It was ironic the help Larry O'Brien had from top federal Conservatives for his Ottawa mayoral victory in 2006 may ultimately have led to his downfall in last week's municipal election, but insiders say even the federal party's grassroots abandoned him for the campaign.
"They cut O'Brien loose completely," a longtime federal and municipal Liberal activist in the city told The Hill Times, pinning much of the change in attitude on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) political king in the region—Government House Leader John Baird (Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.). "He could see the writing on the wall, O'Brien's time was up, and he didn't want to be on the losing side."
Mr. O'Brien was defeated last week by Jim Watson, former Ontario Liberal Cabinet minister and MPP, who won 49 per cent of the vote, while Mr. O'Brien won 24 per cent. Clive Doucet won 15 per cent and Andy Haydon won seven per cent.
It was Mr. Baird whose intervention in the 2006 city elections, suspending federal funding for former mayor and Liberal MPP Bob Chiarelli's light rail plan, contributed significantly to O'Brien's victory over Mr. Chiarelli and second-place finisher that year Alex Munter.
It was also Mr. O'Brien's connections to Mr. Baird and other federal Conservatives in Ottawa that through a series of misadventures led to Mr. O'Brien's dramatic trial in 2009, where he was acquitted on influence peddling charges over efforts to get one of his opponents in the campaign to step aside in the 2006 city election.
Mr. O'Brien's concession speech on election night, and the half-hearted campaign he mounted for the vote, suggested that, at the end of it all, along with a series of other mistakes and missteps behind him, he just wanted to get it all behind him.
And, it seems, so did backroom federal Tories who populate Parliament Hill and the wards and neighbourhoods that surround it.
They flocked to former mayor Mr. Watson despite the term he served in Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty's Cabinet over the past three years.
"The Conservative vote, if you want to call it the small-c conservative, were there in spades for Larry in 2006," said Walter Robinson, the former head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation who ran for the federal Conservatives in Orleans in 2004, and a former chief of staff to Mr. O'Brien, who has since gone on to become a leading commentator on civic politics in the capital. "This time around, there wasn't any real kind of strength of Conservative organization or organizers. He just held a very strong kind of ideological base."
After witnessing Mr. O'Brien's disintegration over the past year, following the traumatic experience of his high-profile trial, it seems federal Conservative organizers, many of them among the political junkies and aides on Parliament Hill, found other places to plant their flags.
"Some of these Hill staffers have been here now for three and four years, some of them have made okay money, they got married, they're building families, I know a few of them have bought houses in Orleans," said Mr. Robinson.
"What I can tell you, because I saw it out in Orleans ward here, I saw it in Cumberland, I saw a bit of it out in Bay ward, if there were Hill staffers and they decided to do something else as opposed to work on the O'Brien campaign, they had a bunch of right-of-centre candidates to work for this time. If there was any bleeding of organizers or workers, which would have hurt Larry, they had more options in their own backyards."
Mr. O'Brien it seems also lost support from the barely right of centre. "If there was a Conservative loss for O'Brien, it was that Red Tory core that has known the Watson brand in this city long before Jim Watson was a member of Dalton McGuinty's government or Cabinet."
Mr. O'Brien's thinly veiled pokes at Mr. Watson's personal life and his highly civil demeanor, with Mr. O'Brien saying politics was no place for "little old ladies," also likely alienated Conservatives, including Mr. Baird.
Mr. O'Brien ended up with the ideological core Mr. Robinson mentioned. It amounted to 64,853 votes, 24.06 per cent of election turnout, which for the mayor's race was only 44 per cent of the city's eligible voters. Mr. Watson received 131,258 votes, 48.7 per cent of the vote and one percentage point higher than the votes Mr. O'Brien won in 2006.
Tim Powers, a well-known federal Conservative commentator who also keeps an eye on the city's pulse, said Mr. O'Brien's fate was likely sealed before the campaign began.
"I think the writing was on the wall, to be perfectly blunt," Mr. Powers told The Hill Times. "I don't think he had the same enthusiasm he had for the job, and clearly he admitted he made some mistakes. I think also, as it related to Watson, Jim being in the field changed the dynamic, whereas Chiarelli last time certainly had some known enemies, I think Jim Watson has more friends than enemies, and that includes many Tory friends."
A political assistant close to Mr. Baird on Parliament Hill called it simply: "The end of a bad era."
Mr. Robinson shrugged off suggestions that Mr. O'Brien, who is privately planning to write a book about his term as mayor, ran again to show that the beating he took through the trial and other affairs did not break him.
"Larry O'Brien's not a quitter," said Mr. Robinson. "When people say, 'No you shouldn't do that or that's not going to help you.' This man does not like no, it's in his DNA."
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The Hill Times
Source: The Hill Times
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