Sore losers are an unfortunate product of political contests. But even worse are the sore winners.

If Justin Trudeau and his new Liberal government are serious about changing the culture of politics when they officially take the reins of power next week, it’s the sore-winner syndrome they will have to resist.

Sore winners are those who put the spoiled odour into that old “spoils of power” phrase. It’s more than just being smug — it’s dwelling on all the ways, real and imagined, that your rivals kept you out of contention while you were out of power. Then, and this is where it becomes a toxic, downward spiral, sore winners decide to mete out some payback.

The sore-winner syndrome has afflicted partisans of all stripes during my 25-plus years covering politics around Ottawa.

It plagued the Liberals throughout their incessant leadership battles through the 1980s to the 2000s, as successive winners found ways to quash their ambitions of rivals, just as they believed they had been treated by the previous leaders.

John Turner kept constantly looking over his shoulder at Jean Chrétien and finding ways to keep him on the sidelines. Chrétien was always on the lookout for signs of insurrection from Paul Martin’s team. Martin, on winning the leadership prize, moved almost immediately to push Sheila Copps out of her long-time Hamilton riding. And on it went, until the Liberals were booted from power altogether in 2006.

But the syndrome didn’t stop. The swearing-in of Harper’s first cabinet in 2006 was riddled with evidence of sore-winnerism.

The appointment of Liberal-turned-Conservative David Emerson was obvious payback for the defection of Belinda Stronach, from Harper’s team to Martin’s cabinet, in the months leading up to the election.

The installation of an appointed senator, Michael Fortier, to Public Works, was a cheeky, double-edged jab on two fronts — patronage appointments and the sponsorship scandal. Fortier seemed to be put in charge of the department responsible for a huge amount of government-tendered contracts simply so Harper could say, defiantly: “Liberals got away with it; I can get away with worse.”

And of course, Harper’s nearly 10 years in power contained constant reminders of just how much the Conservatives were dwelling on grudges of the past. The outsiders-in-power approach spoke to a lingering, Conservative sense that they were being forced to work with past, perceived enemies, from the bureaucracy to the Supreme Court.

The battles with the media were the most obvious, up to and including the establishment of the now-defunct Sun TV, which often acted as a communications arm of the government, complete with a former PMO communications director at the helm. Sun TV was the Conservatives’ attempt to mimic — to the point of exaggerated caricature — what they believed to be the operating principle of CBC and its relationship with Liberals. (This illustrated that sore-winnerism is at its most ridiculous when operating on imagined, rather than real, slights of the past.)

Even the New Democrats, who have never won power, have been afflicted with sore-winner syndrome.

When they ascended to official Opposition in 2011, New Democrats were quick to push high-profile Liberals such as Bob Rae and Trudeau out of nicer offices on Parliament Hill and into less prime real estate in dark corridors.

The NDP constantly monitored the media too, as any political reporter can attest, looking for instances in which Liberals got better billing than New Democrats. Last December, leader Thomas Mulcair told a gathering of New Democrats that every time Trudeau was mentioned in the media before the NDP, partisans should register protests with letters. “Give them s---,” Mulcair said.

After 10 years of stuff like this, many Liberals will be feeling they have a myriad of reasons to be sore winners. They may well be planning now how to make sure New Democrats are ousted from nice offices or how to get Conservative and NDP voices marginalized in the media.

But this will do nothing to halt the downward spiral in Ottawa’s political culture. Trudeau’s oft-repeated line: “Conservatives are not our enemies; they are our neighbours” should be framed and displayed prominently in Liberal offices as the transition gets under way.

Now, this doesn’t have to be extended as far as hiring out-of-work staffers from rival parties, as I’ve seen suggested (though it doesn’t rule it out, either). However, as I have pointed out on other occasions, it is true that the most valuable political staffers tend to be the ones who worked for the party in opposition too. Some of the most insufferable ones are those who have only known how to work for a party riding high in power.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Trudeau has promised to bring “sunny ways” to Ottawa. A good start might be giving us all a break from sore-winner syndrome.

Read more about: