All eyes on Ignatieff
- Thread starter Edward Campbell
- Start date
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
ModlrMike said:
I think you can argue that Prince Icarus is, actually, a winner.
The Bloc and the Dippers can now be accused, are being accused of propping up the hated Conservatives while only the Liberals oppose as opposition parties should do.
Ignatieff is not Dionized because he supported the Tories too often.
Harper is denied the election he wants and many (most?) Liberals do not.
- Reaction score
- 2
- Points
- 210
E.R. I'm curious: why would Mr Harper want an election ?
I can't see it resulting in anything other than yet another Conservative minority government -at best (and a Liberal minority at worst).
And if he fails to gain that majority, would he not find himself looking for work (so to speak) ?
Surely he knows that...no ?
I can't see it resulting in anything other than yet another Conservative minority government -at best (and a Liberal minority at worst).
And if he fails to gain that majority, would he not find himself looking for work (so to speak) ?
Surely he knows that...no ?
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
I think the Harper inner circle thinks that:
• A majority just might be within reach if they can find a good "ballot question;"
• Another minority is good enough if it results in a failure for Ignatieff which might cause yet another Liberal leadershipdebacle contest;
• A Liberal government is highly unlikely.
• A majority just might be within reach if they can find a good "ballot question;"
• Another minority is good enough if it results in a failure for Ignatieff which might cause yet another Liberal leadership
• A Liberal government is highly unlikely.
- Reaction score
- 3
- Points
- 430
Bass ackwards said:
On the contrary, if the Liberals were to trigger an election right now, I suspect the voter backlash would send the Conservatives to a majority. Any party siding with the Liberals to trigger an election would probably incur the same voter wrath. Jack and Gilles aren't completely thick, and, for the moment, will distance themselves from the Liberals as it's in their best interest to do so.
What I don't understand is the press constantly going on about Harper being propped up by the NDP, or being accused by Iggy of having a 'new love for the socialists'. I don't remember seeing a gun to Jack's (or anyone else's) head today when they voted with the Conservatives. Is Harper supposed to wield some sort of Vulcan telepathic mind control technique to get Jack and Gilles to side with him? They voted what they voted without the benefit of a written or unwritten coalition, and I hardly see it as Harper getting into bed with any of the opposition parties.
- Reaction score
- 2
- Points
- 210
OK, thanks for the responses, gentlemen.
I must be a pessimist because I can't for the life of me envision a Conservative majority. Especially under Mr Harper.
I'd sure like to see one -again especially under Mr Harper (if for no other reason than sheer curiosity to see what he'd do with it).
I guess for now I'll just be glad the election is averted.
And I'll go top up my glass of rum (damn thing's half empty...)
I must be a pessimist because I can't for the life of me envision a Conservative majority. Especially under Mr Harper.
I'd sure like to see one -again especially under Mr Harper (if for no other reason than sheer curiosity to see what he'd do with it).
I guess for now I'll just be glad the election is averted.
And I'll go top up my glass of rum (damn thing's half empty...)
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
I think there's two more factors, beyond what Occam added:
1. Ignatieff is not stupid; and
2. The Liberals are, temporarily, at least still divided over Iggy's leadership.
The temporary Liberals divisions will not last if Prince Icarus becomes stronger and stronger.
Ignatieff is not Dion. He's tougher and smarter and he has a much, much better team. As he "finds his footing" as leader, as he becomes politically "smarter" he will likely be a more formidable opponent.
The Conservatives want to fight him sooner rather than later, before he becomes stronger and while the Liberals are not wholly united behind him. If, as they assume they can, the Tories can beat Ignatieff's Liberals - even if they (the Conservatives) have a weaker minority - then they hope that the many ambitious left-wing/anti-Iggy Liberals will sharper their daggers for the (hopefully inevitable) back stabbing.
1. Ignatieff is not stupid; and
2. The Liberals are, temporarily, at least still divided over Iggy's leadership.
The temporary Liberals divisions will not last if Prince Icarus becomes stronger and stronger.
Ignatieff is not Dion. He's tougher and smarter and he has a much, much better team. As he "finds his footing" as leader, as he becomes politically "smarter" he will likely be a more formidable opponent.
The Conservatives want to fight him sooner rather than later, before he becomes stronger and while the Liberals are not wholly united behind him. If, as they assume they can, the Tories can beat Ignatieff's Liberals - even if they (the Conservatives) have a weaker minority - then they hope that the many ambitious left-wing/anti-Iggy Liberals will sharper their daggers for the (hopefully inevitable) back stabbing.
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
Thucydides said:
This is just the old one, the one that goes all the way back to 1967 when Pierre Trudeau overturned the Liberal, indeed national consensus forged by King/St Laurent and extended, albeit weakly, by Pearson.
Pearson lurched leftwards because he never had a majority and needed to appease the newly formed Dippers to stay in power. He also lurched towards appeasing Québec because of the “quiet revolution” and because he needed to head off Réal Caouette and the Ralliement des créditistes.
Trudeau happily extended the leftward stagger and extended the “French fact” in Ottawa – both to the consternation of the St Laurent wing of the party, which was rapidly purged.
Trudeau’s internal opposition came for John Turner. Turner was originally recruited into active federal politics by Pearson’s team (as were Trudeau and Chrétien) and he served in Pearson’s cabinet and in Trudeau’s, finally as finance minister. He resigned (as finance minister) in 1975. Some reports say he quit because he refused to impose wage and price controls which most competent economists regarded as stupidity – pure, partisan, vote buying politics.
Turner eventually won the Liberal leadership in 1984 and, very briefly, became prime minister – for 79 days before Brian Mulroney won a landslide victory in the late summer of 1984. For the next several years, while Mulroney won back-to-back majorities, Turner served as Liberal leader but he was stalked, constantly, by Jean Chrétien, a Trudeau acolyte.
Chrétien was (is) actually a very small “c” conservative in fiscal matters but he was a classic retail politician who believed in the politics of big social spending and of active anti-Americanism. To say that Chrétien and the Trudeauites stabbed Turner in the back is not far off the mark.
The tables were turned on ’tit Jean Chrétien when he became PM because he was, in turn, relentlessly stalked and eventually back stabbed by his finance minister, Paul Martin. Martin was, philosophically, in foreign policy, a near throwback to St Laurent.
Ignatieff? Who knows? Rae? A Trudeauista!
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
Thucydides said:
The Dauphin is a wild card.
His main opposition is this guy:
Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre talks to reporters at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, Monday, Oct.8. (TORSTAR)
Coderre is well organized and his positions are well known and popular in Québec.
The Dauphin appears, still, to be a cypher.
IF Prince Icarus leads the Liberals into an election and fails (the most likely outcome) I have no doubt that the knives will be out and Coderre's will be the sharpest. After Coderre, the next Liberal leader will be an Anglo. The next "turn" for a Franco Québecer might not be until 2020, when Trudeau will be around 50 - an appropriate are to become PM.
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an interesting analysis of Prince Michael from resident loony lefty Rick Salutin:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/narcissieff-in-the-mirror-of-politics/article1300483/
The key to Salutin’s analysis is in the opening sentence: ”Perhaps Michael Ignatieff's views weren't as sinister as they once seemed.” One had to be pretty far “out” of the mainstream to findIggy Icarus sinister, unless one is of a classical bent and remembers when sinister meant left (and dexter, from which we get dexterous or “able,” meant right).
The political left in Canada, which includes a large slice of the Liberal Party of Canada, mistrusts Ignatieff.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/narcissieff-in-the-mirror-of-politics/article1300483/
The key to Salutin’s analysis is in the opening sentence: ”Perhaps Michael Ignatieff's views weren't as sinister as they once seemed.” One had to be pretty far “out” of the mainstream to find
The political left in Canada, which includes a large slice of the Liberal Party of Canada, mistrusts Ignatieff.
The following article from The Observer, a left-leaning British newspaper, is reproduced under the Fair Comments section of the Copyright Act. It makes a number of surprising statements, including that he is most likely to be the next Prime Minister and that the Conservatives are on their knees. However the real zinger is the last line of the story, "[h]e sounds wistful: in exile, somehow, whatever he says about having come home."
Michael Ignatieff: from The Late Show to Prime Minister in waiting?
Michael Ignatieff – writer, thinker and star presenter of BBC2's The Late Show in the 90s – is back in Canada after nearly three decades, and is the man most likely to become the country's next prime minister. But is his national pride the real thing or is he, as his critics sneer, 'just visiting'? Rachel Cooke finds out.
The bald fact is that when Michael Ignatieff, novelist, journalist, philosopher and former presenter of the BBC arts programme The Late Show (catchphrase: "Let's just bro-o-a-aden the frame a little…"), returned to his native Canada in 2005, after an absence of nearly three decades, he did so because he was asked to. The country's Liberal Party was mired in trouble – if you want the details, it had been tainted by a slush-fund scandal in Quebec – and some of its younger Turks saw in Ignatieff a leader uncorrupted by the small matter of previous involvement in politics. They went to see him at Harvard, where he was a professor, and they were blunt. "Will you stand?" they said.
Ignatieff, who answered their question in the affirmative, is now not only a Toronto MP but the leader of the Liberal Party and thus the man most likely to be Canada's next prime minister. (The current Conservative administration is on its knees and there could be an election at any time.) But he likes to attribute his return at least as much to homesickness as to pragmatism. Honestly! It wasn't like he disliked Canada, or anything, for all that he chose to live elsewhere, and for so long. He missed the place: the cold, the skating rinks, the desperate need for mittens in winter. The way he tells it, he might have come back anyway, and sod the top job. "The price of expatriation rose for me over time," he says. "It didn't go down. I began to feel it very strongly. I had a wonderful run in London, but it was a run, and I felt it had come to an end. I missed not belonging. I began to feel, not a stranger, but… coming home gave me a sense of being at home." His voice rises a note. "I'm home! I'm home!" he cries, softly. Then it falls again: "That has been a good feeling."
Of course, not everyone is ready to take his word for this. "What will he do if he loses? Go back to Harvard?" wrote one Canadian commentator recently. The Conservatives, meanwhile, who currently lead Canada's minority government, have broadcast a series of ads attacking Ignatieff for his long absence. "Michael Ignatieff," sneers the voiceover. "Just visiting." Reviewers have approached his new book, True Patriot Love, with a certain amount of suspicion. A companion volume to an earlier memoir about his father's Russian ancestors, it tells the story of his mother's family, the Grants: Anglophiles, who thought Canada would only accrue real status if it was able to hang on to its imperial identity. But the book also contains a lot of stuff about the nature of patriotism; how it functions; why it is A Good Thing. ("Loving a country is an act of the imagination," writes Ignatieff. And later: "The country in question for me has always been Canada.") This is what has had them holding their noses. Now that he is a politician, they say, it's hard to see True Patriot Love as anything other than a grotesquely over-blown campaign leaflet.
Ignatieff, who has the aloof manner and the half-closed, upwardly-tilting eyes of a pedigree cat, looks at me more in sorrow than in anger when I bring this up. It is so very... painful because, after all, he was a writer long before he was a politician. "The book was a voyage of discovery, as books always are," he says. "It really is a book about my family, and their connection to Canada. Yes, I did want to say, since I am under constant attack for various things: 'Wait a minute, here! You don't know who you are dealing with.' That was a motive. But the overwhelming motive was just to figure out how the story held together over three generations."
But what about his new fetish for patriotism? In the 1990s, Ignatieff reported from the Balkan wars, and he has written several books about the dangers of nationalism. Isn't it odd, now, to be praising as a virtue what he once suggested could so easily become a dangerous vice? "Yes, there is a very murderous nationalism out there, one based on purity. But there's also another nationalism, which we call patriotism, which is a love of country and is perfectly inclusive, and I don't think you can run a country unless you can appeal to it. You gotta reach down into something: some shared sense of common history, tradition, enterprise. You don't want to overdo it. You don't want to get sentimental about it. But [if it isn't there] you've got nothing to go on. Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society."
His tone as he tells me this is slow, excessively careful and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it's as if he's been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He's like a jazz man who's lost his sense of rhythm.
Today, Ignatieff really is just visiting. We meet in a grand room in Canada House, on Trafalgar Square, to the sound of squawking from the Gormley plinth outside. He is in London only briefly. This morning, he had meetings at the foreign office and with David Cameron. This afternoon, it is the turn of Lord Mandelson. In between, he hopes to meet up with a few old friends, "occasionally sneaking out for a little ramble through the old haunts". His London schedule, like his meeting earlier this year with Barack Obama, is, I guess, a sign of how seriously politicians outside Canada now take him – and he returns the favour. I ask how he found Cameron. "He's serious. He's got real answers to real questions. He knows what he believes, and he is intensely political in the best sense of the word. I thought he was personally charming. It was fun!"
Fun! But Ignatieff used to be a writer, a man who could say whatever he liked, and now he is a politician, and is able to say precisely nothing unless it comes straight from the script. How can that be fun? The Ignatieff brow – portcullis to his great big brain – wrinkles in the approved manner. "In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness," he says. "It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean. Your question implies that I've suddenly had to tie myself in knots. No, I don't have to tie myself in knots, and I don't have to cease being who I am. But I have to watch what I say because the public has no other way to judge me than by what they read. I can't walk around saying: 'I keep saying these dreadful things, but I'm actually a nice fellow!' Why should they believe that?"
But writing is about nuance, and politics is, well, not. I don't know how he contains himself. "Again, I don't see it that way. I see this as the most exciting thing I've ever had to do. The most difficult, but when it's going well, the most rewarding." Writing and politics are both, he insists, about listening, about expressing what people are thinking and feeling. But the bonus in politics is that, in theory, the politician gets to make people's lives better. "The idea that there is this contrast between a world of subtlety, and a world of bald, flat generalisations doesn't sound like what it's like at all. The best part of what I've been doing in the past four years has been listening intently to Canadians in big rooms and small rooms, in wharves and bars and airport lounges, just trying to pick up the music here, so that what's really on their minds gets into the policies."
But isn't dishonesty built into politics? Admittedly, everything I know about Canada has been gleaned from the stories of Alice Munro, and the novels of Carol Shields [Ignatieff nods approvingly at this: "Good for you!" he says, in the manner of a kindly don to a kid from a council estate.] But if Canadian politicians are anything like British politicians, they say only what they're told to say, even when they clearly believe the opposite. "Well, you should never knowingly tell a falsehood because it really does poison the well of politics. But in [just] the same way that you really should not tell a falsehood in your private life. I'm not sure I see this huge gulf between the moral world I've entered and the moral world I've left."
When I saw him in the newspapers, sitting with Obama, I thought of all those Hollywood movies – like Dave, with Kevin Kline – where an ordinary guy is somehow spirited into the White House, and spends the rest of the picture wandering the corridors of power feeling bewildered. I know Ignatieff is not exactly a plumber… but still: doesn't it all feel preposterous?
"Again, not really. I don't want to give the wrong impression. Going to meet the president of the United States is a big deal. You do get, erm, a little apprehensive. But he is a master political animal. Grips you by the elbow, tells you that he's read your books, sits you down, makes you feel like you're the only guy in the world. Thirty-five minutes later, you think: that was a great guy. But you don't feel surreal. You feel you're sitting down with an extremely intelligent, good listener who's locked right in. A month into his presidency, and he conveyed the impression that he's always been president. That was genuinely astounding. He was at ease in some amazing way."
Ignatieff will not – he cannot – divide his life into two: before politics, and after. "It's a slightly complicated life. But you stitch it together." He is tougher now, no doubt about it, but he relishes the fact that no one could ever call him a career politician. "I like the fact I've lived a full other life. Everyone thinks I lived in an ivory tower, but I lived as a freelance, I lived by my wits, for 15 years, and it wasn't always easy. If you lived in literary London and had as many bad reviews as I did, you kind of toughen up anyway. And painful as it is to say, I've learned more from bad reviews than good reviews. Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading."
Michael Ignatieff is a scion of one of Canada's grandest families – his father, George, the immigrant son of a Russian count, was a senior Canadian diplomat – and attended one of its most prestigious boarding schools, Upper Canada College. (After he was elected leader of the Liberals, a Canadian newspaper sent a reporter to interview his former classmates. One described how the young Michael would walk around with a copy of Paris Match underneath his arm, telling people that his goal was to be prime minister. Another recalled Ignatieff lecturing him on the meaning of the 1905 destruction of the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese war.) But in 1978, shortly after his 30th birthday, he left the country of his birth to seek his fortune elsewhere.
He went first to Cambridge, to continue the academic career he had begun in Canada, and then, tiring of his ivory tower, to London, to live as a freelance writer. As freelances go, he was more successful than most. He wrote an acclaimed biography of Isaiah Berlin. He wrote a column for the Observer. A first novel, Asya, received a royal slagging, but a second, Scar Tissue, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Plus, there was his presenting work on Voices on Channel 4, and Thinking Aloud and The Late Show on BBC2. ("Soooo… Martin Amis. You've written a book called The Moronic Inferno.") In this period, he was famed for his looks, and was sometimes to be found wearing a black polo neck. Yes, he had endured a painful and expensive divorce from his British wife, Susan Barrowclough, by whom he has two children, now grown up (in the past, he has referred obliquely to the difficulties he had over access to them). But he had found new love with a Hungarian-born publicist Zsuzsanna Zsohar. Life was good. After his second wedding, which took place at Hackney Town Hall in 1999, there was a party at the couple's minimalist Hoxton loft. It was attended by, among others, Jonathan Miller, Michael Palin and Simon Rattle.
Soon after this, though, it was all change again. Enough with the freelancing! In 2000, he returned to Harvard, where he had studied for his PhD, as the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F Kennedy School of Government. This was an important and influential job, and many famous ears were soon flatteringly cocked in his direction. It was at this point, however, that he shocked his leftist friends by coming out in favour of the war in Iraq. In the years since, he has recanted his position in the most absolute terms, but in Canada, his former support for Bush continues to hang over him, like a cloud of midges. Worse, there have also been accusations that he supports so-called "torture-lite", though Ignatieff insists that this is not so, a position in which he has been backed by the director of Human Rights Watch.
Ignatieff tells me that he now feels more optimistic about the future of Iraq, but that this does not for one moment change his stance. "Even if Iraq finds some way to stability, you can't justify leading people to war on the basis of lies, and you can't justify the horrendous human cost Iraqis have paid to get where they are. I thought then, as now, that Saddam was a genocidal tyrant, and that conviction led me too far, and I made an error that I think I've taken responsibility for. I've never shied away from admitting that I was wrong, wrong, wrong." What about torture? Will he able to keep his anti-torture principles intact if he becomes prime minister? "Canada sent Maher Arar [a Canadian engineer] to Syria, and a court found that he had been subjected to extraordinary rendition, that his claims [of torture] were true and that he had delivered no intelligence to anybody. It was a disgrace. So, we don't do it. Ever. Period. Off the table. We don't get other people to do our dirty work for us, and we don't do dirty work ever."
How, then, to deal with international terrorism? Ignatieff has always said that our democracies are under threat from the bottom up, thanks to extremism. But without the intelligence services and their dirty methods, what weapons do we have? "One of the conditions of modern life is that you look into any crowd and you think: who's the person with the bomb in their head? But the only solution is politics. Give people tolerant, non-dogmatic, pragmatic good government that serves their interests. I don't know of another solution. That's all there is."
In Canada, feelings about Ignatieff can be split roughly in two. There are those who complain that it is a sign only of the country's feebleness and insecurity that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader; and there are those who boast that it is a sign of its sophistication, maturity and wisdom that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader. Obviously, Ignatieff himself would fall into the latter camp, if pushed. When I ask if he would like Canada to make more noise on the world stage, he says: "There are forms of noise that no country wants. We don't make noise because we work. Some of the quietness and modesty I obviously like, and prefer to our noisy neighbour in the south." Even so, can his donnish sensibility withstand the bullying and bluster and 24-hour news cycle that power, even in Canada, will bring with it?
He thinks so. "I married the right woman," he says. "That has turned out to be the most important single fact. I'm not going to die out there if people don't like me because there's someone at home who thinks I'm OK. I can't put it more directly than that. I have a sort of confidence, not necessarily in myself, but in the life I've led. I've done a lot of things. I'm not a kid any more. I feel I know some things about human beings, and what they're likely to do." Is he working harder than he's ever worked in his life? "Yes!" So when was the last time he read a novel? "Oh, I haven't read a novel in a while. I miss some of the reading. I miss reading for nothing other than the pleasure of it." He sounds wistful: in exile, somehow, whatever he says about having come home
Michael Ignatieff: from The Late Show to Prime Minister in waiting?
Michael Ignatieff – writer, thinker and star presenter of BBC2's The Late Show in the 90s – is back in Canada after nearly three decades, and is the man most likely to become the country's next prime minister. But is his national pride the real thing or is he, as his critics sneer, 'just visiting'? Rachel Cooke finds out.
The bald fact is that when Michael Ignatieff, novelist, journalist, philosopher and former presenter of the BBC arts programme The Late Show (catchphrase: "Let's just bro-o-a-aden the frame a little…"), returned to his native Canada in 2005, after an absence of nearly three decades, he did so because he was asked to. The country's Liberal Party was mired in trouble – if you want the details, it had been tainted by a slush-fund scandal in Quebec – and some of its younger Turks saw in Ignatieff a leader uncorrupted by the small matter of previous involvement in politics. They went to see him at Harvard, where he was a professor, and they were blunt. "Will you stand?" they said.
Ignatieff, who answered their question in the affirmative, is now not only a Toronto MP but the leader of the Liberal Party and thus the man most likely to be Canada's next prime minister. (The current Conservative administration is on its knees and there could be an election at any time.) But he likes to attribute his return at least as much to homesickness as to pragmatism. Honestly! It wasn't like he disliked Canada, or anything, for all that he chose to live elsewhere, and for so long. He missed the place: the cold, the skating rinks, the desperate need for mittens in winter. The way he tells it, he might have come back anyway, and sod the top job. "The price of expatriation rose for me over time," he says. "It didn't go down. I began to feel it very strongly. I had a wonderful run in London, but it was a run, and I felt it had come to an end. I missed not belonging. I began to feel, not a stranger, but… coming home gave me a sense of being at home." His voice rises a note. "I'm home! I'm home!" he cries, softly. Then it falls again: "That has been a good feeling."
Of course, not everyone is ready to take his word for this. "What will he do if he loses? Go back to Harvard?" wrote one Canadian commentator recently. The Conservatives, meanwhile, who currently lead Canada's minority government, have broadcast a series of ads attacking Ignatieff for his long absence. "Michael Ignatieff," sneers the voiceover. "Just visiting." Reviewers have approached his new book, True Patriot Love, with a certain amount of suspicion. A companion volume to an earlier memoir about his father's Russian ancestors, it tells the story of his mother's family, the Grants: Anglophiles, who thought Canada would only accrue real status if it was able to hang on to its imperial identity. But the book also contains a lot of stuff about the nature of patriotism; how it functions; why it is A Good Thing. ("Loving a country is an act of the imagination," writes Ignatieff. And later: "The country in question for me has always been Canada.") This is what has had them holding their noses. Now that he is a politician, they say, it's hard to see True Patriot Love as anything other than a grotesquely over-blown campaign leaflet.
Ignatieff, who has the aloof manner and the half-closed, upwardly-tilting eyes of a pedigree cat, looks at me more in sorrow than in anger when I bring this up. It is so very... painful because, after all, he was a writer long before he was a politician. "The book was a voyage of discovery, as books always are," he says. "It really is a book about my family, and their connection to Canada. Yes, I did want to say, since I am under constant attack for various things: 'Wait a minute, here! You don't know who you are dealing with.' That was a motive. But the overwhelming motive was just to figure out how the story held together over three generations."
But what about his new fetish for patriotism? In the 1990s, Ignatieff reported from the Balkan wars, and he has written several books about the dangers of nationalism. Isn't it odd, now, to be praising as a virtue what he once suggested could so easily become a dangerous vice? "Yes, there is a very murderous nationalism out there, one based on purity. But there's also another nationalism, which we call patriotism, which is a love of country and is perfectly inclusive, and I don't think you can run a country unless you can appeal to it. You gotta reach down into something: some shared sense of common history, tradition, enterprise. You don't want to overdo it. You don't want to get sentimental about it. But [if it isn't there] you've got nothing to go on. Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society."
His tone as he tells me this is slow, excessively careful and completely without irony, none of which would be surprising were he a career politician. Since when did irony and politics go? But Ignatieff used to be a writer. Listening to him now, it's as if he's been sedated, or body-snatched, or something. He's like a jazz man who's lost his sense of rhythm.
Today, Ignatieff really is just visiting. We meet in a grand room in Canada House, on Trafalgar Square, to the sound of squawking from the Gormley plinth outside. He is in London only briefly. This morning, he had meetings at the foreign office and with David Cameron. This afternoon, it is the turn of Lord Mandelson. In between, he hopes to meet up with a few old friends, "occasionally sneaking out for a little ramble through the old haunts". His London schedule, like his meeting earlier this year with Barack Obama, is, I guess, a sign of how seriously politicians outside Canada now take him – and he returns the favour. I ask how he found Cameron. "He's serious. He's got real answers to real questions. He knows what he believes, and he is intensely political in the best sense of the word. I thought he was personally charming. It was fun!"
Fun! But Ignatieff used to be a writer, a man who could say whatever he liked, and now he is a politician, and is able to say precisely nothing unless it comes straight from the script. How can that be fun? The Ignatieff brow – portcullis to his great big brain – wrinkles in the approved manner. "In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness," he says. "It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean. Your question implies that I've suddenly had to tie myself in knots. No, I don't have to tie myself in knots, and I don't have to cease being who I am. But I have to watch what I say because the public has no other way to judge me than by what they read. I can't walk around saying: 'I keep saying these dreadful things, but I'm actually a nice fellow!' Why should they believe that?"
But writing is about nuance, and politics is, well, not. I don't know how he contains himself. "Again, I don't see it that way. I see this as the most exciting thing I've ever had to do. The most difficult, but when it's going well, the most rewarding." Writing and politics are both, he insists, about listening, about expressing what people are thinking and feeling. But the bonus in politics is that, in theory, the politician gets to make people's lives better. "The idea that there is this contrast between a world of subtlety, and a world of bald, flat generalisations doesn't sound like what it's like at all. The best part of what I've been doing in the past four years has been listening intently to Canadians in big rooms and small rooms, in wharves and bars and airport lounges, just trying to pick up the music here, so that what's really on their minds gets into the policies."
But isn't dishonesty built into politics? Admittedly, everything I know about Canada has been gleaned from the stories of Alice Munro, and the novels of Carol Shields [Ignatieff nods approvingly at this: "Good for you!" he says, in the manner of a kindly don to a kid from a council estate.] But if Canadian politicians are anything like British politicians, they say only what they're told to say, even when they clearly believe the opposite. "Well, you should never knowingly tell a falsehood because it really does poison the well of politics. But in [just] the same way that you really should not tell a falsehood in your private life. I'm not sure I see this huge gulf between the moral world I've entered and the moral world I've left."
When I saw him in the newspapers, sitting with Obama, I thought of all those Hollywood movies – like Dave, with Kevin Kline – where an ordinary guy is somehow spirited into the White House, and spends the rest of the picture wandering the corridors of power feeling bewildered. I know Ignatieff is not exactly a plumber… but still: doesn't it all feel preposterous?
"Again, not really. I don't want to give the wrong impression. Going to meet the president of the United States is a big deal. You do get, erm, a little apprehensive. But he is a master political animal. Grips you by the elbow, tells you that he's read your books, sits you down, makes you feel like you're the only guy in the world. Thirty-five minutes later, you think: that was a great guy. But you don't feel surreal. You feel you're sitting down with an extremely intelligent, good listener who's locked right in. A month into his presidency, and he conveyed the impression that he's always been president. That was genuinely astounding. He was at ease in some amazing way."
Ignatieff will not – he cannot – divide his life into two: before politics, and after. "It's a slightly complicated life. But you stitch it together." He is tougher now, no doubt about it, but he relishes the fact that no one could ever call him a career politician. "I like the fact I've lived a full other life. Everyone thinks I lived in an ivory tower, but I lived as a freelance, I lived by my wits, for 15 years, and it wasn't always easy. If you lived in literary London and had as many bad reviews as I did, you kind of toughen up anyway. And painful as it is to say, I've learned more from bad reviews than good reviews. Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading."
Michael Ignatieff is a scion of one of Canada's grandest families – his father, George, the immigrant son of a Russian count, was a senior Canadian diplomat – and attended one of its most prestigious boarding schools, Upper Canada College. (After he was elected leader of the Liberals, a Canadian newspaper sent a reporter to interview his former classmates. One described how the young Michael would walk around with a copy of Paris Match underneath his arm, telling people that his goal was to be prime minister. Another recalled Ignatieff lecturing him on the meaning of the 1905 destruction of the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese war.) But in 1978, shortly after his 30th birthday, he left the country of his birth to seek his fortune elsewhere.
He went first to Cambridge, to continue the academic career he had begun in Canada, and then, tiring of his ivory tower, to London, to live as a freelance writer. As freelances go, he was more successful than most. He wrote an acclaimed biography of Isaiah Berlin. He wrote a column for the Observer. A first novel, Asya, received a royal slagging, but a second, Scar Tissue, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Plus, there was his presenting work on Voices on Channel 4, and Thinking Aloud and The Late Show on BBC2. ("Soooo… Martin Amis. You've written a book called The Moronic Inferno.") In this period, he was famed for his looks, and was sometimes to be found wearing a black polo neck. Yes, he had endured a painful and expensive divorce from his British wife, Susan Barrowclough, by whom he has two children, now grown up (in the past, he has referred obliquely to the difficulties he had over access to them). But he had found new love with a Hungarian-born publicist Zsuzsanna Zsohar. Life was good. After his second wedding, which took place at Hackney Town Hall in 1999, there was a party at the couple's minimalist Hoxton loft. It was attended by, among others, Jonathan Miller, Michael Palin and Simon Rattle.
Soon after this, though, it was all change again. Enough with the freelancing! In 2000, he returned to Harvard, where he had studied for his PhD, as the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F Kennedy School of Government. This was an important and influential job, and many famous ears were soon flatteringly cocked in his direction. It was at this point, however, that he shocked his leftist friends by coming out in favour of the war in Iraq. In the years since, he has recanted his position in the most absolute terms, but in Canada, his former support for Bush continues to hang over him, like a cloud of midges. Worse, there have also been accusations that he supports so-called "torture-lite", though Ignatieff insists that this is not so, a position in which he has been backed by the director of Human Rights Watch.
Ignatieff tells me that he now feels more optimistic about the future of Iraq, but that this does not for one moment change his stance. "Even if Iraq finds some way to stability, you can't justify leading people to war on the basis of lies, and you can't justify the horrendous human cost Iraqis have paid to get where they are. I thought then, as now, that Saddam was a genocidal tyrant, and that conviction led me too far, and I made an error that I think I've taken responsibility for. I've never shied away from admitting that I was wrong, wrong, wrong." What about torture? Will he able to keep his anti-torture principles intact if he becomes prime minister? "Canada sent Maher Arar [a Canadian engineer] to Syria, and a court found that he had been subjected to extraordinary rendition, that his claims [of torture] were true and that he had delivered no intelligence to anybody. It was a disgrace. So, we don't do it. Ever. Period. Off the table. We don't get other people to do our dirty work for us, and we don't do dirty work ever."
How, then, to deal with international terrorism? Ignatieff has always said that our democracies are under threat from the bottom up, thanks to extremism. But without the intelligence services and their dirty methods, what weapons do we have? "One of the conditions of modern life is that you look into any crowd and you think: who's the person with the bomb in their head? But the only solution is politics. Give people tolerant, non-dogmatic, pragmatic good government that serves their interests. I don't know of another solution. That's all there is."
In Canada, feelings about Ignatieff can be split roughly in two. There are those who complain that it is a sign only of the country's feebleness and insecurity that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader; and there are those who boast that it is a sign of its sophistication, maturity and wisdom that it is seriously considering an intellectual who has spent a lifetime abroad as its future leader. Obviously, Ignatieff himself would fall into the latter camp, if pushed. When I ask if he would like Canada to make more noise on the world stage, he says: "There are forms of noise that no country wants. We don't make noise because we work. Some of the quietness and modesty I obviously like, and prefer to our noisy neighbour in the south." Even so, can his donnish sensibility withstand the bullying and bluster and 24-hour news cycle that power, even in Canada, will bring with it?
He thinks so. "I married the right woman," he says. "That has turned out to be the most important single fact. I'm not going to die out there if people don't like me because there's someone at home who thinks I'm OK. I can't put it more directly than that. I have a sort of confidence, not necessarily in myself, but in the life I've led. I've done a lot of things. I'm not a kid any more. I feel I know some things about human beings, and what they're likely to do." Is he working harder than he's ever worked in his life? "Yes!" So when was the last time he read a novel? "Oh, I haven't read a novel in a while. I miss some of the reading. I miss reading for nothing other than the pleasure of it." He sounds wistful: in exile, somehow, whatever he says about having come home
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
The article above, found by Old Sweat, highlights the one area (or one of the areas?) in which Ignatieff ≈ Trudeau: their views on nationalism.
Trudeau was, using an analog developed by the subject of Prince Michael’s best work, Isaiah Berlin, a “hedgehog.” (Berlin posited that thinkers are like “foxes,” darting, quickly and often unpredictably, from idea to idea, or like “hedgehogs,” staying fixed on one idea.) Trudeau had one idea: nationalism is the cause of all the world’s problems. He equated 19th and 20th century British jingoism and German nationalism to 20th century Québec and American nationalism and found them all equally dangerous and destructive.
I think that idée fixe coloured everything he did in public life: socially, economically and, above all, in terms of foreign and defence policy where his, Trudeau’s, actions were, in my view, destructive of Canada’s vital interests.
Trudeau was, using an analog developed by the subject of Prince Michael’s best work, Isaiah Berlin, a “hedgehog.” (Berlin posited that thinkers are like “foxes,” darting, quickly and often unpredictably, from idea to idea, or like “hedgehogs,” staying fixed on one idea.) Trudeau had one idea: nationalism is the cause of all the world’s problems. He equated 19th and 20th century British jingoism and German nationalism to 20th century Québec and American nationalism and found them all equally dangerous and destructive.
I think that idée fixe coloured everything he did in public life: socially, economically and, above all, in terms of foreign and defence policy where his, Trudeau’s, actions were, in my view, destructive of Canada’s vital interests.
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from yesterday’s Globe and Mail web site, is yet another analysis of Prince Michael:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/why-ignatieff-muddles-and-befuddles-us/article1302307/
Murphy is right, it may be that Trudeau ”haunts us still”, as biographers Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson wrote back in 1990, butIggy Icarus baffles and "befuddles” us, temporarily at least, today.
And the comparisons with Trudeau never end, do they? It must annoy the hell out of Justin, the Dauphin.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/why-ignatieff-muddles-and-befuddles-us/article1302307/
Murphy is right, it may be that Trudeau ”haunts us still”, as biographers Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson wrote back in 1990, but
And the comparisons with Trudeau never end, do they? It must annoy the hell out of Justin, the Dauphin.
- Reaction score
- 7,777
- Points
- 1,160
Re: the Rachel Cook article.
Despite the scanty Canadian research on her part (resulting in the conclusion about the Conservatives);
despite the peculiarly British sensibiliities where, even in the Guardian, anyone with a title immediately belongs to a "grand family" (and that such things are found in all countries);
despite the "Dave for President" comment (where only a fellow traveller like Cook, finding a kindred spirit in Ignatieff, could consider Ignatieff "a common man" or perhaps even "a virtuous man" ideally suited for, but unlikely to achieve real power);
despite all of that Ms. Cook does seem to latch on to something that rings true for me:
Ignatieff really is dabbling.....It is just another adventure that one day will supply fodder for the next volume in his memoirs.
I can sympathise with Ignatieff, at his age, slowly realizing a desire to return "home". For some that urge seems akin to that of the Chinook Salmon. If you have been wandering for a while then "home" starts to look just about as attractive as "away" did when you were at "home". Unfortunately, your community shapes you and changes you while age hardens you so that, after a certain period of time, it becomes increasingly difficult to transition from one community to another.
Ignatieff's real community is Rachel Cook's community - the cosmopolitan, post-nationalist community of BBC, the Guardian, OxBridge and Harvard and the London School of Economics. I suggest that that also was a community in which Trudeau felt at ease.
I further suggest that one of the contributing factors (sorry Edward, broken record time again) for Trudeau's cosmopolitanism (a trendy word for internationalism) was the belief, inculcated from birth, that society worked best from the top down with strong hands guiding the lives of billions.....and that, of course, he was best suited to do the guiding. In my opinion that is where Trudeau, raised as a Pius Catholic found common ground with Socialists, if not the Communists. Both (all three?) systems preached against the evils of national borders and local, unauthorized, Princes. Both have difficulty with allowing people, in my Grandfather's phrase, "gaunin' tae h*ll their ain gait" (going to h*ll at their own pace and in their own style).
That, regardless of minor policy variations, is ultimately what, in my view, sets Harper and his supporters, apart from the Trudeau/Ignatieff's and their supporters. Harperites (to use the pejorative) want government to stay out of the way, and they get upset if Harper acts to "govern" by such measures as imposing a dubious stimulus package. Trudeauvians demand a "leader", with a plan, and a rule book, to solve problems that they themselves find insoluable - and intolerable. To survive as a Harperite demands an ability to tolerate "the intolerable".
Or to quote one of Trudeau's influences:
"God give me the courage to change the things I can,
the strength to accept the things I can't
and the wisdom to know the difference."
Too many progressives lack the ability to accept, which requires an ability to tolerate. Toleration is not about accepting people with whom you agree. It is about accepting people with whom you disagree, people with whom you disagree so viscerally that you may allow yourself to be driven to hate them.
Unfortunately that tendency is not unique to progressives....
What churns my belly though is that the progressives assert their moral superiority while failing to recognize their failings.
And I believe that that sense of superiority comes from the comfort associated with abdicating their personal responsibility and putting their trust in "the great leader and his plan". If you believe the leader is right, and his plan is right, then all you personally have to do is follow the plan to be "right" as well. If the plan fails, then the leader was wrong, or they were the wrong leader. You weren't wrong. You were just following the plan. That alleviates you from any personal responsibility for failure.
Despite the scanty Canadian research on her part (resulting in the conclusion about the Conservatives);
despite the peculiarly British sensibiliities where, even in the Guardian, anyone with a title immediately belongs to a "grand family" (and that such things are found in all countries);
despite the "Dave for President" comment (where only a fellow traveller like Cook, finding a kindred spirit in Ignatieff, could consider Ignatieff "a common man" or perhaps even "a virtuous man" ideally suited for, but unlikely to achieve real power);
despite all of that Ms. Cook does seem to latch on to something that rings true for me:
Ignatieff really is dabbling.....It is just another adventure that one day will supply fodder for the next volume in his memoirs.
I can sympathise with Ignatieff, at his age, slowly realizing a desire to return "home". For some that urge seems akin to that of the Chinook Salmon. If you have been wandering for a while then "home" starts to look just about as attractive as "away" did when you were at "home". Unfortunately, your community shapes you and changes you while age hardens you so that, after a certain period of time, it becomes increasingly difficult to transition from one community to another.
Ignatieff's real community is Rachel Cook's community - the cosmopolitan, post-nationalist community of BBC, the Guardian, OxBridge and Harvard and the London School of Economics. I suggest that that also was a community in which Trudeau felt at ease.
I further suggest that one of the contributing factors (sorry Edward, broken record time again) for Trudeau's cosmopolitanism (a trendy word for internationalism) was the belief, inculcated from birth, that society worked best from the top down with strong hands guiding the lives of billions.....and that, of course, he was best suited to do the guiding. In my opinion that is where Trudeau, raised as a Pius Catholic found common ground with Socialists, if not the Communists. Both (all three?) systems preached against the evils of national borders and local, unauthorized, Princes. Both have difficulty with allowing people, in my Grandfather's phrase, "gaunin' tae h*ll their ain gait" (going to h*ll at their own pace and in their own style).
That, regardless of minor policy variations, is ultimately what, in my view, sets Harper and his supporters, apart from the Trudeau/Ignatieff's and their supporters. Harperites (to use the pejorative) want government to stay out of the way, and they get upset if Harper acts to "govern" by such measures as imposing a dubious stimulus package. Trudeauvians demand a "leader", with a plan, and a rule book, to solve problems that they themselves find insoluable - and intolerable. To survive as a Harperite demands an ability to tolerate "the intolerable".
Or to quote one of Trudeau's influences:
"God give me the courage to change the things I can,
the strength to accept the things I can't
and the wisdom to know the difference."
Too many progressives lack the ability to accept, which requires an ability to tolerate. Toleration is not about accepting people with whom you agree. It is about accepting people with whom you disagree, people with whom you disagree so viscerally that you may allow yourself to be driven to hate them.
Unfortunately that tendency is not unique to progressives....
What churns my belly though is that the progressives assert their moral superiority while failing to recognize their failings.
And I believe that that sense of superiority comes from the comfort associated with abdicating their personal responsibility and putting their trust in "the great leader and his plan". If you believe the leader is right, and his plan is right, then all you personally have to do is follow the plan to be "right" as well. If the plan fails, then the leader was wrong, or they were the wrong leader. You weren't wrong. You were just following the plan. That alleviates you from any personal responsibility for failure.
Brad Sallows
Army.ca Legend
- Reaction score
- 7,806
- Points
- 1,040
Substitute "fascist" for "progressive" and the picture clarifies. Some view all persons as a project to be managed - often and conveniently with the viewer holding a membership in either the privileged management castes or the privileged receiver castes, and not so often in the producer castes - and some do not. Ignatieff and the Liberals belong in the former camp, regardless of the party's chosen name. Additionally, Ignatieff has chosen to embrace past Liberal mythology and propaganda rather than chart his own path by reasoning it for himself. I do not see in MP Michael Ignatieff very much of author and scholar Michael Ignatieff.
- Reaction score
- 1,151
- Points
- 1,160
Motivational
- Reaction score
- 1,560
- Points
- 1,090
Et tu Brute...
Denis Coderre is expected to step down Monday as Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's Quebec lieutenant...
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090928/coderre_quebec_090928/20090928?hub=TopStoriesV2
Denis Coderre is expected to step down Monday as Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's Quebec lieutenant...
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090928/coderre_quebec_090928/20090928?hub=TopStoriesV2
- Reaction score
- 146
- Points
- 710
Post at Dust my Broom:
Mickey I.'s Liberals to replace NDP on Socialist International?
http://dustmybroom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12513:mickey-i-liberals-to-replace-ndp-on-socialist-international&catid=38:here-comes-the-science
Mark
Ottawa
Mickey I.'s Liberals to replace NDP on Socialist International?
http://dustmybroom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12513:mickey-i-liberals-to-replace-ndp-on-socialist-international&catid=38:here-comes-the-science
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 4,864
- Points
- 1,160
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail web site, is Jane Taber’s analysis of the Coderre/Ignatieff fuss:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ignatieff-must-rebuild-after-rifts/article1304795/
Many people view Ms. Taber’s political analysis as being biased and the final six paragraphs, in my view, paint an unrealistically optimistic picture of a disastrous situation.
The Liberals had better send the Dippers a bunch of “Thank you!” cards because Taliban Jack Layton’s NDP is shooting itself in the foot: of course it (the NDP) will lose some seats to the Conservatives and maybe even to the Liberals and Greens, but, right now, they stand to gain many more seats from disaffected Liberals.
I think this was the first real test of Prince Michael’s leadership ability; he failed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ignatieff-must-rebuild-after-rifts/article1304795/
Many people view Ms. Taber’s political analysis as being biased and the final six paragraphs, in my view, paint an unrealistically optimistic picture of a disastrous situation.
The Liberals had better send the Dippers a bunch of “Thank you!” cards because Taliban Jack Layton’s NDP is shooting itself in the foot: of course it (the NDP) will lose some seats to the Conservatives and maybe even to the Liberals and Greens, but, right now, they stand to gain many more seats from disaffected Liberals.
I think this was the first real test of Prince Michael’s leadership ability; he failed.
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