“Power is part of life and it is not something that is bad or wrong,” Stéphane Dion has said. “The use of power is what makes human societies different from animals who act on instinct. Humans are always sizing each other up. That constant jockeying for power is what makes life interesting.”

I don’t agree with Dion — constant jockeying for power is what makes life an occasional bore and a frequent misery in my view — but I am delighted to read this quote in Linda Diebel’s new biography, Stéphane Dion: Against the Current. The worry seems to be that Dion isn’t sufficiently aggressive. He is comfortable with himself, humane with others. People like him.

Liberals fret over this even as it becomes clear that Prime Minister Stephen (“Steve” to his friend George Bush) Harper’s unlikeability is going to be a huge handicap in the next election. That they do so shows how crude our political landscape has become. Truthfulness, a certain dignity and a comfort with intelligence are actually seen as handicaps in a Karl Rove world.

But it doesn’t work this way with Canadians. We are more straightforward. Take for instance this business of “flip-flopping” being seen as a sign of weakness among American politicians. It is considered a deadly insult. But here is Diebel on Dion reconsidering his insistence a decade before on a particular clause in any constitutional deal with Quebec: “I don’t agree with myself, ” Dion said, and that was it. Such a thing seems fine to Canadians, who are known to change their minds over time.

Air freshener

The entire book is like this, a breath of fresh air in an Ottawa world that seems stale and uninteresting to most Canadians, who have turned away from politics in disgust but nurse a secret hope that things will change.

And perhaps they will. Dion is smart and honest, among people who can at best be accused of a rat-like cunning and selective honesty.

As well, Diebel’s book has women in it, a rare thing in political reporting. One of them, Dion’s wife, Janine Krieber, is a strong, well-educated intelligent woman with her own career.

“She had initially wanted to be a pilot but chose a path that would lead her to become an internationally recognized specialist on terrorism. Janine was a strong woman — and he was most comfortable with strong women.”

Convention stories

Diebel’s reporting is very good, and the best-known scene in her book is the let’s-all-be-friends staged the day after the Liberal convention that gave a shock victory to Dion. Michael Ignatieff’s manoeuvring is one thing. That man is a piece of work, and Dion knows that.

But the petulance of Bob Rae had me smirking. He literally refused to speak to Martha Hall Findlay, who had thrown her support to Dion when Rae assumed it was his. Rae reacted like a little boy who had lost the spelling bee to a girl. As he ignored Hall Findlay in the days that passed, I kept expecting former NDP member Rae to tell his new fellow Liberals that she had cooties.

Hall Findlay is the Liberal politician I most admire —indeed she is currently one of my favourite humans, for her intelligence and sheer stamina — and her quoted reaction was the female compassionate shrug at its most pure.

“I have just so much respect for Bob. I mean, he’s a guy who started out idealistic, right? âe¦ Anybody trying to govern Ontario at that time [the early ’90s recession years] would have had a really hard time. The guy tried.”

Never has one man been thoroughly damned with such wisps of faint praise. The man who destroyed the New Democrats in Ontario and then has the audacity to change parties only to behave like âe¦ oh, how would Hall Findlay phrase a political IED (Improvised Explosive Device)?

Rae is an acquired taste, and many have yet to acquire it, shall we say.

Female journalists leading way

Diebel’s book very much has the air of someone reporting from outside the pack, and that’s rare in Ottawa. Her last book, a subtle investigation not just into the serial murders of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico, but of the betrayal of one female activist, Digna Ochoa, by her fellow human rights advocates, is proof that cozy, insider reporting doesn’t work

Diebel didn’t trust the Mexican police, Ochoa’s friends, no one. She did her own investigation and reached her own conclusions.

Pack reporting? Look at Bob Woodward’s work since Watergate. I rest my case.

The best reporting in Canada is being done by female journalists. I don’t mean opinionators like me, I mean actual reporters like Linda McQuaig with her new book Holding the Bully’s Coat, the world-changing Naomi Klein, whose new book is imminent, Diebel, along with analyst Chantal Hébert at the Toronto Star, and brave unstoppable foreign reporters like the Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen.

Canada’s women reporters are at their best.

What’s remarkable is how few of them exist in the overwhelmingly male newsrooms of this new millennium, the Star being the worst offender. I shouldn’t single out newsrooms — most everything in this country is still run by men. But if a small group of women is able to reveal talent against such overwhelming odds, think what more women could achieve if only more women were given the chance.

Call this a vote for the next generation. It does seem that women’s rights have, if not sunk, been left to tread water. Online journalism is not terribly welcoming to women, but it is still more welcoming than the traditional world, and for that I congratulate it.

This Week

In 1960, a Moscow newspaper came up with the idea of asking writers to describe one day each year in diary form. The East German novelist Christa Wolf thus embarked on what turned out to be 40 years privately describing daily life under Communism, and its end. (She was a Stasi informer but was dumped for her “reticence” after three years. It then spied on her for 30 more.)

The great joy of One Day a Year: 1960-2000(just translated into English) is the discovery is that all humans are the same no matter what their politics: petty, envious, desperately insecure, you know the type. For example, I have been accused by both the journalistic left and right of being bourgeois, what I call a “parlour pink,” something I object to only because I think it’s a compliment and they think it’s an epithet.

Wolf was similarly accused by her Communist comrades in 1963 of having a “decadent lifestyle,” which probably consisted of her having her own toothbrush.

The drawback of these attacks, Wolf writes, is not that she is wounded. It’s that it “slows down self-criticism,” fatal for a writer. She thus takes praise more seriously and hungers for it, fatal for a human.