Liberalism's fresh face
Tony Keller
National Post
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
In a 2003 interview with Maclean's, Michael Ignatieff -- Harvard professor, public intellectual, thinking woman's crumpet, stealth aspirant for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada -- said of his support for the American-led invasion of Iraq: "I was apparently on the far right of Canadian opinion."
It's true that most Canadians didn't favour taking part in the war, and those who did were on the right side of the spectrum. But the reason Ignatieff diverged from centrist Canadian opinion is that he was traveling to its south, not its right. Michael Ignatieff is a liberal, but he talks American.
A few years ago, Ignatieff started appearing regularly in The New York Times Magazine. His subjects weren't Canada, Canada's role in the war on terror or what walk-on part we might play in Afganistan or Iraq. Obviously not. His writings -- written as an American professor, directed at an American audience -- were about the potential for American power, tied to liberal ideals, to defend America, preserve Western democracy and expand human freedom worldwide. Michael Ignatieff may still carry a Canadian passport, but he has spent the last three decades of his life outside of Canada -- sitting at the grown-ups table.
There are those who think Ignatieff would make a great leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and it's easy to see why. The vaguely mid-Atlantic accent, the eloquence, the international reputation, the movie-star quality remind party faithful of no one more than Pierre Trudeau. They can see him now, Prime Minister Ignatieff, restoring Canada's reputation abroad and making us once again a player on the world stage, as we were (at least in our own minds) under the prophets of middle wayism, Pearson and Trudeau.
Ignatieff may be an unreconstructed Trudeauiste on domestic issues, to judge by his keynote speech at last month's Liberal convention in Ottawa. But on international affairs, his 30 years abroad have taught him lessons profoundly at odds with the reflexive anti-Americanism, preference for soft power and desire for a kind of neutral status that have inflected Liberal foreign policy and Canadian public opinion since Trudeau.
Ignatieff isn't gazing at a distant world from Ottawa, looking at it through a long, narrow straw. Instead, as director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, and a prolific voice in the American media (he rarely writes in Canada, and before Harvard was a public figure in the United Kingdom), he has made himself into a leading intellectual in the most powerful country on Earth. There, foreign policy scholars advise a government that has the power to start and end wars.
Because it is the world's only superpower, whether America acts (Afganistan, Kosovo, Iraq) or does not act (Rwanda, Bosnia pre-1995), people are going to die. The question is almost always, as in the title of Ignatieff's last book, one of choosing The Lesser Evil. Canadian foreign policy is little encumbered by such burdens. It is instead largely driven by a narcissistic desire to be noticed by the rest of the world, and is rarely of lasting consequence to anyone, including ourselves.
All of which makes for a provocative yet stilted discourse when Ignatieff comes up here to talk shop. Ignatieff addressing a left-leaning Canadian audience has a hint of those old Rick Mercer sketches, "Talking to Americans," except that the roles are reversed, and the audience isn't in on the joke. Or it's Lost in Translation, except everyone believes there's no translation necessary.
"In the United States, where I work," Ignatieff said in his convention speech last month, "liberals are in the wilderness. In Canada, liberals are in government. Down there, being a liberal is a burden. Up here, it is a badge of honour. No wonder I'm happy to be home."
Did Ignatieff's audience realize that Canadians and Americans don't speak the same political dialect, and liberal means different things on either side of the border? Did Ignatieff?
In the past few months, I've seen Ignatieff give three speeches in Canada. He is a superb orator, arrogant enough to be respected; nuanced and self-deprecating enough to be liked. He easily convinces Canadians that he's one of them, expressing pride in our vaunted humility, invoking liberal and Liberal principles.
And then a funny thing happens: He starts applying those principles in a way Canadian liberals and Liberals don't. He ends up putting forward premises that might be conventional for an American audience, or for Tony Blair backers in Britain, yet which are novel and challenging for Liberal Canada.
I'm not sure the audience gets it -- which is why Ignatieff may have the makings of a great Canadian politician. He has a talent for convincing a liberal crowd that his heart is on their side (which, in fairness, it is), even as he's pushing ideas with which they disagree. He charms them with magic phrases -- multilateralism, United Nations, international law -- and then, before you know it, he's telling a packed university auditorium that yes, we really are in a global war against terror; that the United States is a leading force for good in the world; that Ronald Reagan was a champion of human rights; and that the Bush White House is led by radical idealists.
He said all of the above a few weeks ago in an address at the University of Toronto Law School. And yet one graduate student I spoke to afterwards still thought that he was, like her, on the Noam Chomsky-Michael Moore side of the fence. No wonder parts of the Liberal brain trust think this guy is a political golden calf. But they might want to also consider the substance beyond the sell.
"Look at the big picture," Ignatieff told a U of T student who suggested the U.S. has been a less than a positive force for freedom. "The biggest single gain in human rights in the last 50 years happened during the Reagan and Bush I presidency. And it happened, in part, because of very intransigent American presidential rhetoric. I was a detente guy in the 1980s and I thought, boy, all this sabre-rattling from Reagan is terrifying. Well, guess who turned out to be right."
At the Liberal party convention, his speech started by congratulating his audience: "We are the coalition -- between regions, languages and peoples -- that holds our nation together." But when it came to policy prescriptions, he told them to spend more money on defence, to recognize that we live next door to "the primary target of global terrorism," to take steps to ensure that we never become a transit point for terrorist attacks on the United States and to sign on to ballistic missile defence.
One gets the sense that, like Christopher Hitchens, Ignatieff is a liberal grown increasingly disillusioned not with liberalism, but with liberals. "Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neoconservative bombast," Ignatieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine on the day of the Iraqi election. "All this makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people is fascists."
The man who may want to be PM wrote in his recent book, Empire Lite, that "to call nation-building an exercise in 'humanitarian intervention' by a fiction called the 'international community' actively obscures the fact that none of it would have happened had the United States not decided to use decisive military force." Not exactly a pean to that Liberal touchstone, peacekeeping.
And he opens his latest book, The Lesser Evil, with the following: "When democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their political life should be free of violence. But defeating terror requires violence. It may also require coercion, deception, secrecy and violation of rights."
There is so much here that does not square with the Liberal party world-view. Ignatieff's second proposition, on the possible need for the legalization of what in times of peace would be taboo, is debatable, but his is at least a brave, honest attempt to find a way to prevent democratic societies from tearing up our own civil rights principles, should we ever face massive, sustained terrorism.
And his first proposition -- that defeating terror (or winning a war, or arresting criminals) may require violence -- clashes with the Liberal conceit that our soldiers are about peace, and while some may have died for it, Canadians never killed for it. It explains why, after Canadian peacekeepers went to war with the Croatian army in Bosnia's Medak pocket in 1993, there was neither media nor government recognition of their battle, until journalist Carol Off wrote a book on the subject a decade later. It explains why Canadian snipers in Afganistan, who picked off al-Qaeda foes in battle in 2002, were more celebrated by the U.S. military than by our own embarrassed media and government.
"Liberal societies," Ignatieff wrote in The Lesser Evil, "cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us." The image, self-evident to an American audience, doesn't fit with the Canadian Heritage Minute story of Canada.
Ignatieff as politician, in other words, would be a bracing tonic for the Canadian body politic. Though he speaks fluent American, he remains less concerned with the American national interest, and more concerned with what America, and her allies, can do for the world. He is, in other words, not quite right or left, not quite American or Canadian, not a convert to unilateralism but neither a faithful worshipper in the house of orthodox United Nations multilateralism. Michael Ignatieff may be more like the people of this country than he, or the Liberal party, knows.
ur first task as a party is to preserve the national unity of Canada. Today, that is challenged by provinces wanting to use resource wealth exclusively for the benefit of their own people. Atlantic provinces should be able to use their new wealth to overcome economic deficits, but any national government worthy of the name must ensure that new resource wealth strengthens rather than weakens our federation. Some provinces are asking why they should keep paying out to help less prosperous ones. They want to reduce their transfer payments, keeping their wealth to themselves. The Liberal answer to these demands is that without burden-sharing and resource-sharing, there cannot be equality of Canadian citizenship.
