Don’t get no respect: Why the Leader of the Official Opposition is the worst job in Canadian politics

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Peter Donolo is a Toronto-based strategic communications consultant. He served as director of communications to Jean Chrétien from 1991 to 1999, and as chief of staff to Michael Ignatieff from 2009 to 2011.

It may not be the worst job in Canada. But being the leader of the Official Opposition is certainly the worst – the most thankless, frustrating, consistently humiliating – job in Canadian politics.

As the Conservative Party leadership race nears its conclusion, it’s worth remembering that the immediate prize to be bestowed upon the victor is really no prize at all. At best, leading the Opposition will likely be a three-year political purgatory. If that time is well spent, it will allow for the building of a solid team and platform – not just to win the next federal election, but to govern the country effectively. But every minute of it is bound to be a painful ordeal, with the media, pundits and – you can be certain – the party’s own parliamentary caucus making the task infinitely more difficult.

It’s no coincidence that over the past 15 years Canada has had just two prime ministers but nine leaders of the Official Opposition. The job is much more likely to mark the end of a political career than serve as a stepping stone to the prime minister’s office. Indeed, if electoral victory comes at all, it is in spite of the job, not because of it.

I’ve been there twice, working closely with two vastly different Liberal leaders of the Official Opposition, almost two decades apart: Jean Chrétien and Michael Ignatieff. Their eventual electoral performances were just as divergent as their personalities and life stories. Yet the challenges the two men faced in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO) were remarkably similar – because they are endemic to that office.

First of all, there are the inevitable divisions and rivalries that afflict all political parties, especially those aspiring to power. Slings and arrows are a fact of life in politics, but for Opposition leaders, an inordinate number of those missiles originates from their own ranks. Let’s call this syndrome “Oppositionitis.”

Part of it can be chalked up to unhealed wounds from contentious leadership races. For example, Mr. Chrétien’s first-ballot Liberal leadership victory on June 23, 1990, should have been a day of celebration. However, it also happened to be the day that the Meech Lake accord died. Many Quebec delegates donned black armbands, and two MPs from that province bolted the Liberals to help found a new separatist party, the Bloc Québécois. Few party leaderships in Canada have gotten off to a less auspicious start.

Opposition leaders have relatively few remedies at hand to salve these types of bitter wounds. They have no access to patronage of any sort, their budget is limited, and they have none of the levers to truly affect or change public policy. Consequently, members of the opposition benches are free to stew and fret – and sometimes squawk and conspire – working themselves into a feverish bout of Oppositionitis.

This is even true when the leadership is entrusted in a politician without the trials of a leadership contest, as was the case with Mr. Ignatieff in December, 2008. What happens then is a vicious cycle in which the Opposition’s inability to gain traction only further darkens the mood of MPs and their confidence in the leader.

Indeed, that very inability is the defining feature of the job – not a bug. And that problem stems from the complete irrelevance of Question Period in the House of Commons.

Ever since Question Period began being televised in the 1970s, the opposition strategy has been the same: scan the clippings (and, in more recent years, social media) for “gotcha” questions that can embarrass the government and hope that a 10-second zinger gets picked up by the media. But this never breaks new ground and rather just piggybacks on the work already done by the media, guaranteeing that these canned soundbites look trite and performative.

For its part, the government – through its ministers – grudgingly provides non-answers. (The only change in this latter element has been the nastiness that has crept into many ministerial responses, an innovation of the uber-partisan government of Stephen Harper.)

The result is a kind of kabuki theatre that preoccupies the MPs and young staffers scurrying through the halls of Parliament but has little or no relevance to Canadians. Furthermore, with fewer journalists in the Parliamentary Press Gallery and more crowded news lineups – not to mention the atomization of news consumption – fewer and fewer Canadians are paying any attention to these labour-intensive theatrics.

All of that only contributes to even greater angst among Opposition MPs. They bemoan their lack of profile in the news – and their leader’s, too. This just reinforces the second-guessing of their caucus leadership and, in many cases, the belief they could do a better job themselves.

Meanwhile, armed with no carrots and virtually no sticks, the leader is at the mercy of caucus. This is true even for experienced and forceful politicians such as Mr. Chrétien. Alone among the Liberal leadership contenders in 1990 (which included Paul Martin and Sheila Copps), Mr. Chrétien refused to definitively promise to scrap the deeply unpopular goods and services tax, which had been introduced by Brian Mulroney’s government. However, just three months into his leadership, Mr. Chrétien’s caucus was so riven and so consumed by Oppositionitis that he felt compelled to reverse his position and oppose the tax. Once the Liberals took office in 1993, however, the GST omelette proved impossible to unscramble – to the party’s considerable political embarrassment. Mr. Chrétien would have been better off sticking to his original position rather than caving to caucus.

In these moments, anonymous complaints from panicky MPs (“Nervous Nellies,” in Mr. Chrétien’s memorable phrase) start to proliferate until pretty soon the only media coverage the Opposition party is getting is about dissent and recriminations in the ranks. And without the ability to actually do anything, Opposition leaders are often treated lazily and contemptuously by the political media. Their every gaffe is parsed, the picayune details of the inner workings of their offices become the focus of media attention, and the way they talk and dress become the criteria by which they’re judged. And given the frequently vapid nature of their jobs, there is no substance to counterbalance the trivia.

In other words, all this adds up to the political job from hell.

In fact, from what I could see up close, the job had only two perks that made it halfway bearable. The first is Stornoway, the official residence of the leader of the Opposition. It’s a stately yet comfortable mansion in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park neighbourhood that’s both very livable and ideal for entertaining. Just ask the Conservatives’ interim Opposition leader Candice Bergen; she couldn’t wait to move in, dropping $19,000 in taxpayers’ money to cover moving costs, despite the brevity of her stay.

The other perk is the leader’s spectacular Mackenzie King-designed Centre Block office (complete with a King-esque secret entrance). It’s one floor directly above the Prime Minister’s Office, and it’s arguably superior, too. However, with the massive restoration of Parliament likely to take at least 10 more years, that prize will certainly elude the next half-dozen (at the current rate of turnover) Opposition leaders.

Still, these add up to a small reward for the daily ignominy of the job.

But there is good news. What caucus members (and the punditocracy) usually forget is that what the leader does in this political valley of death is virtually guaranteed to have no effect on the next election.

Consider these facts.

The NDP’s Thomas Mulcair, with his tough, prosecutorial style in the House of Commons, was widely hailed as the most effective Opposition leader in decades. But under his leadership, his party lost 51 seats and slid to third place in the 2015 election.

Joe Clark, on the other hand, was mercilessly mocked by pundits and beset by internal party intrigues. “Joe Who,” the media called him, making a national punchline out of his lost luggage on his ill-fated world tour. Yet Mr. Clark will go down in history as the only leader to deal an election defeat to the formidable Pierre Trudeau.

The key, then, is to survive the experience while preparing for the real moment of truth – the next election.

Mr. Chrétien used his three years as Opposition leader to refresh the Liberal Party’s ideas bank by hosting a “Thinker’s Conference” in Aylmer, Que. That summit was inspired by the successful Kingston Conference that former Liberal leader Lester Pearson used to intellectually re-energize the then-opposition Liberals about three decades earlier. Mr. Chrétien tapped his platform co-chairs Paul Martin and Chaviva Hosek to synthesize much of the conference’s thinking into the Liberals’ breakthrough campaign platform, the “Red Book.” Finally, he travelled across the country and attracted a new generation of candidates. As he repeated ad nauseam throughout the 1993 election: “I have the people. I have the plan. Together we can make the difference.” Mr. Chrétien went on to lead the party to its first of three majority victories.

Mr. Ignatieff tried many of the same approaches during his own time as leader of the Opposition. He convened a Thinkers’ Conference in Montreal and oversaw a detailed platform. But he had difficulty recruiting high-profile, exciting candidates, largely because polling never gave the Liberals much of a shot at winning the next election. Mr. Ignatieff’s Liberals would suffer their worst-ever electoral defeat in 2011.

Timing and electoral breaks were major factors in the different outcomes. In 1993, Canadians were champing at the bit for change, with the governing Progressive Conservatives reduced to just two seats in the election; in 2011, not so much. Just as importantly, Mr. Chrétien had become a familiar and well-regarded public figure over the course of his 30 years in Canadian politics, while Mr. Ignatieff’s 30-year absence from Canada only gave credence to the suspicions raised by the Conservatives’ “He’s just visiting” advertising broadsides. One had a deep well of trust to call on; the other was defined by his opponents.

So what does this all mean for the candidates seeking the Conservative Party leadership, particularly front-runners Pierre Poilievre and Jean Charest?

Mr. Poilievre can be sure that the issues that turbocharged his candidacy – the so-called Freedom Convoy, financial regulations and attacks on gatekeepers – will provide fat targets once he’s ensconced in the OLO. And they hold the potential of boomeranging on him in the next election, where his job won’t be to further excite those who already share some of his more marginal views but to build a team and develop a broad platform that can enable the Conservatives once again to break through into the seat-rich suburbs of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

On the other hand, if Mr. Charest wins, he will find that his steady-hand, old-pro statesmanship is ill-suited to the job of leader of the Opposition – just as Mr. Chrétien did 30 years ago. There is a lot to be said for the electoral appeal of a proven, effective former premier and federal minister, but that moment is potentially three years away (assuming the Liberal-NDP confidence-and-supply deal holds together). The interim period, which will be filled with the inanities of opposition life, will be the longest ordeal of his long political career.

The work that goes into winning a general election – and the even more important work of planning a government – is real and it’s gruelling. But that work goes on under the surface. So whoever wins the party leadership on Sept. 10 should celebrate hard that night, then wake up the next day ready to roll up their sleeves and start preparing for the long game of winning over Canadians. Especially since they’ll have to get comfortable with their new status as just the latest Rodney Dangerfield of Canadian politics.

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