I noted that former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen was in Toronto recently, a guest at the convention that saw the replacement of Jean Chretien by Paul Martin as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The manner of Chretien’s leaving strikes me as similar to the way Owen was shoved out of office by the local Non Partisan Association (NPA).

Politicians like NDP leader Jack Layton and left-leaning commentators like Linda McQuaig and Moe Sihota have been lately waxing positive about Jean Chretien’s last year in office. Paul Martin, as Layton would have it, is muscling in to pull the Liberals to the right just as Chretien was on the cusp of introducing a slew of socially progressive policies. For Layton it's a nifty manouver; use the outgoing leader for your own political gain, even if he's not in your party.

A similar tack was taken by Vancouver’s new mayor, Larry Campbell, in the municipal election of a year ago. Philip Owen, long derided as an establishment square, was reborn in the eyes of the left as a latterly-enlightened social progressive, thrust out of his party by scheming backroomers and an ambitous former ally just as he was about to go forward with the safe injection site experiment.

The media bought the line and the wily Campbell was off and running. He tapped into a silent but significant view held by many in Vancouver; that Owen was a simple but decent guy; not perfect, but easy to relate to on some basic level.

Is Layton onto something as well? Will the many Canadian voters who had a gut-level affection for the gushing Canadian-ness of Chretien turn on Martin? Certainly not enough of them to elect Layton as Prime Minister, but maybe enough of them on the left flank of the Liberal constituency to give the NDP a more respectable number of seats in Ottawa.

Without the simple ‘Canada is best’ patriotism of Chretien, it is unlikely that Paul Martin would have had the leeway to do what he did in the Finance portfolio. Many of Martin’s initiatives, particularly the cutting of programs and transfer payments to balance the federal budget, would have been seen as the thin edge of some ideologically conservative wedge had Chretien, with his open wariness of the American right and his years in the Trudeau inner circle, not been running interference.

The fact that much of the Liberal party can’t grasp this is reminiscent of the way the local NPA couldn’t see the asset it had in ‘Philip the Dim.’ Indeed, Martin himself seems to be the only one who knows it. We saw hints of this at his coronation as Liberal leader over the weekend. His acknowledgement of Chretien’s support while he was finance minster, his invoking of his father’s social activism, and his alliance of convenience with Bono all may allow him to create just enough of a small ‘l’ liberal face to stave off an electoral threat from the left.

Whether we'll still see this side of him when he's forced to make a few hard decisions as Prime Minister is another matter. It may well be that he performs best when someone else is the frontman.