A Post Election Rant

What’s in the cards for us? Machiavelli for our Prime Minister, a clown for the opposition leader? This could all be very Shakespearean, were it not for the fact we live in a media world which allows neither tragedy nor comedy, only farce, to configure public discourse. We must live with icon consumption. There’ll be hard times. Harper will execute his Plan, which is to turn Canada into a market autocracy; Layton will continue with his party-piece style of self presentation, blind to the fact that his Quebec contingent is a flash in the pan, a mistake, at best an experiment, and hop around like the poor man’s rock opera star he aspires to be. The Liberals are toast; the bad Ignatieff dream is thankfully over, and no, the youth vote, like so many media-invented phenomena, did not materialize. Voting percentage was up only a couple of points from the last election, no data is available that tells us which percentage of voters came from the youth demographic. Old media just doesn’t do this kind of reporting.

Harper’s “strong majority” is running on gasoline provided by forty percent of the Canadian electorate.  I worry, again, that the “new media” hullabaloo, about which I can at times get excited, is a self-referential circular system in which reality bubbles appear and burst when reality sets in with a strong purpose, as it will with Harper. I hope I’m wrong about this but I do not feel gleeful at the moment. I worry that by the time Harper finishes with us it will be too late—as our attempts at halting climate change will come too late—to disarm the traps we’re getting into. A dark day for Canada. In dark days, people, like abused kids, rush to strong leaders.

7 May 11

Harper’s big majority (take a deep breath, lie back and think of England) was garnered with a 2% increase in his popular vote in the last election. The rest of us did not vote for him. The fundamentally undemocratic first-past-post electoral system brings this about: the strong get majorities because they are strong, not because they have the support of the majority.

Harper’s great desire, his life project, was to kill the Liberal Party. He’s succeeded. He lives in an epic age, in which your main job is to kill your enemy. That’s his thinking.  Now he’ll try to build an empire. But he may not know how, and will try instead to find a new enemy. Having no natural enemy left, he may in fact not know what to do. It’s useful, I think, to compare him to boy gamers. You get points for vanquishing the enemy, monsters, etc., then you go downstairs where mom has cooked supper for you. You get status and kudos from your imaginary peers, the other boys and their super toys.

So let’s assume that our prime minister—I don’t think I’m wrong about this—lives in this sort of boy-in-his-room-battling-monsters kind of reality. Layton, meanwhile, is a boy scout. He mouths truisms he doesn’t quite understand and couldn’t make good on if his mother’s life depended on it. He’s a man of platitudes and a cute face who likes himself so much as a celeb that he daily pees his pants with joy. Layton’s the jester figure to Harper’s hero-king. The two might need each other to keep this story-line going—and what I fear sometimes in my darkest moments, is that the real kids, raised on hero-meets-monster fiction and media, will willy nilly take to such a story line. This is a great catastrophe, if you ask me. Harper’s so out of touch my teeth hurt when I think of it; Layton makes my gums bleed.

The media, meanwhile, are gleeful. They got a story where they worried there wasn’t one: but now, just imagine, we have the demise of the Liberals, for the first time in history, they, the end of the natural governing party, are neither….etc. etc.. We have the rise of the NDP, for the first time in history a serious contender, as Marlon Brando would have put it, as official opposition. An orange revolution, here in commonplace Canada, imagine that! And the collapse of the BQ. How much happier can a journalist get? We have neophyte kids from Quebec who don’t speak French forming the majority of the NDP caucus, how cool is that—as a story, not as reality, remember? Media people love history because they so rarely, in fact never, make it. Meanwhile the true issues mount up: climate change, the oil sands (remember when they were tar sands?) Afghanistan, Obama—I mean Osama—and the end of the 9/11 era. Another computer game tribal killing with no relation to legal reality, without due national or international process: a wild west show. Obama reminds me of Ignatieff, which is a sad comparison to be making.

The young, who I think wish to vote and have influence, don’t quite know how to do it. They don’t get the concept: it’s not enough like shopping. What do I get in return for voting? Their networks encourage them—and us old farts—to act, and one has hope, but youth needs more guidance from people, not from social networking software. Facebook is a different animal here in North.America than in Egypt, where people talk and then text, not vice versa. I do have hope that when Harper gets going on his many projects the kids’ll wake up and smell the rats. How they will deal with them I don’t know. Some of the kids have kids themselves, though, and that’ll make a difference. I have hope, see?

11 May 11

I’ve calmed a bit and today I am more worried about Harper’s neo-con agenda bee buzzing into Canada’s cultural and political fabric. He’ll abolish public funding for political parties, thus giving the corporations the say over who’ll get elected; he’ll slash CBC funding and support his crony media outlets like Sun TV; he’ll, needless to say, slash arts funding even more; he’ll cut corporate taxes, privatize healthcare delivery, deregulate guns,  balloon up the prison system, throw money at the military, make love to the tar sands, and make Canada the laughing stock of global efforts to curb climate change or address any other environmental matter. He’s a disgrace, an embarrassment, a Bush holdover, a menace to Canadian democracy: all the things we knew before the election, and didn’t prevent.

1080 words,  May 18, 2011

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.

Stephen Harper After Five Years As Prime Minister

We’re now almost five years into Stephen Harper’s rule, so what do we know about this man? The short answer is disturbing: not much more than we knew five years ago.

A few days ago I uncovered some notes I made as he was about to accede to power in February 2006. I headed the notes “Stephen Harper’s Character” because I thought it was his character that signaled the most important issues around him, given that he had a minority government and Canada was therefore not going to see much implimented policy from him.  I wrote—and then abandoned as too preliminary—the following:

*A decent but not especially nice man.

*unclear whether he’s self-involved and impatient of others or simply private and introspective.

*He seems unwilling to communicate on form, which is a quality you’d probably admire in a friend, but not necessarily in a political leader.

*He likes power for its own sake, and we can expect him to wield it, occasionally with arrogance and prejudice, but with just enough intoxication that he’ll get his ass in a sling.

I think I nailed him on all four, but glancingly, and without much nuance. So let’s add the nuance we now have, based on his actions over the last five years.

*In private life, Harper is a pleasant but not warm man, and in public he is utterly incompetent at projecting himself as anything other than a man with a private agenda he is itching to impose. This is curious, because what we see of that agenda, while conservative to the point of Thatcherism, remains cloudy. As much as anything (other than Liberal leader Michael Ignatief’s grimacing political and physical awkwardness) this sense that he’s harbouring a harsh private agenda is what has kept him from acquiring the political means to impose it.

*Harper manages to be self-involved and impatient and private and introspective. He possesses considerable and even formidable calculative intelligence, but it is offset by a chronic and unattractive emotional woodenness that borders on Aspergers: you can always see what he loathes and it is uncertain whether he loves anything very much.

*He’s likeably terrible at kissing babies and at glad-handing, but he is also a vindictive micromanager who prevents his own key people from communicating anything except on form. The degree to which he’s consolidated power in the PMO is predictable and politically dangerous, and yet he has done nothing with his promise to increase the accountability and transparency of the federal government, and worse, is openly neglectful and contemptuous of portfolios he dislikes, and almost Hitleresque in his savaging of his own people he believes have not shown sufficient loyalty.

*He enjoys power a little too much for comfort, and he’s more than willing to exercise it. He wields his power arrogantly, with prejudice and (happily for those who dislike him) with occasional intoxication, as witnessed by the recent billion dollar boondoggle of the G-8/G-20 fiasco in Toronto, which accomplished nothing other than some photo-ops of him with world leaders, and to present Canada to the world as an amateur police state.

What is perhaps most disturbing of all about Stephen Harper is how little else anyone has learned about this man’s true character. We can see the iron will, sure. We can see his hardness when someone goes off message. But he’s so secretive and close-mouthed that even this is often hard to parse. Is the visible cold shoulder Peter McKay is currently getting to do with his public affair with Belinda Stronach, or was there some back-room shoot-up no one but a few taped-over mouthed insiders were witness to?

About as close to comedy as it ever gets with Harper (aside from the alleged affair wife Lauren is supposed to have had with a female security staff member) is that he has Bill Clinton’s populist aspirations without any feel for populism, which has raised a  suspicion that, when it’s 3:00 AM and he’s had a couple of drinks, he turns into Neil Diamond—except that we don’t actually know if he’s ever stayed up that late, or if he’s ever even had “a few drinks”.  I suspect that if Stephen Harper ever did either and it became public knowledge, it would do him more political good than a truckful of baby blue sweaters, and that a lot of us would be relieved.

It has also become evident that, after a half decade in power, Harper is developing a serious and surprising taste for the global stage and that he’s beginning to see himself as one of the good old boys of globalization even as the movement is being discredited by its excesses and built-in injustices. When he isn’t simply embarrassing himself and Canada with his eagerness, it’s fairly entertaining to watch him in those venues, trying desperately to look comfortable and failing utterly to get past the “who the hell is this guy” looks from other world leaders, who seem to mistake him permanently for someone’s aide who’s mistakenly wandered into the group photo ops.

And since he’s probably pretty much who and what he’s always been—Margaret Thatcher in a business suit and with smaller testicles—let’s hope no one, including the world leaders, gets used to him being in the group photos.

Let’s also hope that Canadians don’t ever get to find out what he’s really here to do to us.

Owning the Podium

I have to admit to a more-than-mild attack of Schadenfreude at the so-far spectacular  failure of Canada’s 5 year $120 million  “Own the Podium” program that was supposed to produce enough medals by Canadian athletes at the Vancouver Olympics to win the competition for overall medals. It just ain’t happening.

There was something distasteful about it from the beginning, and not just because it offered nothing at all to the fitness and health of Vancouver’s 23,000 homeless people. It’s more to do with the “Triumph of the Reich” motif it barely concealed, and the open ruthlessness of its organizers, as typified by the near-sequestering of training facilities during the run-up to competition, or the recently-revealed “Top Secret” sub-program that had our signature competitors training on ultra-high tech equipment not available to other countries. One of the devices, a high-speed treadmill parked at the Calgary Speed-skating Oval allowed our strapped-in speed skaters to improve their form with a series of mirrors and cameras. That one worked splendidly, I note.

It stopped short, as far as we know, of Stephen Harper personally distributing steroids and copies of Ayn Rand’s novels around the Canadian athletes’ compound, but you get the distinct impression that this sort of crap wasn’t that far beyond the realm of possibility. What we are seeing at the Vancouver Winter Olympics is the Stephen Harper vision of Canadian excellence, with fuzzy mascots designed in Los Angeles and manufactured by Chinese factory workers, and if the aftermath is a poor medal haul, vast cost-overruns and a herd of white elephants dotting the landscape of B.C.’s lower mainland, I’m okay with that as an object lesson.

I’d prefer to live in a country where we didn’t chronically blow smoke up our own asses, and where political leaders who get caught out doing the same are punished for wielding the smoke machines, however high-tech and gleaming. Let’s hope that’s where we’re headed. Screw the Olympic podium.

326 words, February 22, 2010

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.