Deconstructing Iggy

Ron GRAHAM has done an excellent job of describing the ascension to power of Liberal Leader Michael IGNATIEFF in December issue of The Walrus entitled "The Stranger Within".  I highly recommend it. (Apart from the obviously evocative title, I cannot help but think of Albert CAMUS's novel "L'Etranger" as I read GRAHAM's thoughts.  IGNATIEFF truly is a veritable stranger in his own land!)

Among the wonderful and woeful observations:

• The backstory begins with a creation myth, an original sin, an immaculate misconception. In January 2005, three kingmakers traversed afar, following yonder star from Toronto to Boston in search of a messiah, he who would lead them out of the political wilderness and into the Prime Minister’s Office.  There were: Alf Apps, Dan Brock and Ian Davey. 
• The "script" went something like this "Ignatieff would deliver a barnburner speech at the Liberal convention in March, move back to Canada by the fall, secure a perch at the University of Toronto, write a book, make a TV documentary, find a riding, knock on doors, and get elected. Though a rookie MP, he would ascend swiftly into the cabinet to sit at the right hand of Paul Martin, learn the ropes of Parliament and government for a couple of years, run for the leadership when Martin retired, win, and become prime minister of Canada."
  
• By happenstance, they caught Ignatieff at a moment when he was open to their enticement. He was approaching sixty years of age. He was in the habit of reinventing himself every decade or so.  
• What better way to cap an illustrious life of thought and letters than to become un homme engagé, an actor on the stage, a servant of the people, a prime minister? What more appropriate destiny for the grandson of Count Pavel Ignatiev, minister of education to Czar Nicholas II, and the scion of a prominent clan of British imperialists, Upper Canadian academics, and distinguished diplomats? Hadn’t young Michael proclaimed it his intention as a lad on the playing fields of Upper Canada College?
• A question that’s often asked of Michael Ignatieff is whether he knows how much he doesn’t know.
• In fact, it might have given Ignatieff cold feet if he had remembered that Trudeau initially refused to run for leader because he sincerely believed he didn’t have the experience or the credentials for the job. He felt rather old at forty-eight to be entering such a high-stakes game. He had only been an MP for three years and a cabinet minister for one. And what did he know of business, bureaucracy, or party politics?
• The party thrived on its internal tensions and contradictions. It made a virtue out of being in the centre, somewhere between the United Empire Loyalists and the social democrats, moderate, flexible, open to any good idea or practical solution. It usually succeeded by campaigning to the left and governing to the right. 
• The foundation of the Liberals’ electoral success was based on simple math: a majority of Ontario plus a majority of Quebec equals an excellent chance for a majority in the House of Commons. That led to an entente cordiale between the party’s machine in Ontario and the party’s machine in Quebec: the boys from Toronto would divide the spoils in Ottawa if the boys from Montreal delivered enough moutons to show up and vote. Ontario got Finance and Commerce; Quebec got Justice and the post office; and they would take turns in the prime minister’s job.  
• But Pierre Trudeau changed the game.  He slighted Pearson by dissolving Parliament before the House had its chance to pay homage to the outgoing prime minister. He introduced reason and order into Pearson’s crisis management chaos. He trashed Pearson’s beloved Department of External Affairs, where Ignatieff’s father was a star. He humiliated Pearson’s warhorses with experiments in participatory democracy and regional desks. He turned away from Pearson’s moves toward special status for Quebec. In the eyes of the Pearsonian Liberals, of whom Ignatieff often says he’s the last in existence, he took their party away from them.
• The Bay Street Liberals had had enough.  At the party’s convention in November 1982, a twenty-four-year-old law student named Alf Apps put forward a resolution attacking the PMO’s “non-accountable, non-legitimate, non-elected” inner circle. Everyone saw it for what it was: an unprecedented attack on Trudeau’s leadership on behalf of the Toronto business community’s knight in shining armour, John Turner. 
• Over the course of the next ten years, while John Turner was leading the Liberals into two catastrophic defeats with the assistance of Alf Apps, they taught Paul Martin how to deliver a decent speech, how to schmooze the membership and the media, how to offset his anger and pro-business bias with warmth, wit, and the rhetoric of compassion. 
• In those early days, Martin didn’t look much like a winner. He was awkward with people, a bumbling speaker, inexperienced as a campaigner, with an explosive temper on a short fuse.  He bore a  grudge against Trudeau for humiliating his father in the 1968 leadership race, and they liked the power base that his wealth and connections secured.  Most of all, he was willing to put himself completely into their hands to be trained for public office. (Is this starting to sound familiar yet?)
• They positioned Martin for the leadership race against Jean Chrétien in 1990. They followed him into the Department of Finance. They worked the riding associations across the country, the Ottawa press corps, and the money guys in Toronto. Paul asked their advice. Paul gave exclusive interviews. Paul promised everybody whatever everybody wanted to hear.
  
• By contrast, Chrétien was inaccessible and enigmatic. Sure, he had served time on the boards of Toronto-Dominion Bank and Gordon Capital, but he liked to throw barbs at the greed and selfishness of bankers and CEOs. Sure, he had close connections with Power Corporation and more than two decades of experience as a cabinet minister, but he went to extraordinary lengths to maintain his populist image and grassroots connections.
• It took a few intrigues and a bit more time, but the Martin gang eventually forced Chrétien to announce a departure date. Then, frustrated that he was lingering too long, they pushed him out of his office ahead of schedule, and the sponsorship scandal landed in Martin’s lap instead of Chrétien’s. In a lunatic manoeuvre that backfired badly, the new prime minister set Justice Gomery on the government of which he had been a prominent member, and purged many of the pros with the experience and skill to have won three elections.
• One senior bureaucrat, casting his eye over Martin’s team, observed that “the kids” had arrived. These skilled operators, who had spent almost all of their adult lives trying to get into the PMO, found themselves with no actual reason to be there. No agenda, no priorities, no ideas. And the general who had brought them, however good he was at following orders and pleasing everyone, turned out to be indecisive and conflicted once the buck stopped with him. He who had marched them up the hill marched them down again, blowing the gains in Quebec, detonating the lead in the polls, and barely surviving with a minority government in June 2004.
• For a neophyte apprenticing on the job in public, Ignatieff rarely lost his confidence or his cool. But he suffered a handicap that couldn’t be casually dismissed, like his empty speeches or awkward glad-handing, as the forgivable blunder of a novice: he had been out of the country for almost three decades! He stumbled blindly into the thickets of Israel, Afghanistan, and carbon taxes.
• Nothing betrayed the gaps in Ignatieff’s knowledge more than his reckless foray into Quebec nationalism. Just as Lord Durham had dropped in on the Canadian colonies and found two “nations” warring in the bosom of a single state, so too did Count Ignatieff when he landed here, in his own words, like a Martian outsider. 
• Hapless Dion. For all his experience and courage as a minister under Chrétien and Martin, he proved incapable of growing into the top job, and the attacks on his geeky personality and fractured English in Toronto circles bordered — as Jimmy Carter might put it — on racism. 
• Suddenly and with no warning, egged on from behind the curtains by Chrétien, he made the one and only bold move of his short, sad leadership. On the first day of December, he signed a coalition agreement with the NDP and the Bloc Québécois that would have replaced the Conservatives with a Liberal-dominated cabinet. The deal collapsed when the Governor General allowed Harper to prorogue the House of Commons before a vote of no confidence could be held, so no one will ever know whether it was a brilliant or an idiotic idea. However, it did serve to shake things up in Ottawa. Harper was humbled for the first time, Dion resigned within days, Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc withdrew their hats from the ring, and Michael Ignatieff was named interim leader on December 10, to be confirmed at the party convention in May. 
• Set Ignatieff's True Patriot Love against Obama's Dreams of my Father leaves you empty.   Even if public relations had been the goal, Ignatieff and his entourage showed dreadful political instincts in not delaying the book’s publication. Rather than strengthening his roots as a son of the True North strong and free, his account of the Grant and Parkin clan played to his weaknesses. It hardly helped his reputation as a condescending, narcissistic elitist to highlight his childhood in the bosom of the Upper Canadian establishment.

So much for the setup.  The rest of the article describes how bankrupt Ignatieff is of purpose, talent and experience. An elitist poseur of the first order.   It is a great read and I recommend as an excellent overview of Iggy's first term.   We shall see how the next one plays out.