Letter from Berlin: True Patriot Distractedness

How am I supposed to keep track of the Canadian federal election when I’m so busy keeping track of earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab Spring? And I haven’t even mentioned the Ivory Coast’s former president holed up in the basement of the palace, Robert Mugabe still clinging to power in Zimbabwe, or the Kim-il-yer-wun-tu clan in North Korea. It’s hard to pay attention to someone clinging to power in the True North Strong and Free, armed only with negative political ads and buckets of money. There are at least 50 evil dictators who pop up on my radar screen before the slightly unpleasant Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, makes a blip.

Talk about multi-tasking! I mean, I’m the kind of person who, on the best of days, tends to confuse tsunamis with tiramisu, the Italian dessert, unless one or the other is about to sweep me away. Have I noted the Eurozone crisis or the revival of the Culture Wars in the U.S.? I didn’t even know that Glenn Beck, the right-wing telepropagandist, was fired last week by his right-wing Fox network bosses who found Beck too crazy even for them. Fortunately, I ran into a YouTube video of comedian Jon Stewart doing his imitation of Beck and passing on this heartening bit of news.

Where was I? Oh yes, the Canadian election. It’s hard to pay attention. At the halfway point of the campaign, the Nanos poll numbers are more or less exactly where they were at the beginning of the campaign, although it’s kind of impossible to understand the numbers because of the weird joker in the pack, aka Bloc Quebecois, which has about 10 per cent of the votes, but only in one province, while the other four parties’ potential voters are scattered across the whole We Stand On Guard For Thee land, plus the territories and the melting Arctic in which we’ve planted our rubber ducky flag, so the meaning of the numbers is slightly skewed. Hey, are you following all this?! Wake up, Canada! (I hate it when advertisers and politicians address us collectively by the name of a country or region or town: Yo, Burnaby! Show us some love, Saskatchewan! Etc.)

What was I saying? Numbers. Sumpin’ ‘bout numbers. I’m trying to get the numbers on Tiger Woods’ golf score, so I gotta click on the leaderboard hyperlink. No, wait: Canadian election numbers. Ok, I’m back: the Conservatives have 40 per cent of the vote, Liberals 30 per cent, NDP 15-20 per cent depending on which way the wind is blowin’ on a given day, and there’s about 3 per cent wasted Green votes, which might not be wasted if we had proportional representation like they do in sensible but often broke Eurozone countries, but we don’t, so forget it. The numbers are the same as they were at the start of the 2011 campaign, and the same as they were in the last campaign, and in the one before that, and …

But then it turns out that the national numbers don’t mean anything because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, so it’s the numbers in the provinces we have to pay attention to, but the polling margin of error there is too great to know what the provincial numbers mean, and anyway, the election will be decided by the vote in Ontario, where the Good People of Toronto elected a plump right-wing mayor who looks like the plump right-wing recently-elected governor of New Jersey.

I’ll go out on a limb. The 2011 Canadian federal election will result in an exact, precise, riding-for-riding copy of the results of the last Canadian election, and the election before that and the election before… Unless it doesn’t, that is.

So, the likely case scenario is another Stephen Harper minority government, unless we have the worst case scenario, a Stephen Harper majority government. At which point, we’ll recognize that elections are unnecessary because they always produce the same results, a constitutional amendment will be passed eliminating elections, and Canada, the first post-modern country, will become the first post-electoral democracy. Uh… just kidding.

If we get another Conservative minority government, then one of two things will happen: 1) nothing; 2) the majority opposition will vote against the minority Conservative government throne speech or budget, the minority Conservative guv will fall, the Guv-General will ask the largest opposition party to try to form a guv, the Libs will say yes, Jack Layton’s NDP will grudgingly announce it will support the Liberal minority guv, but will not form a … (can we use the word “coalition” on a family-oriented website?) … will not form a C-word, the Bloc Everything but Quebec will mutter something in a language most Canadians are too lazy to understand that will amount to tacit consent, and Michael Ignatieff will become the new and less unpleasant prime minister of Canadada. Got all that? When I explain this perfectly simple, reasonable, typically Canadian scenario to my Berlin friends, their eyeballs fall into their beer steins and float.

We wouldn’t have to go through any of these Cirque du Soleil contortions if the Liberals and social democrats could count. If they could count they would discover that the Canadian centre-left amounts to about 50 per cent of the Canadian electorate, enough to form a government if the vote wasn’t split between two parties in a country without proportional representation. If it was up to me, I’d dissolve the existing centre-left parties and form a new party. I’d call it the Centre Party.

The worst case scenario is a Conservative majority government. If that happens, Stephen Harper will unveil his long-rumoured, long-awaited Secret Agenda. The Secret Agenda, as everyone knows, includes getting rid of the long gun registry, forbidding late-term abortions, and not allowing gays to be portrayed on postage stamps. This is not quite as bad as severing people’s tongues, killing the first-to-ninth-born of particular ethnic groups, or making us listen to Celine Dion. But it’s enough to alarm some Canadians. I read one reader response to the poll number online story (no, don’t get me started on the subject of “reader response”—I’m distinctly irrational on that topic) that said about the prospect of a Stephen Harper majority government, and I quote: “On the march to a fascist state”! I mean, c’mon, man! Isn’t there a tiny gap between a mildly unpleasant Conservative prime minister and fascism? A little itsy-bitsy teensy gap?!

If you want to talk about proto-fascism, you’d do better to ponder the Republican Tea Party of the US, which last week threatened to shut down the government of the entire country unless the liberal/communist Kenyan-born secret-Muslim president of the USofA agreed to get rid of abortions, health care, gays, trade unions, and education. Or listen to the deficit-cutting debates in the legislature of the Republican Tea Party-controlled state of Texas … Wait, were we talking about the Canadian election?

Oh, hold on a sec. My Facebook app on my i-Pogue is blinking furiously. Hey, guess what? It’s Jack Layton, leader of the whole NDP. He wants to “friend” me. (I never imagined that the word “friend” would be turned into an obscene-sounding verb.) Just stay where you are. Let me just click this hyperlink here… whoops, it’s an article about the opposition in Yemen that says … C-c-c-canadian something-or-other. I’ll be back in a minute, ok?

.

Berlin, April 10, 2011.

Trudeau, He Ain’t

Mercifully, it seems that the next federal election is at least a few months away, now that the confrontation over employment insurance, medical isotopes, and various other points of disagreement between the governing Conservatives and opposition Liberals has been postponed indefinitely. While it’s a good thing that Canadians won’t have to contend with scores of aggressively earnest volunteers campaigning on behalf of their chosen candidate this summer, the two sides haven’t signed a truce, either. Over the next few months, each side will fight the first battle of the next election, each engaged in a campaign to define newly elected Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff on their terms. Ironically, they both appear to be attempting to portray him as the heir to Pierre Trudeau’s legacy.

The battle to define Ignatieff began just days after he was acclaimed as Stephane Dion’s replacement at the Liberal leadership convention in Vancouver this past May. The Conservatives fired first, rolling out an aggressive advertising campaign aimed at painting Ignatieff as an impatient visitor, an effete intellectual who would rather be in the salons and classrooms of Europe than the Parliament of Canada, the very same strategy that one assumes Harper and his advisors would have used in the days after Trudeau captured the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968. Like Trudeau, who was portrayed as a disinterested trust-fund playboy, the Conservatives are attempting to depict Ignatieff as a man too far removed from the experience of the average Canadian to either understand their needs or act in their interests, focusing their attentions on both his scholarly wanderings abroad and his patrician roots and ties to Russian nobility.

The Liberals, in turn, have also turned to the Trudeau legacy in their effort to define Michael Ignatieff. They have championed his academic and intellectual achievements as proof that he’s a man of ideas, of thought, and of imagination, a stark contrast, they say, to the cold, mechanical, tactically obsessed Harper. According to Toronto-area Liberal MP Navdeep Bains, a self-described Charter of Rights Liberal and a man who regards Pierre Trudeau as his political hero, the comparison between Trudeau and Ignatieff is a good fit. “It’s not necessarily the particular idea that he puts out there, the notion for me is that Michael thinks big,” Bains said. “It’s the fact that he exudes confidence that he can take on big ideas. Just like Trudeau early on, there was no one idea that stuck out, you just sensed there was hope and vision.”

While Ignatieff wisely deflects any direct comparisons that are made between himself and Trudeau, he hasn’t done anything to discourage the people who keep making them, either. As the CBC’s John Gray notes, “about Michael Ignatieff, it was the eager invocation of the memory of Pierre Trudeau that sent out the first signal of things to come.” In almost hushed voices Liberals in the know said that Ignatieff had “the Trudeau thing.” The reference to Trudeau that Ignatieff included in a speech given to youth delegates at the convention that confirmed him as leader is indicative of his approach to the Trudeau legacy. “You have to indulge an old guy like me,” he said, “but this is the feeling that I felt in 1968 at the great convention that chose Pierre Elliott Trudeau as our prime minister.” By casting himself as an unabashed admirer of Trudeau’s work, one who shares his professional credentials and political orientation, Ignatieff and his team put forward the elements of a political narrative that are too conspicuous for even the most dim-witted pundit to miss.

This strategy of associative identification has been largely successful, too, as a variety of political writers, from the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin to the Independent’s Leonard Doyle to Peter C. Newman, have picked up on this trail of crumbs.

The problem with this comparison between Ignatieff and Trudeau is that there’s no substance to it. In the November 2008 Globe and Mail column in which he makes the comparison between Ignatieff and Trudeau, Lawrence Martin declared the new Liberal leader as the rightful heir to the charismatic political lineage of Trudeau, and before him John F. Kennedy. Yet Ignatieff’s supposed charm, which is largely the result of being compared with Stephen Harper, whose goofy looking sweater vests have more charm than he does, is of a decidedly different nature than Trudeau’s.

From the pirouette that he performed behind the Queen’s back to the outfits that he wore in the House of Commons purely in order to get under John Diefenbaker’s notoriously thin skin, Trudeau’s charm had a degree of insolence and subversiveness to it that Ignatieff does not appear capable of understanding, much less mimicking. Take, as an example, his decision to wear a Vancouver Canucks jersey at the recent convention, despite the fact that he is a professed lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Can anyone really imagine Trudeau wearing a Leafs jersey in Toronto, or a Jets jersey in Winnipeg, just to ingratiate himself to a crowd that was already there to support him?

Throughout his career, sometimes to his own detriment, Trudeau repeatedly reaffirmed the fact that he had no interest in his own popularity, an unusual trait for somebody who ran for public office. Ignatieff, on the other hand, seems almost desperately interested in being liked, a trait that he shares with the rest of his colleagues on Parliament Hill.

The heart of the comparison between Ignatieff and Trudeau is the notion that they are both men of ideas, philosopher kings who have graced the gritty game of politics with their very presence. Yet under closer scrutiny it quickly becomes apparent that while they may both be men of ideas, the ideas that matter to them are very different. More importantly, on those most important of ideas for Trudeau, the shape of federalism, the future of Quebec, and the influence of the United States, they disagree, and often profoundly so.

For example, in 2006, during his first campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, Ignatieff proposed that Canada ought to recognize Quebec as a nation. Astonishingly, one of his senior campaign officials, Alf Apps, published a letter in which he asserted that Trudeau would have supported Ignatieff’s position were he alive today. But Trudeau’s younger son, Alexandre, set the record straight, noting that anybody who thinks his father would have shared Ignatieff’s view on Quebec “couldn’t be more wrong,” and that it was “more objectionable still” to suggest that his father “would, like Ignatieff, deal in vacuous terms meant to appease emotions.”

Pierre Trudeau spent his entire political career trying to, as he once said, “put Quebec in its place, and that place is Canada.” As James Laxer writes, “Trudeau articulated a vision of a great country that could encompass multiple identities without succumbing to the poison of the exclusive nationalism of any of them.” Ignatieff, in contrast, seemed happy to inject the poison himself if it could help to win him the leadership of the party.

On federalism, Ignatieff talks a good game, affirming the importance of a strong central government. “Above all,” said a statement on his website during the 2008 leadership race, “Canadians want a federal government that protects the spine of equal citizenship that unites all Canadians, from coast to coast to coast.” Yet that same statement also made reference to the importance of respecting the constitutional and fiscal autonomy of the provincial governments, and his recent handling of a dissenting group of Newfoundland MPs showed that he’s far more willing to give ground to the provinces and those representing their issues than Trudeau ever would have been. This schizophrenic approach to federalism was reflected in a recent speech in which he said he wouldn’t give Quebec any more powers if he became Prime Minister because the federation was already sufficiently decentralized, but then added the view that this decentralization is “a good thing.”

On Canada’s relationship with the United States, Ignatieff is far less ambiguous. Trudeau famously observed that living next to the United States was like sleeping with an elephant, but it’s unlikely that Ignatieff shares that apprehension. The recent wave of Conservative ads included a snippet in which he used the first person plural pronoun to refer to Americans, and while it’s unlikely he’d do that today the very fact that he did it even once illustrates the place that the border separating the United States and Canada occupies in Michael Ignatieff’s imagination. Ignatieff’s support of George W. Bush’s misadventure in Iraq, a war about which Trudeau would have been loudly critical were he alive to see it, is yet another indication of Ignatieff’s instinctive comfort with the American influence that Trudeau found so worrisome.

The biggest difference of all between the two men, though, isn’t in the views they hold on these issues, but how tightly they hold them. Trudeau rarely ever wavered during his sixteen years in office, holding firm to his views on Quebec nationalism, the importance of a strong central government, and the darker side of America’s influence on Canada. He held tight to these views through political crises, a minority government, and even a defeat at the hands of Joe Clark. Ignatieff, in contrast, seems willing to alter, adjust, or even abandon his views at even the slightest provocation. As Maclean’s columnist Andrew Coyne writes, “the question is not, what does Michael Ignatieff stand for? It is, what does he stand for now? It is not, what would he do in government? It is, what would he do differently?” Already, Ignatieff has changed his mind on the war in Iraq, the development of the oil sands in Alberta, and the propriety of the proposed coalition that nearly brought down Stephen Harper’s government last November, to name just a few. As Coyne observes, “so it is with much of Ignatieff’s oeuvre. They are views. But they are not positions.”

Ignatieff’s decision to back down from a confrontation he himself precipitated just weeks ago over the Conservative government’s handling of the economy reinforces just how different he and Pierre Trudeau really are. His decision to force a confrontation over a supposed point of principle, only to back down meekly when it was no longer politically profitably to do so, was in every meaningful way the opposite of what Trudeau would have done in the same situation. Michael Ignatieff may be a good politician, and he may well become the next Prime Minister of Canada, but he’s not the next Pierre Trudeau.

Chetwynd, July 1, 2009 – 1,700 w.