Michael Ignatieff’s clumsy coming of age
Robert Fulford
28/09/13
By his own account, Michael Ignatieff entered Canadian politics in a state of innocence. He was shocked by everything unpleasant that happened to him during his run for prime minister, above all the unsettling change in his own personality. His nightmarish account of his five-year attempt to become prime minister sounds as if he had accidentally checked into a mad scientist’s rehab clinic and signed up for a psychological makeover.
Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, published today by Random House, may be the most melancholy memoir in the history of Canadian politics. What could be sadder than a man in his 60s losing his innocence?
In 2004, when three ambitious Liberals asked Ignatieff to leave Harvard and seek the prime ministership, it was as if (he tells us) he had been waiting his whole life for them to show up. He was apparently so overjoyed, so enchanted by this prospect, that he immediately forgot everything he knew about politics.
He writes with horrified surprise that in an election you must surrender spontaneity. “Freely expressing yourself is a luxury you can’t afford.” Gosh!
As his advisers insisted that he play it safe, he felt his personal convictions drain away from him. He began to feel he had acquired a strange, hollow new persona. He spent five years of his life “in a state of constant dependence on the opinion of others.”
But none of it was his fault, apparently. The blame falls on Stephen Harper and negative campaigning.
He quickly learned to obey the rules, as if he could imagine no alternative. He forgot that a few politicians, notably Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Thatcher, won elections while boldly speaking their minds, defying their handlers. Ignatieff admired Trudeau’s obvious authenticity but did not follow his example.
Amazingly, Ignatieff was shocked,
shocked, to find that words he had written or spoke many years before were seized upon by his opponents and replayed on TV to his detriment, sometimes even taken out of context or otherwise misused. But surely he must have noticed that this technique was deployed in the campaigns of Reagan, Nixon, Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson and many others. Surely he knew, before returning to Canada, that Stephen Harper would be his opponent.
Like many newcomers, he may even have tried too hard to be one of the gang. He doesn’t admire rigidly partisan politics, but in Ottawa he buried himself among the Liberals. He let party identity define his life. (“I had no friends on the other side during my time in politics,” he writes). Ignatieff never ate, drank or talked with Tory MPs. He gives one barely credible example: “If you were found talking to someone on the other side while walking on the treadmill in the parliamentary gym, for example, rumours would start that you were thinking of crossing the aisle.” He didn’t notice until the election was over that the Conservatives and New Democrats were not all bad.
Yet somehow he came through this dreadful experience “with renewed respect for politicians as a breed.” His book is intended “in praise of politics and politicians.”
Unfortunately, he gives few praiseworthy examples. He can’t be referring to Stéphane Dion, his party’s leader for two years, who treated him as an alien usurper and isolated him. He seems bitter about this, though of course he was after Dion’s job. Nor can he be referring to Bob Rae, who ended their long friendship the minute Ignatieff revealed he was entering politics.
With two years to think it over, Ignatieff still seems unaware of the effect of his words. When he recalls the Liberal caucus’s decision to make him temporary leader, he writes: “So here I was, leader of the party at last …”
Did he say “at last”? That sounds as if he was ending a long, arduous journey. But this was in 2008, just four years after he first talked of entering politics and only two years after his election as MP.
Ignatieff resented anyone claiming he felt entitled to the leadership because, as he notes, “voters hate entitlement.” But the part about “at last” suggests he was indeed stamping his foot with impatience, waiting for the slow-witted Liberals to come to their senses and embrace him.
It would be good to hear Jean Chrétien’s response; he became prime minister in 1993, 30 years after his first election. Even Pierre Trudeau served three years before becoming leader.
Perhaps Ignatieff’s “at last” explains why everything turned out so badly for him. He thought it was going to be easy. After all, who was more entitled to power than he?
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
