Canadians could predict the Conservative “Just Visiting” attack ads long before Ignatieff took the Liberal leadership. The Internet smear campaign, venomous even by the standards of most attack ads (and, for some reason, hosted by a server in Montenegro) features a stern looking Ignatieff on the cover of a magazine entitled Me! with the headline “Elitist Exclusive.” A Youtube video charges, “Why is Michael Ignatieff returning to Canada after 34 years? Does he have a plan for the economy? No…he has no long-term plan for the economy, he’s not in it for Canada, he’s just in it for himself.” There are usually self-damaging consequences for running such ads before an election campaign has even begun.
On one hand, the ads are effective. The most dangerous element of the Tory campaign is the suggestion that Ignatieff is a “visionless” dilettante, incapable of fixing the Canadian economy or leading the country. This is ironic, given the Conservatives’ economic blunders. Throughout the last election, Prime Minister Harper insisted there would be no recession, dismissing warnings to the contrary; in January, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty conceded there would be a $34-billion deficit, and in May, revised this figure to “more than fifty billion.” It’s clear that opposition parties must present real alternatives to Conservative fiscal policies.
Then again, the Conservatives may find that their attacks achieve the exact opposite of their intent. In their attempt to play up Ignatieff’s elitism and American pedigree, they might bolster his image as a cosmopolitan figure: educated, refined, and tastefully aristocratic. Politicians of this nature have enjoyed great success (particularly in Quebec, which has been the key to forming any government since the days of Brian Mulroney). The most common criticism of Ignatieff in the press is that he always speaks in the abstract and has yet to reveal what kind of a Prime Minister he would be. But the appeal of an attractive figurehead—a reliable face upon which to project national ideals—is considerable. Recent examples have shown that abstraction can be vital to a politician’s career.
Politicians and policymakers around the world scrupulously followed the U.S. presidential race of 2008 down to the most peripheral of details. Of the many lessons learned from this grand example of representative capitalist democracy, the most significant was the need for balance and inclusivity. For all its opulence, the greatest triumph of the Obama campaign was in the lucid vacuity of its promise for “Change.” Though there was commendable substance to elements of the campaign—the promise of multilateral diplomacy, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, etc.—it was the blankness of this slogan that prompted so many in the ranks of the apathetic and indifferent to realize the potential of their involvement in the political system.
Most importantly, it provided voters with a blank slate upon which to project their dislike of George W. Bush and the Republicans, as well as their hopes and desires for the future. Ultimately, the tremendous failure of the McCain campaign lay in its inability to match these strategies with either tangible policy alternatives or an equally abstract counter-response. Rather, it desperately adopted the conventional strategy of loutish fear mongering, anti-intellectualism (as evidenced by the selection of Sarah Palin), and parroting populist right-wing orthodoxy. It remains to be seen whether the Ignatieff camp is attempting to repeat the success of Obama’s strategy.
The long and winding road
Canadian politics has seen its share of improbable figures since the end of the Chrétien/Martin dynasty: Belinda Stronach, the western entrepreneur turned kingmaker, Stephen Harper, the right-wing ideologue turned Prime Minister, and Stéphane Dion, the professorial federalist turned party leader. The first played a vital role in unifying the social and economic factions of Canadian conservatism, only to change parties and then leave politics altogether. The second has held this uneasy alliance together with ironclad discipline and staunch intransigence through three elections and two minority governments. The last failed to counter Harper’s obstinacy, suffered a crushing defeat and then came within a monarch’s breath of leading a nation even as it was writing his epitaph. Emerging unscathed from the nightmarish affair of last December was perhaps the most interesting, most enigmatic figure to appear in Ottawa for some time: newly crowned Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
Ignatieff’s initial leadership campaign was unsuccessful. The Liberal Party had no heir apparent following Paul Martin’s departure and eight candidates entered the race, including several with vastly superior credentials: Gerard Kennedy, who had served as Minister of Education in Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet, Stéphane Dion, who had been federal Environment Minister and authored the Clarity Act, and Ignatieff’s friend and college roommate, former New Democrat Premier Bob Rae. Though he remained frontrunner throughout the convention, Ignatieff never secured more than 34 per cent support. He was eventually defeated by a series of alliances and endorsements.
Outside of the party, he received a lukewarm response. While his international credentials were a draw to some, his critics dismissed him as an outsider intruding upon the Canadian political scene. After attending the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, he moved to Oxford and later Harvard where he finished his PhD in 1976. Two years later he returned to the United Kingdom, where he would remain until the turn of the century. He then became Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Both his support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the publication of his book The Lesser Evil reinforced the conviction within the Canadian Left that he was an opportunistic interloper, a pragmatic defender of American empire, and a sinister apologist for Bush-Blair policies.
For a while, it appeared that Ignatieff’s faults could prove fatal to his ambitions. But it seems that when held in contrast to the Conservatives, Canadians are willing to see past Ignatieff’s earlier American intellectual ties.
The tabula rasa
Ignatieff’s career as a correspondent, author, and internationally prominent public intellectual is both prolific and diverse, spanning from the dungeons of Victorian Britain to the Balkan battlefields in the twilight of the twentieth century. His family history literally speaks volumes. His paternal grandfather, Minister of Education in the court of the last Tsar, was a liberal who resigned his post on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution and escaped to the West. His uncle was conservative nationalist theologian George Parkin Grant, whose influential 1965 work Lament for a Nation predicted the collapse of the traditional, communitarian Canada and its eventual absorption into the United States through the forces of modernity and the rampant individualist tendencies of liberalism. George Monroe Grant, principal of Queen’s University from 1877 to 1902 and colleague of Canadian Pacific Railroad prospector Sir Sandford Fleming, was Ignatieff’s great grandfather.
But despite the richness of his family’s history—with its shades of Tolstoy and echoes of Robertson Davies, and the contemporary recognition of his own work—Ignatieff remains an unresolved figure for some and a complete blank for most. His sudden and audacious entry into the Liberal leadership race in 2006 electrified much of the party, still reeling from Paul Martin’s defeat and the ensuing power vacuum left by 13 years of unencumbered primacy. To the most fervent of Liberal zealots, he was the reincarnation of Pierre Eliot Trudeau: the globally renowned public intellectual, the cosmopolitan internationalist, and the outspoken defender of social justice and human rights. One Liberal enthusiastically declared “It’s like Garibaldi returning to Italy.”
Ignatieff was born into history, and has the regal bearing one would expect of a man of his lineage. Ignatieff the politician is natural. Ignatieff as policymaker is a question mark. His latest book, True Patriot Love (released on the eve of the Liberal Leadership Convention), is full of illustrious talk of nation-building and the meaning of Canadian identity, but absent from the book’s elegant prose are any mention of the recession, the environment, or the failures of the Harper Government. True Patriot Love is, by its own declaration, a family memoir and not a piece of pre-campaign literature such as Barack Obama’s treatise The Audacity of Hope—a discussion of national identity in the tradition of Ignatieff’s past work on ethnic nationalism, interwoven with his passion for studying his family. This does little to offset the Liberal leader’s remarkable blankness, as the national press has observed. The Globe and Mail, for one, dismissed the book as “a shameless attempt to promote [Ignatieff’s] apparently unquestionable Canadian pedigree.”
This frustration is shared by many of the political commentators in Ottawa: apart from demands that the government institute a national standard for Employment Insurance and several more minor policies, Ignatieff has yet to release an alternative platform. The pundits in the national press are essentially correct in this regard—the Ignatieff Liberals have yet to reveal themselves outside of the abstract—but this may be indicative of a calculated strategy and not a lack of vision.
Curiously enough, Ignatieff laid a similar charge against Pierre Trudeau in his youth. Writing in The Varsity in 1968, he says:
“My trouble is that I’m tired of talking about Trudeau, but somehow can’t seem to stop. Anyone who went to the convention or who worked in the election has discussed The Wit, The Charm, The Elegance, The Arrogance, The Just Society, The Women-In-His-Life themes for about 8 months…
I know why I can’t stop playing Trudeau-scan. He always wins. He remains inscrutable after eight months under the hot klieg lights of innumerable ‘InsightProbeAnalysisTheWayIt IsHere’sTheRealMan’ interviews. But we have probably been going about it the wrong way. Instead of attempting to rip off the inscrutable mask in search of the ‘real’ man beneath, we should accept the mask as part of the real. We should accept his inscrutability as the one solid piece of personal data upon which to base further analysis. We should regard the fact that we know nothing about him as significant.”
Ignatieff’s friend Bob Rae (who at the time attended University College) disagreed, writing in the same issue: “But the victory of style has been an empty, if not totally disillusioning one. The conservatism and legalism of this swinging new government have become an almost unbearable reality.” Just as some today maintain that the Obama presidency will be a triumph of rhetoric over substance, Rae viewed Trudeau’s perceived mysteriousness not as a great strength but as a sinister flaw. Whether Rae was right or wrong in this regard, Trudeau’s strategy made him one of the most successful and resilient political figures in Canadian history.
Return of the king
The ascendance of Michael Ignatieff to the podium at the Liberal Convention on May 2 marked a new era for the party. Gone was the tribalism that kept it divided under Chrétien and Martin, gone were the leadership posters and delegate blocs of 2006, and gone was the sense of abject frustration felt under Dion. The Harper government, suffering from its self-inflicted wounds, is seeing its support at an all-time low. Ignatieff, on the other hand, has shown great competence in reconciling and rebuilding the Liberal Party. In allowing his Newfoundland MPs to vote against the Conservative budget, he revealed his capacity for moderation and compromise. By not forcing an immediate election he has shown shrewd political judgement. Unlike John Turner and Paul Martin, he has ascended to leadership with a clean slate. And like Trudeau, he wears an “inscrutable mask.”
Since all three opposition parties must vote against the government to bring it down, an election might occur at any time. It could strike during the summer or elude us until fall, winter, or spring. Whatever the political climate of the next few months turns out to be, Canada’s latest enigmatic politician is poised to play a vital role in this country’s future.
