If Obama is America's savior then Michael Ignatieff is Canada's prodigal son.
If anyone tells you Canadian politics is a dull affair you must tell them otherwise. Consider the events of the past 60 days or so.
In October, the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper was re-elected. While the Tories increased their number of seats in the House of Commons they did not get an elusive majority. For the uninitiated, this means while the Conservatives have more seats than any other party the opposition parties' collective strength could bring down the government on a whim. While this risk existed the Conservatives did not seem to think the opposition parties would join forces. After all elections cost money and elections put political parties in debt, especially the parties that lose elections.
And boy did the Liberals lose the election. Under the leadership of Stephane Dion, the Liberals lost 18 seats in the House of Commons and garnered only 26% of the popular vote – their worst showing in nearly a century and a half. Dion had made the mistake of focusing the Liberal campaign on the environment rather than the economy. The centerpiece of Dion's campaign was a carbon tax. Suffice it to say, his proposal and the Liberals' electoral hopes dropped like a lead balloon.
Dion would announce his resignation only days after the election. He became the first Liberal Party leader to not become Prime Minister since Edward Blake, who led the Grits in the 1880s and was unable to eclipse the looming shadow of Canada's first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald.
The plan was for Dion to remain as Liberal leader until a successor was chosen at the Liberal Party Leadership Convention this May in Vancouver. But a funny thing happened while Americans were gobbling their Thanksgiving turkey.
On November 26th, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released an economic statement. Simply put, an economic statement is a precursor to the federal budget which is usually read in the House of Commons in February. The economic statement is usually a one-day story. The opposition parties issue the obligatory press releases proclaiming how the economic statement will lead the country to damnation. That is until they find the next thing that opens the door to purgatory.
However, the economic collapse has affected Canada as much as the United States and the rest of the world. The economic statement did not contain a stimulus package, and there were also provisions that prohibited federal civil servants from striking for the next three years, prohibited civil servants from suing over wage disparities, and an end to public subsidies to the political parties to hire staff on Parliament Hill. Not surprisingly, this last provision caught the ire of all opposition parties.
While the Conservative government quickly backed down on those provisions the opposition smelled weakness and banded together. They would a force a vote of no-confidence in the House of Commons on December 8th. If the government lost the vote, the opposition would be given an opportunity to govern or new elections would be called.
The opposition was banking on the former. The Liberals and New Democratic Party (NDP) announced they would form a coalition government with the support of the separatist Bloc Quebecois.
No one was happier than Stephane Dion. He could become Prime Minister after all, even if the Liberals had lost both votes and seats under his watch. Edward Blake would not get company after all. Only in Canada could such a thing happen.
Prime Minister Harper played the only card in his hand. He went on Canadian television on December 3rd and announced that he would ask the Governor General to prorogue Parliament until January 26, 2009. In other words, Canada's House of Commons was suspended. When Parliament reconvened the federal budget would be submitted a month ahead of schedule. Governor General Michelle Jean acceded to Harper's request the following day. Not only did this buy Harper and the Conservatives time it shifted public attention from the Tories to the Liberals.
The night Harper addressed Canadians the leaders of the opposition parties were given an opportunity to reply. When Dion went on television his video had been submitted in the incorrect feed and looked like an old Betamax tape from the late 1970's. It wasn't exactly confidence inspiring and Liberal MPs grumbled at the prospect of a coalition government led by Dion. Liberals were not willing to wait until May for Dion to depart. Move over Edward Blake, you now have company.
Two of the three candidates vying to replace Dion had run against him for the Liberal leadership in December 2006. Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae (onetime roommates at the University of Toronto's Trinity College) were considered the two frontrunners. However, many Liberals were concerned with Ignatieff's lack of political experience and had reservations about some of his foreign policy positions. The Liberals didn't trust Rae by virtue of his former association with the NDP, particularly his stint as Premier of Ontario between 1990 and 1995. Liberals were accustomed to working against Rae and not for him.
So the Liberals chose Dion, a former academic from Quebec who served in the cabinets of Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. He wasn't their first choice but he did have a competent record as a Cabinet Minister. However, the qualities that made him a successful Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and a successful Minister of the Environment didn't come across during his stint as party leader. Dion has a weak command of English and, pardon my French, he looks like a weenie. As attested at the polls, Canadians didn't want a weenie as Prime Minister.
Given this opportunity and not wanting to make the same mistake twice the Liberals accelerated Dion's departure and coalesced around Ignatieff. Dominic LeBlanc, while well-spoken, is considered too young to take over the Liberals just days shy of his 41st birthday. Although LeBlanc is from New Brunswick and not Quebec the Liberals have had three francophone leaders in a row. So LeBlanc dropped out on December 8th and threw his support to Ignatieff.
The Liberal Party caucus had scheduled a vote to choose a leader for December 10th. Rae objected arguing that all Liberal Party members should have a chance to vote for their new leader. His position was due in no small part to Ignatieff having the support of an overwhelmingly majority of Liberal MPs. The Liberal Party's National Executive subsequently announced it would consult with 800 of its party members on the question of leadership by December 17th. Most of these 800 members would presumably have already thrown their lot in with Ignatieff. Seeing the writing on the wall, Rae bowed out of the race on December 9th, paving the way for Ignatieff to become Liberal Party leader on an interim basis and the leader of Her Majesty's Official Opposition. Unless Ignatieff mutates into Dion, Liberals will still meet in Vancouver in May to make his selection official.
But who exactly is Michael Ignatieff and why are Liberals swooning over him?
Michael Ignatieff was born in Toronto, the son of a Canadian diplomat and the grandson of the last Russian Czar's Minister of Education. His maternal uncle, George Grant, wrote the seminal Canadian classic Lament for a Nation which warned that Canada was doomed because of Americanization. Ignatieff has spent most of his adult life outside of Canada. He spent more than two decades in Great Britain teaching history both at Oxford and Cambridge, writing books and appearing frequently on BBC radio and TV. Ignatieff would move from Cambridge, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2000 to become the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He was colleagues and close friends with Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who resigned last spring after referring to Hillary Clinton as "a monster" but has since fallen back into favor with The One.
If Barack Obama were a Canadian his language would be not unlike that of Michael Ignatieff, who shared his thoughts on America after the September 11th attacks in the March 2002 issue British literary magazine Granta:
I'm a Canadian, but it was inevitable that the great cause of my growing up was an American war, not a Canadian wrong. I loved my own country, but I believed in America in a way that Canada never allowed. I was against the war because I thought it betrayed something essential about the country. I marched because I believed in Jefferson and Lincoln.
Obama, too, admires Jefferson and Lincoln. On pages 179 and 180 of The Audacity of Hope, the President-elect writes:
And on this point, at least, Jefferson agreed – it was based on his belief in a meritocracy, rather than a hereditary aristocracy, that Jefferson would champion the creation of a national, government-financed university that could educate and train talent across the new nation, and he considered the founding of the University of Virginia to be one of his greatest achievements.
The tradition, of government investment in America's physical infrastructure and in its people, was thoroughly embraced by Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party. For Lincoln, the essence of America was opportunity, the ability of "free labor" to advance in life. Lincoln considered capitalism the best means of creating such opportunity, but he also saw how the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was disrupting lives and destroying communities.
If Ignatieff's language is reminiscent of the language of Obama it would be a mistake to consider them identical in their thinking. Nor can Ignatieff be easily dismissed as a knee-jerk leftist academic. His thinking on the issues of the day is quite enigmatic; a quality that has worked both for and against him.
While Obama was speaking out against America going to war in Iraq in 2002, Ignatieff was writing editorials in favor of it. In the January 5, 2003 edition of The New York Times Magazine, Ignatieff wrote:
Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role. Iraq itself is an imperial fiction cobbled together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 by the French and the British and held together by force and violence since independence. Now an expansionist rights violator holds it together with terror. The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark. Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares it fangs. (http://faculty.washington.edu.nsingh/ignatieff.htm)
By August 2007, just as the U.S. military surge was beginning to reap rewards, Ignatieff reversed his position on Iraq calling it "an unfolding catastrophe." He was now in simpatico with Obama.
If Obama is America's savior then Ignatieff is Canada's prodigal son. After more than a quarter-century abroad Ignatieff returned to Canada in 2005 to become a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, his alma mater. However, the principal reason Ignatieff came home was because prominent Liberals wanted him to run for Parliament and also viewed him as a successor to then-Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Ignatieff sought the Liberal nomination in a Toronto riding for the January 2006 federal election. He won the nomination although some Ukrainian members of the riding objected because they believed his 1995 book on nationalism, Blood and Belonging, was pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. Although Ignatieff was elected to the House of Commons, the Liberals lost to the Conservatives after being in power for 12 years. Martin immediately resigned as Liberal Party leader thus intensifying speculation that Ignatieff would be his heir apparent. Ignatieff jumped into the race to succeed Martin in April 2006. His ascension was too fast, too soon for some. While Ignatieff did not crash and burn he made a couple of missteps which kept him from winning outright two years ago. The downside of his enigma would erect a temporary roadblock to his political career.
Many Liberals had reservations about Ignatieff's position on Iraq. While Canada had troops in Afghanistan even the Tories did not dare send troops to Iraq. Although generally regarded as pro-Israel, Ignatieff also raised the ire of some Jewish members of the Liberal Party in October 2006 when he accused Israel of committing war crimes in Qana, Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah war three months earlier. His comments prompted the resignation of his campaign co-chair and then-Liberal MP Susan Kadis as well as the defection of several prominent Jewish Liberals to the Conservative Party. (www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/1017/will-canadian-jews-desert-the-liberal-party/)
But time has been Ignatieff's friend. In the intervening two years, Ignatieff has cultivated better relationships within the Liberal Party. Dion picked Ignatieff as the party's deputy leader and emerged as their most trusted spokesman. Ignatieff's effective performance against Dion's ineffectual performance brought buyer's remorse amongst Liberals. Would Harper and the Tories have been so eager to fight an election last fall if they were facing off against Ignatieff instead of Dion?
After all, Ignatieff earned Harper's respect, especially when Ignatieff emerged as one of the few Liberals who supported the continuation of Canada's military presence in Afghanistan. In May 2006, Ignatieff persuaded 23 other Liberals to join him in voting with the Conservatives to extend the mission in Afghanistan to February 2009 (which has since been extended to July 2011). After the vote, Harper crossed the floor of the House of Commons to shake Ignatieff's hand. Ignatieff probably saved the Conservative government from falling that day.
This brings us to the question of what Michael Ignatieff will do when the Tories present their budget next month. Where will his enigmatic thoughts lead him? Will Ignatieff lead a vote of non-confidence, bring down the government and form a coalition government with the NDP? NDP MPs are nervous they will not get their cabinet posts after all. Oh, what J.S. Woodsworth would have thought?
Or will Ignatieff back the Liberals out of the coalition, support the budget, earn another handshake from Harper and bide his time? When Ignatieff was asked about his support for the coalition by CBC Radio's Michael Enright on December 7th, he paraphrased William Lyon Mackenzie King, a Liberal and Canada's longest serving Prime Minister. Ignatieff said, "A coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition." He spoke it like he never left Canada.
It's interesting to hear about something other than Obama. If Ignatieff is an enigma it seems fitting that he lead a country of the same flavor.