Ignatieff has always been part of the Canadian Liberal party establishment but as Colby Cash points out he may be out of touch with some of the party's less admirable characteristics and development. Fabulous Fisking:
colbycosh.com
Harvard man on horseback
The worse things get for Paul Martin, the more you hear the name that Peter C. Newman whispered into the wind in February--the name of the Liberal Party's rescuer-in-waiting, Michael Ignatieff . Foreigners may be surprised to learn that the acolyte-biographer of Isaiah Berlin is thought by some to be holding a golden Wonka ticket to ultimate political power in his home country, where he hasn't really resided since 1978. But such are the mechanics of culture cringe. For Ignatieff, having missed out on the first Quebec sovereignty referendum, the patriation of the Constitution, the Meech Lake Accord, the negotiations on free trade and the 1988 election, the Charlottetown Accord, and the second Quebec sovereignty referendum--all of which catches us up only as far as ten years ago--must be counted a decisive advantage.
Of course, he's been watching it all unfold from various perches like the BBC, the Soros Foundation, and his present posting at the Kennedy School of Government, which is nothing if not a self-conscious laboratory for the creation of a global énarque class. And, without doubt, a suitable distance can allow one to see the whole forest instead of just the neighbouring trees. Still, it's a bit much to play the immigrant card on your own behalf. "Hey, believe me, I know all about what it's like to flee a stagnant authoritarian country for greener pastures--my Russian grandparents did it, and so did I..."
Newman's column was accompanied by a laboured and unconvincing thesis about "discontinuity" being the key principle of Liberal leadership selection. But Ignatieff is certainly aware of how Liberal sentiment was rallied behind Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. (As convenient as it is for him to recall his refugee ancestry to mind, he remains the nephew of George Grant and the grandson of George M. Grant , WASP ascendancy figures whose stature might best be compared to Thomas and Matthew Arnold's in England.) And Ignatieff has been seeding Canadian soil lately with op-eds, finding fertile soil at both the Globe, where he once served as a reporter, and the Post, where his support for the Bush administration's "war on terror" commands respect.
It is a respect I am tempted to share. Last night, during a long evening power outage in my neighbourhood, I settled in with a flashlight and a recent book I venerate, Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century . Lo and behold, who should turn up in its earliest pages but the 1992 incarnation of Ignatieff, in the guise of a BBC interviewer, giving E.J. Hobsbawm a most deserved what-for about his unapologetic Communism. On questions of geopolitics, Ignatieff is admirably uncringing, especially for a leader in the global human rights industry.
The practical question for Ignatieff is whether such a man can possibly seduce the mass of the Liberal Party. Ignatieff's take on American imperialism flies in the face of Liberal history; he calls it "a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." For supporting the Iraq war, questioning the apostolic bona fides of the UN, and accepting the legitimacy of superpower intervention against rogue states, Ignatieff has already been permanently tarred on the Left as a late-life neoconvert. Paul Martin's other potential successors--even assuming the party's iambic pattern of French and English leaders doesn't hold--can do their opposition research at the nearest Chapters store.
Like others I would feel a intellectual's satisfaction at living in a country where Ignatieff and Stephen Harper were the leaders of the two main parties. But the truth is that political leadership has done much to de-intellectualize Stephen Harper; and when it comes to the state of Canada, I'm frankly not certain that Ignatieff wouldn't already come pre-de-intellectualized. Ignatieff's Liberal convention address was a plea for trans-regional unity that commenced, awkwardly, with the requisite homage to Pierre Trudeau--
"I watched a great man become a great politician, and let me tell you if you weren't there, all I can say (I hope some of you were there) but if you weren't there, the words of the poet apply, 'blessed was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young was very heaven'."
--confirmed the attendees in the corrosive and despicable view that the Liberal Party bears the same relationship to Canada that the Holy Spirit does to the Son--
"Other parties represent regional grievances and regional interests, other parties represent sectional, class interests. Our party represents the nation, ocean to ocean. Our party has never been just a machine for winning elections, though they were the best machine for winning elections in the world. But we've never, my friends, just been a machine for winning elections. We are the governing party of our nation."
--and proceeded to offer a litany of dialectical platitudes and policy prescriptions that were mostly offensive when they made any sense at all. This paragraph, for example:
"We need to use federal power to make education a ladder of mobility for all our people and an engine of productivity for our economy. Let's not, my dear friends, let's not get tangled up in federal-provincial battles over jurisdiction. Let's just do it."
Hey, it's only the constitution! How Paul Martin must have felt, hearing Ignatieff--whom he had personally invited to be the cynosure of the convention--dismiss the tension between the federation and the provinces as a "tangle", a mere creation of the mind. That Ignatieff was applauded for this sort of thing only shows how far the Liberals have wandered from the etymology of their name. All that's needed is a strong will--we'll have those Pontine marshes cleared up in no time. (He also explicitly celebrated Trudeau's support for Cuba and Red China, which makes one wonder whether old Hobsbawm might have managed to daub some sort of musk on Ignatieff's skin during their televised contretemps.)
Well, as you get closer to Broadway, the critics get tougher. One week ago Ignatieff elbowed his way into the Post again with some trenchant observations about the implications of Adscam for the future of the country. Again, he displayed an intellectual's willingness to think clearly instead of wishfully on a key point:
"Federalists have wasted a good deal of time contesting the idea that Quebec is a nation. I have never had difficulty conceiving Quebec as such. My central objection to Quebec nationalism is to its claim that it is necessary for their nation to have a state."
But, in the end, he passed the buck:
"What makes the current situation serious is that our constitutional crisis is rapidly becoming systemic: Atlantic provinces discovering new energy wealth are seeking to patriate this wealth for their own development alone. Hard-pressed Ontario is asking how it can meet the steadily escalating costs of its commitments in health and education and is raising fundamental questions about its historic role in equalization. Alberta has its own concerns with equalization. Saskatchewan wants to re-negotiate its deal. Strapped municipalities -- many of them larger than some provinces -- are asking where they fit into a fiscal federalism constructed primarily to distribute taxation and revenue between federal and provincial governments.
Successive federal and provincial governments have compounded the problem with case-by-case improvisation, making deals that are slowly provoking a systemic crisis, in which Canada backs its way, without fully intending it, into an ever more asymmetrical, and ever more unsustainable, fiscal crisis.
If our fiscal crisis is systemic then it needs to be dealt with systematically. A Royal Commission -- with bipartisan representation from all three levels of government -- is one possible way to re-order fiscal federalism for the 21st century."
Nothing printed in any Canadian newspaper this year can have provoked as much laughter as this punchline, for which Peter Foster eviscerated Ignatieff in Wednesday's Financial Post. It speaks to Ignatieff's real detachment from the scene: "I dunno, why don't you guys ask some smart people what they think?"
If he were seeking a real response to the worst political scandal in Canadian history, he could have addressed the progress of Liberal autocracy through the 20th century--the way it has persistently impoverished our constitutional safety nets, transferred power from Parliament to the Prime Minister's Office, centralized authority in Ottawa, and used the public purse as a political war chest. All of which set the table for Adscam--hell, it cooked and served the whole meal.
But Ignatieff regards the Liberals the same way all Liberals do, though he is more candid than most. He sees them as "the governing party", period. It's a matter of religious faith. So while he might be capable of quarrelling with the Liberals on fine points of post-Pearsonian foreign policy, he is utterly unprepared to offer a comprehensive critique of the party's history. He is no use at all to Canada, even as a guide to the Liberal Party's soul-searching (and let us know when you find one, fellas). Still, one almost wishes the movement to bring him "home" would pick up steam; it might be a fitting penalty for his fatuity for him to return to Canada and be confronted with the crooked, mean, evasive, plumb-stupid reality of Liberalism. Imagine the courtly, learned professor trying to absorb the reality of--never mind actually dealing with--creatures like Alfonso Gagliano. Dante himself could not devise a better hell for an intellectual than the one called Ottawa.
- 10:16 pm, April 23 ( |
