Bright and Blind

Michael Ignatieff still does not understand the part he played in his party's worst defeat in history. Bob Hepburn writes that Ignatieff's new book should be titled It Really Wasn't My Fault:

According to Ignatieff, the Liberals were trounced because they lacked money to buy television ads to counter Harper’s attack ads, which kept hammering away at the fact Ignatieff had been out of Canada for nearly 30 years, because they were in worse shape internally than he had imagined and because Harper and Layton were veteran politicians who knew how to connect with voters better than he did.

To Ignatieff, the Liberals’ demise had little or nothing to do with his flip-flopping on key issues, his failure to focus on two or three issues about which he felt passionately or his wooden, cold television image.

If anything, the book reinforces the widely perceived image of Ignatieff as arrogant and aloof, a man who turned voters off, not on. It’s as if he is saying about his political life: “I’m brilliant, I’m better than this.”

Hepburn writes that Ignatieff made all kinds of mistakes:

As leader, he was uninspiring and his political smarts were questionable. He failed to establish distinctive policies that set him apart from Harper. He failed to tell Canadians two or three key issues that he felt most passionately about. He supported Harper on virtually every Conservative legislative initiative, keeping the Tories in power.

At the same time, Ignatieff excluded his own MPs from a major Liberal policy conference. He failed to attract star candidates. He showed little understanding of what he wanted to do as a politician or how he would achieve it. He was terrible on television and refused to listen to advisers who wanted to help because, as a former TV star, he knew better.

Canadians didn’t like him not because he wouldn’t get down and dirty in politics, like Harper does. They voted against him because they knew he didn’t have any core values and because they felt he looked down on them.

There's a lot that Ignatieff has failed to learn. A man can be very bright -- and utterly blind.

An Eye On The Future

In today's Globe and Mail, Micheal Ignatieff offers a response to those despicable attack ads that Conservatives ran from the day he became Liberal leader until the day he resigned that post -- the ones that ended with the tagline, "he didn't come back for you."

Even though the ads sought to paint Ignatieff as some kind of  untrustworthy oddity, Ignatieff reminds his readers that "nearly three million Canadians -- 9 percent of the population," live and work outside Canada:

Most of these expatriates are in the United States, but you can find Canadians everywhere: on oil rigs offshore in Ghana, in NGOs in African villages, hunkered down at United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and in brokerage houses in Frankfurt, London and Beijing. Increasing numbers of our expatriates were born outside Canada, came to this country and now have moved on, taking their citizenship with them.

The Conservatives would have you believe that they are deadbeats -- freeloaders. They argue that once you leave, you can't come home again. There is, writes Ignatieff, "a weird insinuation: Why would anyone come home, unless you were just in it for yourself?" The Harperites have turned the old Canadian inferiority complex on its head and used it as a weapon. Returning home is a sign of failure, both internationally and domestically.

It is yet another sign that the Conservatives are a party of the old -- led by a fifty-two year old prime Minister who is so much older than his years.. He and they simply do not understand the young. Ignatieff writes:

So many of the young Canadians I meet want to be global citizens. They want to be expatriates. They want a life that includes a couple of years in Mumbai or Shanghai, a summer teaching English in Tanzania, a year or longer working for some company in South Korea.  

Young Canadians know which way the world is going, and they want to be out there, at the heart of the action. They are thinking about what a good life looks like and they know a good life might take them beyond our borders. Some won’t come home again, but others will, because they realize being away made them more Canadian, not less.

Ignatieff has his eye on the future.  Harper dreams of resurrecting the past.

A Ghost from the Past

Claiming that it was "a good day for a hanging" Jean Chretien returned to Parliament Hill last week. He proclaimed public service "a very noble life;" and, like most former politicians, he enjoyed being the centre of attention.

Of course, some in the audience were drawing lessons from his time as prime minister. Stephen Harper -- in a remark that revealed more about himself than it did about Chretien -- said, "He knew instinctively what it took to win." Perhaps the lesson Harper took from Chretien also explains why the present prime minister didn't bother to attend the ceremony in the Centre Block two years ago, when they hung Joe Clark's portrait next to Chretien's.

But the man who should really be pondering Chretien's success is Michael Ignatieff. To his credit, Ignatieff is not the dictator Chretien was. But, as Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail last week, anyone trying to mimic "the old lion's tough ways" is taking the wrong lesson. "He was at his best," Martin wrote, "when he was the little guy from Shawinigan, when he stood his ground, at one with the values of everyday people and the country."

It was when Chretien insisted that the Clarity Bill would be passed; when he refused to join George Bush's "coalition of the willing;" and when -- with Paul Martin's help -- he destroyed the "debt wall" which Brian Mulroney and his predecessors had bequeathed to him, that Chretien earned his place in Canadian history. He could mangle both official languages; and (when the pen he gave Queen Elizabeth refused to cooperate) he could mutter "merde" -- a remark which seems to have endeared him to the monarch.

Micheal Ignatieff would do none of these things. But neither will he stand his ground. When he told Mr. Harper his time was up, he then decided to give the prime minister more time. After he said that Quebec's new health care user fee was acceptable, he backtracked and said that it could not stand. And, after saying that the Auditor General should not be allowed to scrutinize MP's expenses, he now says he will accept Ms. Fraser's oversight.

He should have accepted that oversight in the first place. But that is not the point. When Mr. Ignatieff takes a stand, Canadians have come to expect that -- like this country's climate -- it can change quickly and radically. Ignatieff's vacillation is the reason Liberal poll numbers are now in the 25% range.

Ignatieff is a very intelligent and a very articulate man -- in both English and French. But what he lacks is Chretien's political experience. When Chretien became prime minister, he had toiled in Ottawa for nearly thirty years. He had apprenticed under Pierre Trudeau and Mitchell Sharp; and he had served as the Minister of National Revenue, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the President of the Treasury Board, the Minister of Industry Trade and Commerce, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Energy Mines and Resources, the Minister of External Affairs, and Deputy Prime Minister. In short, he knew how Ottawa worked.

Michael Ignatieff has had an illustrious career. And he has apprenticed under Issiah Berlin. But he lacks Chretien's experience and Chretien's common touch. Those deficits are becoming more -- not less -- apparent.

Playing for Keeps

Michael Ignatieff made two key personnel changes during the month of October. He replaced his Quebec lieutenant, Denis Cordere, with former astronaut Marc Garneau; and he replaced his chief of staff, Ian Davey -- one of the team which went to Boston and asked him to return to Canada -- with Jean Chretien's former director of communications, Peter Donolo. Both appointments underscore the fact that Mr. Ignatieff has had trouble making the transition from public intellectual to leader of a political party.

But, as James Travers pointed out last week in the Toronto Star, Ignatieff is not the first leader to have a difficult -- sometimes bruising -- transition to the centre ring of national politics. "It took Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney a term in office to build teams able to sustain their momentum. Paul Martin failed to turn his leadership team into a cohesive administration and paid the ultimate political price." And Tom Flanagan, Stephen Harper's guide to political victory, went even further. Claiming that Ignatieff needed a history lesson, he wrote in the Globe and Mail that the Liberal leader "has been imitating Mr. Harper so closely" that he should "take solace from the fact that the Conservative leader bounced back."

Both changes show that Ignatieff is learning how to play for keeps. The essential problem in Liberal strategy up to this point has been the assumption that Mr. Harper's intemperate nature will eventually lead him to the guillotine. That may yet happen. But Canadians have also consistently shown that -- while they remain interested in who they are voting for -- they also want to know what they are voting for. And, on this second score, the Liberals have offered nothing. Unlike Stephane Dion, who offered Canadians a radical platform for the future, the post-Dion Liberals have promoted no new ideas.

It is more than ironic that a man of ideas seems to have none at his disposal. Until the party has the courage to do a thoroughly critical post-mortem of its recent failures, there will be no changes in its fortunes. The time and place for that post-mortem is the policy conference which has been scheduled for early in the new year. It will be Ignatieff's task to lead an intellectual renewal of his party. His past history suggests that he is the man for the job. But that job will only get done if the Liberals have the courage to admit their failures and reject what some see as short cuts to the brass ring.

Patrician Patriotism

During the past week, Michael Ignatieff was all over the newspapers and the air waves, promoting his new book, True Patriot Love. It's a catchy title; and it will probably top the Canadian bestseller lists. It is sure to be reviewed in the New York Times. In a difficult period for publishers, it should make money.

But there is more at stake than money. The leadership convention for the Liberal Party of Canada is just around the corner, and -- even though the outcome has already been decided -- Ignatieff is using the book as a means to breathe life into his party and into his bid for the brass ring.

As he told Michael Valpe in the Globe and Mail last week, what he is trying to do is offer his country a vision for the 21st century. And part of that vision is based upon the idea of a National Dream -- in the sense that John A. MacDonald's transcontinental railway or Pierre Trudeau's Just Society were national dreams.

For Ignatieff, it is a shared dream which holds a country together. And it is the reason the federal government exits. "The job description of a federal government," he told Valpe, "is just one job -- hold the country together, make it stronger." To do that, Ignatieff said, "we need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live." Those common allegiances find expression in common projects -- the railway, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, National Health Insurance.

The problem for the present government, says Ignatieff, is that it has no common project. I has nothing big that has yet to be accomplished. "The fatal flaw" of Stephen Harper's government is that it "fits a country that is finished, but it doesn't fit a country that is not yet done."

The problem for Ignatieff is that many Canadians fear that he himself is not yet done.There is much about him we still need to discover. He is no common man. His father's family were members of the Russian nobility. His mother's family are members of what passes, in this country, for nobility -- Ontario's Family Compact. And Ignatieff has spent his whole life coming to terms with that legacy.

Now that he is a potential prime minister, Canadians need time to come to terms with that legacy, too. Most of all, Ignatieff needs to convince Canadians that his patrician patriotism is as unshakable as the patriotism of the common man. And that his return to Canada was not just a career move -- that it was, instead, an act of true patriot love.

A Mesopotamian Conversion

Like Paul, two thousand years ago, Michael Ignatieff -- former Harvard professor and presently the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada -- has had his own experience on the road to Damascus -- or, more precisely, on the road to Baghdad.

In an article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Ignatieff writes about visiting northern Iraq in 1992. "I saw what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds," he writes. "From that moment forward I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can the Kurds, Sunnis and Shites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together in terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self justifying, and in matters of ultimate political judgment nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of self justification through cross examination and argument."

The people who understood what would happen in Iraq, says Ignatieff, asked the hard questions; and they did not "take wishes for reality." They were not foolish enough to assume that "because they believed in the integrity of their own motives, everyone else in the region would believe it too. They didn't suppose that a free state could arrive on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn't suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn't believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq."

In the end, writes Ignatieff, "Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take care to understand himself. The sense of reality which might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then it is doubtful that warning bells have sounded in him before. He has led a charmed life, and in charmed lives, warning bells do not sound."

Mr. Ignatieff is something of an expert on the subject of leading a charmed life. Descended from Russian nobility on his father's side, and a descendant of the Grants -- part of Canada's old line aristocracy on his mother's side -- he is no stranger to privilege. He knows how privilege can help one develop a tin ear. Like Mr. Bush, the warning bell did not sound inside Mr. Ignatieff.

The warning bell did not sound inside another scion of privilege, John Kennedy, when he launched his failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. But he was soon forced to confront the fiasco which his lack of judgment had spawned. Allowing that "success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan," Kennedy acknowledged his failure and accepted responsibility for it. Naturally, the man who had been elected by the thinnest of margins, was the target of fierce and bitter criticism. But his response to the Bay of Pigs was, in Kennedy's own phrase, a profile in courage. More importantly, the lessons he learned from that acknowledged failure shaped his response to the Cuban Missile Crisis a year and a half later; and it motivated his work to achieve the first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and Russia.

Mr. Ignatieff's recent admission and analysis of how and why he got the preemptive strike against Iraq wrong is a similar act of courage. That kind of self criticism is the first step in setting things right.