political leader in Canada.
Summer is a time not for battery recharging but for charging ahead in defence of the cause.
In Rae’s case, it is to try to pick the Liberals up from their worst electoral drubbing in the history of the party. He has announced a summer tour and while not quite Michael Ignatieff’s 2010 national pre-election bus tour that did not turn out so well, Rae already has popped up in Prince Edward Island, Shediac, N.B., the Calgary Stampede and the Toronto Gay Parade (no relation).
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Conservative leader Stephen Harper has his own busy schedule of meetings, foreign travel and planning an agenda for an autumn parliamentary session that will be pivotal to the success or failure of his first majority government.
NDP leader Jack Layton is filling his summer (between medical appointments) trying to solidify the incredible electoral gains his party made in the last election.
While for many scornful Canadians national political leaders are embarrassing actors, overpaid preeners, political tyrants or puppets of special interests, the summer schedules are a reminder it is one tough job.
Canada, with its linguistic, regional and demographic divides, is an almost impossible country to try to represent. It’s even a tough place to understand and yet part of the political leader job description is the requirement to be all things to all people, to be as comfortable talking about the lobster fishery in Atlantic Canada or the auto plant in Ontario as you are talking cattle prices in Alberta’s feedlot alley.
And as the last election showed, some carry it off better than others.
Since May 2, political scientists, pundits and political operatives have been dissecting the entrails of that most amazing of elections.
Looked at from the perspective of political leadership, it also was an historic night.
Of the five political party leaders contesting the election, three did very well and the other two, not so well.
But even the losers, Liberal Michael Ignatieff and Bloc Québecois leader Gilles Duceppe, made some modern-day history.
Both lost their own seats as their parties tumbled and it was the first election in 85 years that saw two national leaders lose their own re-election bid. The last time was 1926 when William Lyon Mackenzie King won the election while losing his Toronto seat while prime minister Arthur Meighen lost the election and his own Portage, Man., seat.
On the winner side, Stephen Harper became the first leader in Canadian history to win a majority after two consecutive minorities.
Jack Layton became the first leader of the New Democratic Party and its predecessor CCF to become official opposition rather than a distant third or fourth.
And Green party leader Elizabeth May saw party votes plummet across the country but made history by winning the first Green seat in Parliament.
It is a reminder that while the main burden of the leadership job is to project nationally, they also have to find the time to tend to their own local voters who send them to Parliament, or not.
It is a tough balancing act.
