Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

According to the cover blurb, this book is “a story of how a
left-of-centre party that had grown intellectually lazy in opposition
was transformed, under the pressure of recession and its own
inconsistencies, into a conservative government.” The catalyst Walkom
holds responsible for all this is Bob Rae, a former Trudeau campaign
worker, Rhodes scholar, and federal finance critic, and the first NDP
premier of Ontario.

Walkom became a political columnist for the Toronto Star just before
the Ontario NDP swept to victory in 1990. He bases his book on
interviews with cabinet ministers, bureaucrats, unnamed aides, former
schoolmates, and ex-girlfriends of Bob Rae. Although Walkom’s
publisher would like readers to believe they are getting a
“behind-the-scenes” view of Rae and his government, Walkom is
himself an outsider. Lacking an insider’s perspective, Walkom has a
tendency to treat the axe-grinding anecdotes of an anonymous source with
the same credibility as statements from cabinet ministers who know they
are being interviewed for a book.

Walkom has a Ph.D. in economics and is most convincing on this
subject. He handily bashes Rae’s NDP for half-measures, bad judgment,
and endless missed opportunities, and is not entirely off base in
pointing out the NDP’s resemblance to a typical Conservative
government. On the subject of politics, Walkom sounds least informed.
Just as he attempts to hold Rae to a 20-year-old university thesis,
Walkom often sounds as if he expects the NDP to have remained the
“opposition party,” even when it formed a government.

Walkom is not the first critic to embrace the “Bad Bob” theory. It
is questionable, however, whether it is useful to attempt to write a
comprehensive critique of a politician who is still in office and in
mid-career. As a whole, Walkom tells the reader very little that is not
already well known.