This Liberal leadership race may be unusual, but there have been stranger ones before

The good news is that both of the candidates competing to take the premier's chair in Augustrecognize there's a serious financial crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.

The bad news is that there's no good news in that fiscal picture.

That became apparent in Thursday night's televised debate, when John Abbott and Andrew Furey came to the CBC studios in St. John's to make their physically distanced cases for why they should win the favour of the Liberal faithful on Aug. 3.

Abbott and Furey answered a volley of questions submitted by audience members, on topics that ranged from tackling the debt to raising the minimum wage, from figuring out fixes for the health-care system to addressing privilege in politics and decision-making.

They were fairly even-handed, with a spark here and there. "I feel like I'm shooting at shadows," said Abbott, referring to what he described as Furey's vague platforms.

Furey fired right back. "You had a chance, sir. You had a chance," said Furey, arguing that Abbott who served as the deputy minister of health under both Danny Williams and Dwight Ball ought to have been able to effect the change he's now campaigning for. (You can watch that testy bit in the clip below.)

In five weeks, it'll all be over, and we'll know who will win Furey, the surgeon with political connections who arrived with the support of most of the caucus, or Abbott, who worked at the top levels of government for years and is now positioning himself as the outsider fighting the status quo.

Blood on the floor (metaphorically, of course)

The Liberals have had a tangle or two over the years with their leadership. Some have been smooth, some have practically left blood on the floor.

This one will have nothing on the floor, because there will be no floor at all. Because of COVID-19, the campaign itself had to besuspended for just over twomonths,and there will be no leadership convention because of safety concerns. No placards, no decorations, no brass bands just a virtual affair in which the results will be announced.

Thus, Thursday's debate in which Abbott and Furey stood 30 apart from each other, with a screen between them that Furey's campaign said was necessary is an indication of how unusual this leadership campaign has been.

There, of course, have been others through the years, and they've varied dramatically in terms of drama, stakes and strategy, for a party that has been in and out of government.

For blood on the floor, nothing matched the 2001 fight between Roger Grimes and John Efford, with Paul Dicks in the mix as well. That was a full-on leadership fight, with round-the-province campaigning, finger-pointing and the nastiest of aftertastes. One of my main recollections of watching it all unfold (I'm tempted to say unspool) during a winter storm at Mount Pearl's Glacier arena was seeing the floor: the Grimes camp on one side, kind of dressed up for the occasion, and jackets and caps on the Efford side. It really did seem like the suits versus the workers. Grimes won the race, and Efford never really quite got over it, and the Liberals were horribly divided; not a few told me it made it difficult to hold things together for the 2003 election, when Danny Williams took the Tories back to power.

The weirdest of races

How leaders get elected can say a lot about the party.

The weirdest Liberal contest would have to have been in 1969, when Joseph R. Smallwood entered the race to succeed himself, and won. John Crosbie, who had seemed poised to win the race, felt Joey could not live with turning over the reins to the "merchant princeling."

It proved to bea pyrrhic victory for Smallwood: Crosbie and many others decamped to the Tories, who eventually gained power in 1972. The Liberal party, once unbeatable, was put on the defensive for a generation.

Smallwood's spectre hung over the party for years. Ed Roberts, one of the bright upstarts that Smallwood recruited in the '60s, won the leadership convention in 1972 to succeed Smallwood who wasn't quite ready, thank you very much, to leave politics. It's still thought the Liberal Reform Party that Joeytook into the 1975 election cost Roberts his best chance at being premier. In any event, Roberts seemed to spend the Seventies fighting for his own leadership. He did it in 1974, and won, and again in 1977, and lost. (Bill Rowe, past cabinet minister and future talk show host and author, won after four gruelling ballots.)

The Liberals then went through a series of leaders,including former Tory cabinet minister Leo Barry, whom many Liberals appeared to never trust, and who resigned after a caucus revolt in 1987. That culminated in Clyde Wells coming to the fore in a subsequent contest, which was not really much of a contest, in my recollection; he easily defeated Winston Baker (a future cabinet minister) and Ted Noseworthy.

"Wells In a Waltz," said the headline in the Sunday Express, where I was writing at the time. Which was very much what the party wanted. Senior Liberals had wooed Wells for years, and eventually brought him around.

It's interesting how often there have been no contests at all. Former federal cabinet minister Don Jamieson was hand-picked by the party executive in 1979 to lead the party into an election against Brian Peckford.

When Wells announced his retirement over the Christmas holidays in 1995, there was no convention to replace him, even though the party was still going strong. Brian Tobin was the only candidate again, in the manner that party insiders wanted. Tobin wanted to get on with governing, and did not want to waste time with a convention.

Acclamations and consternation

There were other acclamations, but while the party was in opposition. (They don't have a monopoly on it, either; the PCs famously acclaimed Kathy Dunderdale, who had agreed to be just interim premier after Danny Williams retired; prospective candidates got the message that a contest would be divisive.)

Jim Bennett, an outsider to be sure, was acclaimed as leader in 2006 and abruptly ran head-first into the small caucus. He quit after just three months.

Gerry Reid was next: no leadership race, just the approval of the executive. Reid stepped down after losing his own seat in the disastrous 2007 election.

Yvonne Jones, who had been interim leader after that, was acclaimed in the 2011 race-that-was-not-a-race. Jones stepped down months later to battle breast cancer.

Did you miss Thursday's debate? Watch it in full here:

The Liberal leadership competition that ensued was most unusual. It was August 2011, and the provincial election was just two months away. The party executive asked for submissions, got seven, and then voted (secretly; the results were never made public) for one: former cabinet minister Kevin Aylward.

The next time around, in November 2013, there was an actual convention, with a hotel ballroom, bunting and rah-rahs from the competing teams. There were five candidates, and Dwight Ball, of course, won. While there were multiple ballots, they had all already been cast in advance with tiered voting, making the "run-offs" somewhat artificial.

And so here we are.

When Ball announced in February he wanted to step down, it was clear that the establishment was behind Furey, a surgeon who founded Team Broken Earth and, notably, the son of Sen. George Furey and nephew of former Wells-Tobin cabinet minister Chuck Furey.

• Weekend Briefing: Read prior editions of this column

It looked like we might have had another acclamation. I'm not sure how good that's been for any party over the years.

John Abbott was not prepared to let it be a coronation. And so we have an actual campaign, as unusual as it is.

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