Topic: All eyes on Ignatieff

[E.R. Campbell]

I almost never agree with anything Peter C Newman says, but ...

This (from today's National Posit at: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=5b76f3e9-ffa0-4a4e-bdbd-a71eef6943d8 ) is fascinating:

All eyes on Ignatieff

Peter C. Newman
National Post

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Now that Paul Martin has recognized there exists a middle ground between shooting from the hip and rigor mortis, and has finally begun to act like a prime minister, the review of his leadership at next week's Liberal convention is a predictable formality.

The real star at the gathering will be Michael Ignatieff, who has been asked to deliver the keynote address. Given the pivotal role he may eventually come to play within the party, the attention will be richly deserved.

The Toronto-born academic has taught at Cambridge University, l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, as well as St. Anthony's College at Oxford, and is currently a tenured professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has written half a dozen defining books on ethnic nationalism and the moral imagination. But unlike most intellectuals, he has also ventured into fiction. His book Scar Tissue was nominated for the Booker Prize, while Charlie Johnson in the Flames has been compared to thrillers by Graham Greene and Len Deighton. His current projects include a book on Canada, which will follow the trail blazed by his great-grandfather George Munro Grant, the great principal of Queen's University.

Ignatieff's speech will be of interest not only because of the insights he is expected to offer on the prospects for a world in turmoil. Some senior party strategists have convinced themselves he might be persuaded to run for the leadership once Paul Martin decides to seek calmer pastures.

Significantly, it was Martin himself who recommended that Prof. Ignatieff address the convention on the theme of "Liberalism in the 21st Century."

So far, switching careers is not part of Prof. Ignatieff's life plan, but he doesn't recoil in horror when the same idea is mentioned, as Pierre Trudeau did when the subject was first broached in 1967. Certainly, the aura of great things hangs about the man: A far-sighted TV crew is following his footsteps as he researches a new book, modelled on Alexis de Tocqueville's epic journey across the United States 150 years ago.

If this still hypothetical but entirely plausible manoeuvre succeeds, it would be very much in keeping with the masterful strategy that has kept the Liberal party in power longer than any other democratic political movement in history. Unlike Conservatives, who seem to choose leaders by drawing straws, the Liberals take a more systematic approach. The eight candidates who have assumed command of the Governing Party since the 1919 leadership convention demonstrate a pattern: Liberal kingmakers often ignore the clamouring of ambitious Cabinet members and opt instead to pluck from obscurity an untried but inspiring outsider.

That's political sorcery of the highest order. Instead of having to defend the corruption and patronage of the ancien regime, the freshly-minted leader can innocently declare: "Who me? What Sponsorship Scandal? This is moi, a new guy with new ideas."

Thus does discontinuity rule.

The pattern began with Mackenzie King, the Party's patron saint, still worshipped for turning Liberalism into Canada's state religion. At the 1919 leadership convention, his main opponent was William Stevens Fielding, who had been a successful minister of finance in Wilfrid Laurier's 1896 cabinet and was considered Laurier's natural successor. Instead, delegates voted for King, then deputy minister of labour, who had briefly sat as a Liberal backbencher 10 years earlier, but left to become a consultant. A spooky bachelor who was so fastidious that he travelled with six spare shoe laces, he led the Liberals into office two years later, and kept them there for most of the next three (eternal) decades.

In 1948, when it came time for Mr. King to prepare his departure, Jimmy Gardiner and Chubby Power were the party regulars in line to grab the brass ring. Instead, Mr. King went outside his circle to recruit Louis St. Laurent, a Quebec City corporate lawyer, and manoeuvred the 1948 Liberal leadership convention to assure his victory. Ten years later, Paul Martin Sr., father of the current PM, was the obvious insiders' choice. But the delegates selected Lester Bowles Pearson, a political neophyte who'd been a life-long public servant.

The transition that followed tested the outsider pattern with a vengeance. In 1968, when Mike Pearson felt ready to retire, nine candidates ran to succeed him, including Robert Winters, a handsome M.I.T. graduate who had served with distinction in the St. Laurent Cabinet before becoming one of Canada's most powerful corporate bigwigs. Instead, the Liberals opted for Monsieur Trudeau, the ultimate party outsider, a man who only a few years earlier had been a member of the NDP, attacking the government for its nuclear-friendly defence policies. The convention delegates recognized in Trudeau the philosopher-king who could salvage their party, and he did.

Former Justice Minister John Turner was next up in 1984, having turned himself into an outsider a decade earlier, when he suddenly resigned from the Trudeau Cabinet to practise law in Toronto. Jean Chretien's succession in 1990 similarly followed his resignation from the Commons in 1986 to follow Turner into the hedonistic hollows of Bay Street. Likewise, Paul Martin, Jr. became a nominal and temporary outsider when he was fired from his finance portfolio by Chretien. (In truth, though, he is the exception that proves the rule.)

Given his lack of expressed interest in the job -- and the fact he has put down strong roots in the United States -- Ignatieff has as great a claim to outsider status as any of these men. He follows closely in the Trudeau mould: a charming and distinguished academic who would endow the crumbling Liberal party with a sense of purpose and the excitement that comes with fresh ideas. Even those untutored Liberal apparatchiks who think charisma is a brand of French perfume will recognize his magnetism, and feel it when he evokes his vision of Canada's Liberal future.

Ignatieff could be just the man for our time. Canada's most serious dilemma is not the calamitous state of our health-care system, nor the dithering of our PM, or our growing irrelevance on the world stage. It is the belief among ordinary citizens that they can no longer change things through the political process.

Because democratic activism forms the core of Prof. Ignatieff's writing and thinking, he might --once he has served his political apprenticeship -- turn out to be the ideal successor to Mr. Martin.

During the decade-long Chretien-Martin feud, Canada's public life became legalized mayhem. Michael Ignatieff's divine mission, should he choose to accept it, will be to restore the civility, trust and vitality that give birth to creative politics. Next week's convention will be his proving ground.

The Liberal brain-trust doesn't always get it right.   St Laurent, for example, was an excellent prime minister and the best foreign affairs minister Canada ever had, bar none.   Trudeau was the worst prime minister in Canadian history: a petty, pretentious, puffed-up, provincial poltroon; a second rate mind with a first rate education who became a third rate academic in a backwater.

Michael Ignatief is no Pierre Trudeau; the question is: is there a St. Laurent in there?

[whiskey601]

Couple of points:

1.  Michael Eizenga [ rumoured to be a huge St. Laurent fan] is in an exellent position to also take a shot at the top.

2. St. Laurent [as External Affiars Minister] was heavily involved in the creation of the UN, but I think his shining moments in foreign affairs occured when he was PM: Korea, UNEF, NATO.   Note how the reputation of Pearson and Peacekeeping eclipse Uncle Louis.

Cheers.   

[Infanteer]

I'm a bit of an Ignatieff fan myself, his books are top notch.

I can remember when Ignatieff shocked the liberal establishment for coming out in support of the invasion of Iraq.  The anti-war crowd labelled him "traitor" and "sell-out".

Obviously, he is not a "Dither"....

[smersh]

There was a time when Ignatieff was considered a potential leader of the Ontario Liberal Party too - I can't imagine why he'd want the job. It's a big leap from public intellectual and TV celebrity to electoral politics. (like Infanteer, I admired his stand on Iraq) Besides I think Newman overstates the "masterful strategy" of succession in the federal Liberal Party. There has been a civil war in the party for the past five years, and I wouldn't exactly describe Chretien, Martin and Turner as "outsiders" either -- and they have dominated the party for nearly a quarter of a century. (St. Laurent was hardly an obscure figure either - he had been a Liberal cabinet minister under King and helped keep the government together during the Conscription Crisis of 1944.)

cheers, mdh

[E.R. Campbell]

Louis St Laurent was a life-long Liberal, from a Liberal family (his father having been a candidate in some election or another).   He had, however, no practical experience when, in 1941, Ernest Lapointe, King's powerful Québec lieutenant died, and he (St. Laurent) was persuaded to come to Ottawa â “ only until the end of the war.   In that respect he was an outsider.

St. Laurent was a brilliant man â “ turned down a Rhodes Scholarship, etc â “ and was an internationally known barrister with friends in high places in London and Washington.   That also made him something of an outsider in a Party which kepy close to its local roots.

He and Howe were a 'team' in managing the transition to peace and, especially (with Acheson), an active, leading role for Canada in reshaping the global multilateral institutions like the UN and NATO.

His first, important 'break' with King and O.D. Skelton's foreign policy (which St Laurent repudiated, wholly and completely) was over Korea, in 1949; there were many more: mostly opposed by wings of the 'big tent' Liberal Party which we would recognize 60 years later.   St Laurent was a skilled, 'natural' politician: able to build coalitions and scatter opposing alliances through a combination of legal/argumentative skills and personality (there were no skeletons in his closet, he was 'bomb proof' on most traditional political fronts â “ that, too, made him something of an outsider).

[jmacleod]

Agreed, Ignatieff would make an first class Liberal politician, and has all the right credentials
except that getting a recommendation from Peter C. Newman, detested in the Liberal Party
of Canada, is essentially a "kiss-of-death". The Liberal Party of course, is always considering new
options related to leadership, and life after Martin is being discussed, however, the Federal Liberals
in my opinion will win a majority in the next national election. because of the fractured leadership
in the Conservative Party. For an interesting perspective, read Columnist Chantal Hebert in today's
(February 28,2005) Toronto Star. Regards, MacLeod

[smersh]

Hi Edward,

I guess it depends on how you define a political "outsider".   I would agree that Trudeau was definitely one - he was always ambivalent about the LP - especially in its Quebec manifestation (which he considered a corrupt machine all too ready to strike a deal with Duplessis and the Union Nationale.)  

I would argue that St. Laurent was in a different category, (although with an Irish mother and Quebecois father he had shades of the Trudeauvian bicultural heritage that fits so well with the federal LP's reigning national ethos - or at least their version of it).

My problem with Newman is that he makes is sound like the LP has some collection of wizened gnomes combing the country for the Next Great Leader - and considering the history of the party since 1980, I just don't buy that thesis.

As for Laurent and Howe, you wonder how they would fare in today's pop culture political environment.   Both of them were very much products of the pre-TV age when deference was still a by-word in Canadian political culture.

Cheers, mdh  

[smersh]

Jmacleod,

I did read the Herbert piece and I agree with her.   Harper doens't appear to have been very successful in capturing the public's imagination and for some reason there has been an obsession (perhaps understandable) with finding some "wedge" issue to galvanize support for the federal Tories (the gay marriage issue).

I suppose we will have to wait and see if it produces any results but it's a risky strategy - especially in urban Ontario (in my view).  

But the flip side of the parlous state of the Tories is the state of the federal Liberal Party in Quebec.   Under Martin the party is not making any significant headway, and I suspect that the Bloc is becoming an institutionalized force with a lot of appeal to the soft (and indeed hard) nationalist vote in the province.  

Martin has failed to consolidate his leadership there and this will undoubtedly continue to divide the party between his faction and the old Chretienites.  I'm not sure how an Igantieff would make much difference in bridging that divide.

cheers, mdh

[whiskey601]

Martin has failed to consolidate his leadership there and this will undoubtedly continue to divide the party between his faction and the old Chretienites.   I'm not sure how an Igantieff would make much difference in bridging that divide.

Perhaps he could try buying them off? Or, has that already been tried?

[Thucydides]

Like the Americans salivating over the possibility of Secretary of State Dr Rice running for President in 2008, a lot of this article seems to be more wishful thinking than anything else. I donn't know if anyone has done an analysis, but is Ignatieff backed by a powerful "machine" to put him into the catbird seat? Is he personally ruthless enough to deal with the various people and factions in the Liberal Party, enough to "purge" the Martinites or Creitienistas if they get in the way of his vision?

For that matter, although his literary and academic credentials are good, his personal resume seems a bit empty compared to, say, Dr Rice, who has actual expereince running a major university, being on the board of directors of various corporations, serving in government, being a heavy duty academic (and a concert musician by training to boot). IF writing books is all you need, well, we have lots of posters on this board who could have a serious shot at the position (you can take this as a positive or a negative. I favor the Libertarian point of view anyway).

As for the other suspects in Parliament, Harper has turned on the cloaking device; and I havn't heard any ideas coming from his side of the house for ages. Layton is dreaming in technicolour (must have something to do with the leagalized deamon weed), his ideas are the same old socialist BS stuffed in a new envelope. The Bloc is only designed to appeal to a very limited subset of voters, and the Greens are like watermelons; once you cut through the rind, it is red inside (Hey look, a Socialist solution to our Ecological problems!)

We need to get powerful new ideas implimented past the Status Quo; and I have a few thoughts on how to do just that.......

[E.R. Campbell]

...

We need to get powerful new ideas implimented past the Status Quo; and I have a few thoughts on how to do just that.......

Lay on Macduff.

I would like to see our army.ca Politics page deal with positive proposals to make Canada better, especially in the foreign and defence policy domains.   We already have enough sophomoric anti-Americanism, let's have some grown up pro-Canadianism.   Patriam volunt meliorem.

[Torlyn]

I'm a bit of an Ignatieff fan myself, his books are top notch.

I can remember when Ignatieff shocked the liberal establishment for coming out in support of the invasion of Iraq.  The anti-war crowd labelled him "traitor" and "sell-out".

Obviously, he is not a "Dither"....

Sorry to jump on this, but I was actually quite surprised how vehemently in favour of it he was.  My mind kept jumping back to his book "the Rights Revolution" and when I heard his views, I had to re-read the article twice to confirm.  I thought it was rather telling that someone who is so intrisically involved, and such a proponent for human rights would be willing to have those rights reduced (patriot act, etc.).  He did make an excellent argument for it, one which (if I can find) I'll post the more salient points here...  Infanteer, perhaps you know the article which I'm talking about?

T

[Infanteer]

No, I'm not sure what article you're specifically referring to.  The last thing I remembered was a MacLeans article on Ignatieff which I found interesting.  As well, I had a debate with a fellow over on SOCNET about "Rights" and he emailed Ignatieff the synopsis of our debate and got a response, which I thought was nice.

The last book I read of his was "Empire Lite" which I enjoyed - basically saying lets not try and colour our expeditions up and lets make sure that we go hard or go home.

[E.R. Campbell]

Here, from today's Globe and Mail (   http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050304.wxcoignat04/BNStory/specialComment/ ) are excerpts from Michael Ignatief's address to the Liberal Party convention last night.   I have highlighted some bits.

A generous helping of Liberal brains

To be a Canadian Liberal means to be just, generous and always share the pie, says author and analyst MICHAEL IGNATIEFF


By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Friday, March 4, 2005 Updated at 6:49 AM EST
From Friday's Globe and Mail

In the United States, where I work, liberals are in the wilderness. In Canada, Liberals are in government. Still, it's a nervous time in the party. Running a minority government is tough. The competition is at our heels.
 
I'm here to remind you of something you've always known: the fundamentals of Liberal belief. A party that tries to be all things to all people cannot succeed. We've succeeded as a party of government, because we know that to govern is to choose. We've always known when to say a clear Yes, and when to say a clear No.Our 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.

Provinces are now complaining about a fiscal imbalance between a cash-rich federal government and cash-strapped provincial governments. Let's address that imbalance, but not by weakening federal authority or diluting national standards of common citizenship.

Federal Liberals say yes to strong provinces, but no to a balkanized Canada, in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. We stand for one country, not 10.

Liberals understand that we cannot have a country at peace with itself, if justice has not been done to aboriginal peoples, if acknowledgment has not been made of the tragedy that has haunted our national experience together. We cannot have second-class citizens in our midst. We cannot have pride and self-reliance if peoples are dependent for their survival on government handouts.

The country has embarked on an experiment in aboriginal self-government that the rest of the world is watching. In this experiment, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples have said no to paternalism and dependency, yes to self-reliance and self-government.

Seen from afar, Canada is a noble experiment: whether peoples speaking different languages, divided into five regions, can survive and prosper as a united country. If we fail, the future of the multilingual, multicultural state in the modern world will be grim indeed. From Sri Lanka to Iraq, from South Africa to Ukraine, we can help promote democratic federalism for multiethnic, multilingual states. Exporting peace, order and good government should be the core of a disciplined foreign policy that shares the Canadian dream with the rest of the world.

Our second task as Canadians is to preserve our national independence. We face a geopolitical reality unlike any other country: The greatest challenge to our sovereignty comes not from our enemies, but from our best friend. Canadian-American relations are the central issue of Canadian politics in the next generation. Liberals have always said no to anti-Americanism -- but also to continentalism. We are reliable neighbours, good friends, but firm defenders of our sovereignty. In the first half of the past century, that meant fighting for European freedom in two world wars before the U.S. joined in; in the second half, it meant recognizing Cuba and China, supporting the International Criminal Court and promoting the land-mines treaty.

But we cannot defend our sovereignty with sermons. We must have our own military, intelligence-gathering capacity, immigration and border controls, control of our air space. Our independence depends on our being a credible partner in the struggle to keep North America safe from terrorist attack. Like it or not, we are next door to the primary target of global terrorism. We must invest to ensure we are never a terrorist transit point or a terrorist haven.

In the world's failed and failing states, the most urgent human need is security. People at the mercy of tyrants and gunmen need protection first of all. To protect them, we have to have the capacity to fire back. We do not want to repeat Rwanda, when a brave Canadian soldier, Roméo Dallaire, was sent out on a UN mission to protect civilians, without the arms, equipment and troops to stop the slaughter in front of his eyes. We owe this to our men and women in uniform. And to the world.

The government has recently announced its decision about ballistic-missile defence. The decision will be popular in the party. But we need clarity in our national defence policy. We need to balance a principled opposition to the future weaponization of space with an equally principled commitment to participate in North American defence right now. We don't want our decisions to fracture the command system of North American defence, and we don't want a principled decision to result in us having less control over our national sovereignty. We must be there, at the table, defending what only we can defend.

Our third task is to stand as a party of social justice. You can't have a united country unless you have a just society, and a just society is an equal one. Can we really say the prosperity of the past 30 years has been equally shared? We know there are more than a million children living in poverty in Canada. We know that these children come from the families of recent immigrants, minorities and aboriginal peoples. Just as prime minister Lester Pearson used federal power to create a national health system for all Canadians, so we, in the next generation, need to use federal power to invest in education, especially postsecondary education, and set the standards nationally that we need in order to make education an engine of mobility for our people and an engine of productivity for our economy.

Liberals don't think a government program is the solution to every injustice in our society. Injustice can only be remedied when individuals take responsibility for themselves. Individuals need programs that help them bear the burden of losing a job, losing their health, losing their way. We believe in a market economy, not the law of the jungle.

There is one liberal value we must not forget. When my mother passed the pie over the table, she told us to have a "liberal" helping. Liberal meant generous.

Generosity means trusting each other, helping without counting the cost, taking risks together. Generosity, unity, sovereignty, justice: These are the beacons of a liberal politics.

Michael Ignatieff is Carr Professor of Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. This is excerpted from his address last night to the biennial policy conference of the Liberal Party.

This, especially the highlighted parts, is not going to endear him to either the Youth Wing or the Women's Commission of the Liberal Party of Canada where knee-jerk anti-Americanism and institutionalized national-feminism (entitlements over responsibilities) are the order of the day.

[Infanteer]

Maybe the Conservative Party could take him and get rid of Mr Hair?

[SeaKingTacco]

Gulp.  I hate to admit it...

Damned good speech.

Will the Liberal Party listen?

[Brad Sallows]

Some parts strong, some parts weak.  I am surprised by this: "but firm defenders of our sovereignty. In the first half of the past century, that meant fighting for European freedom"

I have never thought of the rush of the pro-British part of Canada to support Britain in 1914 and 1939 as particularly "sovereign" behaviour.

[whiskey601]

I saw the part of his speech where he suggested that those who preach anti-americanism ought to belong "withering with the NDP." I almost spit my rum and coke out. The looks on the faces of many of the liberal party members was appropriately glum, although a large contingent were quite enthusiastic about those sorts of remarks. He started saying something about the conservatives, and thats when I immediately tuned him out ....     

[smersh]

I almost spit my rum and coke out.

Have you been watching the Trailor Park Boys again Whiskey 601? 

[E.R. Campbell]

I found this, by Tony Keller (U of T), in today's National Post at: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=e3eb4f80-e1ba-49ff-adbf-71421f76ca8e very interesting:

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.[/i]

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.[/b]

My emphasis added.

[Acorn]

I liked the "herbivores/carnivores" quote so much I decided to use it as a sig.

Acorn

[Infanteer]

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.

...who knows the places we'll go if we had this kind of leadership?

[E.R. Campbell]

This is from today's Globe and Mail.

There are some interesting parallels with 40 years ago: a somewhat dithering crown prince succeeds a managerial PM - much is expected but little happens.  The ditherer is replaced by a charismatic newcomer - with philosopher king pretensions.

My, personal, take is that Ignatieff is no Trudeau - I think Ignatieff has brains and substance, but time will tell.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050629.wxignatieff29/BNStory/National/

Ignatieff sets sights on Ottawa

BY MICHAEL VALPY

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2005 UPDATED AT 5:06 AM EDT
FROM WEDNESDAY'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Celebrity intellectual Michael Ignatieff is coming home to Canada with his eyes fixed on 24 Sussex Dr.

The 58-year-old author, broadcaster and director of Harvard University's prestigious Carr Center for Human Rights Policy is on the edge of announcing his decision to run for Parliament for the Liberals in the next election.

He has met regularly with an informal group of influential Liberals in Toronto and elsewhere over recent months to discuss his political future.

He has painstakingly - almost stealthily - laid the foundations for his return to Canada after an absence of more than three decades.

He has been negotiating with the CBC to produce a four-part TV documentary series and companion book, reportedly exploring an academic appointment at the University of Toronto, circulating word of his availability to address influential Canadian audiences and quietly looking for Toronto accommodation.

His greatest coup, according to a knowledgeable party source, was finessing an invitation from the Prime Minister's Office to give the keynote address at last March's Liberal Party policy convention, an occasion he used to deliver a bare-naked political speech that negatively compared aspects of Mr. Martin's prime-ministership to the glorious national vision of Pierre Trudeau.

"It's very close to the stage that he will do it [seek a Liberal nomination]," said a leading member of the group with whom Mr. Ignatieff has been consulting. "It's close, but it's not definitive."

To those Liberals urging him to enter political life, Mr. Ignatieff is seen as both a philosopher-king in Mr. Trudeau's iconic mould and someone who would generate excitement around progressive ideas in a party seen as having become lacklustre, drifting and visionless under Mr. Martin.

(He also will encounter uneasiness in the party, especially in its pink Trudeauesque wing, over his support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq - he argues that the Iraqis deserved freedom from Saddam Hussein - and there is no consensus on whether he sits on the left or the right of the party on social and fiscal issues.)

But because he - and those Liberals around him - inevitably will be seen as a threat to Mr. Martin's leadership, the work of greasing the path for Mr. Ignatieff's glide into Liberal politics is being done clandestinely and very, very nervously.

"Insurrection? It's not that, and it can't be that," said an Ignatieff supporter who, like others, agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. "It's not about royal jelly. It's about focusing on the short term of getting him back to Canada and getting him into Parliament.

"And if people are being identified [with Mr. Ignatieff] in a covert way, it's because we don't want the thing to go off the rails. It's a difficult time for Liberals, Liberals like myself."

It's also evident that the Ignatieff crusade is one of the worst-kept secrets in national political circles. Mr. Ignatieff, reported yesterday to be in either France or Iran, could not be reached for comment.

He is said to have looked for a constituency in Nova Scotia - the home of his maternal family, among them great-grandfather George Monro Grant, principal of Queen's University, and his uncle, Lament for a Nation philosopher George Parkin Grant - and Toronto, where he was born and grew up and where his father George Ignatieff, one of Canada's outstanding Cold War diplomats, served as provost of the University of Toronto's Trinity College and university chancellor.

Rumours that he will run either in the U of T's Trinity-Spadina riding or in adjacent Toronto-Centre Rosedale are undermined by the fact that the two Liberals who now hold the constituencies - Trinity-Spadina's Tony Ianno, Minister of State for Families and Caregivers, and Rosedale's Bill Graham, Minister of Defence - have been renominated for the next election and intend to be candidates.

The Liberals indeed hold every seat in Toronto except one - New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton's - and 90 per cent have been renominated.

Still, a senior Liberal with extensive election campaign experience did not rule out Mr. Ignatieff winning a nomination. "There could be two or three [sitting Toronto MPs] who have reached a maximum situation regarding their pensions and could be scratching their heads about running again."

The CBC documentary series and book Mr. Ignatieff plans to do is on George Monro Grant, who travelled across Canada in 1872 with the engineer-in-chief of the proposed transcontinental railway, Sir Sandford Fleming, and wrote a journal in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville on the country's future.

"He is kind of keeping his options open on Harvard," a Liberal supporter said. But according to another source, Mr. Ignatieff already has arranged a leave of absence from Harvard's Carr Center to do the Grant project - a leave of absence that could conveniently envelope the next election campaign.

© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Poor Mr. Dithers is same sex marriage going to be his legacy?

[jmacleod]

Minority Government leader Martin is faced with a committment to undertake a Federal Election
30 days after the Gomery Report is filed (and accepted, which could cause a delay). Election has
been planned since Nov 2004; Liberals expect to form a Majority Government. Although no one
has said this, Party strategists prefer Harper to stay put; tactical problem if he leaves. There is
talk about Martin's replacement, but potential candidates are in short supply, so Ignatieff will be
a highly attractive leadership candidate, could probably easily win. But if Harper goes, it appears
Conservative Leader in Ontario, John Tory is the odds on favourite to replace him. Liberal Party
will be looking for an attractive candidate who can win, and maintain the Liberal hold on the
national government. Layton's days as a deal maker are over, the Liberals will drop him like
they did Lewis when Alan J. MacEachern of the Black Arts made a deal for support, and once a
majority was achieved, disposed of the NDP support. In those days, the NDP support was generated
by giving NDP MP's full control of patronage in their ridings. MacLeod

[Aden_Gatling]

Minority Government leader Martin is faced with a committment to undertake a Federal Election
30 days after the Gomery Report is filed (and accepted, which could cause a delay).

Funny that Belinda Stronach is going to spearhead implementation of the recommendations of the Gomery Report: I suppose they'll be nothing 30 days of 'work' can't clear right up.