Has Martin Cauchon joined Liberal leadership race too late?: Hébert
One can't help but note that Liberal leadership candidate Martin Cauchon seems to have left matters very much to the last minute.
By Chantal HébertContributing Columnist
Mon., Jan. 14, 2013timer3 min. read
MONTREAL—As improbable as it may sound, there must be times when a real-life dog actually eats some poor kid's homework.
On that basis, one has to take former justice minister Martin Cauchon at his word when he says that a discrepancy in the French-language wording of the Liberal leadership rules forced him to scramble to gather enough signatures to qualify as a candidate before Sunday's cut-off.
But on the same basis, one can't help but note that Cauchon seems to have left matters very much to the last minute.
The fact that he needed the help of his rivals to meet a long-established deadline is perhaps even more puzzling.
Cauchon is entering a crowded field that features a front-runner who has been on the road shoring up a strong lead for months. Yet he is apparently jumping in the fray with a campaign team too bare-boned to swing into action and find a few hundred signatures at short notice.
In this day and age it is possible to make up for a weak ground game with a strong presence in the social media. But at this juncture, Cauchon boasts fewer than 1,000 Twitter followers.
His last tweet goes back to the beginning of October . . . when he congratulated Justin Trudeau for his decision to run in the Liberal race.
Connect all those dots and what you have is the perplexing picture of an underdog who seems to be going out of his way to avoid hitting the ground running.
The last time Cauchon played the turtle in a fable-like contest, the prize was his former riding of Outremont and the hare was the NDP's Thomas Mulcair who beat him to the finish line without breaking much of a sweat.
Had the result of the 2011 election in Outremont been different, Mulcair would not be the leader of the official Opposition today and Cauchon's entry in the Liberal campaign would have had the potential to alter its dynamics.
As things stand now though, his failure to win back the federalist seat that he held for a decade is a major Achilles heel and not just because it would be months before he would be back in the House of Commons if he ever became leader.
As former MP Jean Lapierre puts it, one of the first questions Liberal members tend to ask themselves when pondering whether to back a leadership candidate from Quebec is whether he or she can deliver the province.
That question has taken on even more salience in the party's current predicament.
Absent an army of volunteers and a strong social media presence, Cauchon is obviously banking on his tenure in government and on the series of nine-person all-candidates debates that will take place between next weekend and the mid-April leadership vote to make his mark.
The only contender to have served in the federal cabinet, his track record as justice minister includes pro-same-sex marriage draft bill and the proposed decriminalization of marijuana. But neither is going to be much of a wedge issue in the leadership campaign.
While he offered a spirited defence of the gun registry when Trudeau described it as a failure last fall, Cauchon may find that many Liberals are not all that eager to return to that battle — especially among themselves.
Cauchon brings few more economic credentials to the fore than the rest of the pack. He has been out of elected politics for about a decade. Many of the scores of younger people who are signing up to vote in the Liberal campaign were not even 10 the last time he attended a cabinet meeting. To them he is part of the Liberal old guard.
If a bus hit the Trudeau campaign, Cauchon could be a fallback candidate to watch against Marc Garneau, Martha Hall Findlay and Joyce Murray.
Short of that though, the biggest unanswered question about Cauchon's late entry in the Liberal contest is why he wants others to take his bid more seriously than he has so far taken it himself.