I watched the Liberal Party’s national leadership convention with great interest, because the current Conservative government is rapidly losing the respect of the Canadian people, and the Liberals have a very good chance of winning the next election. The convention opened with Michael Ignatieff as the favourite, with a strong lead.
Ignatieff comes from an unusually prestigious background for a Canadian politician. His grandmother was Princess Natasha Mestchersky and his grandfather was Count Paul Ignatieff, a close advisor to Czar Nicholas II serving as his last Minister of Education. In 1918, Count Ignatieff was arrested and slated for execution but fled to Canada with his family after he was released by sympathetic guards. His father was a career diplomat who served as representative to NATO (1963–1966), Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations (1966–1969) and president of the United Nations Security Council.
Ignatieff offered impressive credentials beyond his background. He has authored sixteen fiction and non-fiction books, and won some acclaim as a journalist and film-maker. Apart from Canadian universities, he has held faculty positions at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard.
But I did not trust him. As the invasion of Iraq began, Ignatieff apparently thought it was a good idea, when anyone with common sense could see otherwise. That demonstrates something I’ve had to learn from experience: that a man can be very well educated, very intelligent, and very sophisticated, and still be a blithering idiot. In addition, he has spent half his life outside the country, has always moved in hi-falutin’ circles, and could not possibly understand or identify with the people of this country. I didn’t want this man as Prime Minister.
I was able to live quite comfortably with any of the other three leading candidates. Bob Rae had moved to the Liberals a few years ago from the New Democratic Party. During his term as Premier of Ontario, he was not a great success. That brief NDP administration managed to upset everyone. After a few months in office, chambers of commerce, unions, teachers, businessmen, suburbanites, farmers, were all equally angered by the party’s incompetence and incoherent policies. However, most people felt that Rae himself was an honest and reasonably competent man trapped in a party that was designed to be in eternal opposition and unfit to govern. In the Liberal party, he had won a degree of respect, and was seen as the only serious contender to Ignatieff.
Trailing way behind the two front-runners were Gerard Kennedy and Stéphane Dion.
Kennedy is a rising star. Born and educated in the West, he came to Toronto after university and built a reputation administering food banks. He entered Ontario provincial politics in a 1996 bi-election, and subsequently won two landslide victories in one of the provinces’ poorest and most problem-filled urban neighbourhoods. As Minister of Education in the current Ontario Liberal government, he did a very impressive job of cleaning up the fiscal and administrative mess the Conservatives had made of the school system. His political liabilities are evident: he is very young, has had a relatively short political career, and despite living in a bilingual family, he speaks French with an embarassingly bad accent. This is not an absolutely crucial point in Canadian politics, but in the rundown of second and third ballots, it can play a role.
The same problem faced Stéphane Dion, who speaks English clumsily. Though from a much more modest social background in Quebec City, he is as much a scholar as Ignatieff, and has published numerous books on public administration, organizational theory and analysis. His trenchant criticism of common economic misconceptions in Quebec has at times angered both Sovereigntists and Federalists, and he has almost no public support in that province. Ignatieff is the favourite there. Also, Dion’s preoccupation with ecological issues and long-term economic choices are not the sort of thing that usually sounds “electable” to party delegates.
However, the convention unfolded in a series of surprises. As the balloting progressed, Kennedy pulled out and threw his support to Dion, then Rae pulled out and asked his delegates to “vote their conscience”. Ignatieff’s strong lead eroded, as second thoughts, especially about his suspicious sucking up to American foreign policy, started to surface. At the end of the day, Dion emerged as a genuine “dark horse” winner, one of the most rapid and dramatic upsets at a leadership convention.
Now the question for most people is what kind of a man he is. He has a good reputation as an administrator, but, outside of his prominent role during the sovereignty referendum debates, he has never been a political celebrity or a camera-hound. I’ve been in the dark about this as anyone else. I have known him largely as an abstraction attached to particular policies, and seldom heard him interviewed or speaking. Tonight, CBC gave us an in-depth interview in which he was asked to respond, unprepared, to questions submitted by citizens across the country.
Dion acquitted himself extremely well. He came across as a person who thinks seriously about things, tries to find logical solutions to problems, and unconcerned with projecting an image. His English is perfectly fine, he just has a more prominent accent than is usual in senior Canadian politicians, and he obviously doesn’t feel comfortable with the language. My guess is that he is accustomed to thinking clearly and precisely in French, and is irritated by his inability to duplicate the process in English, which leads to hesitations and awkward phrasing. When a politician is mouthing formula phrases and trying to obfuscate issues, he usually doesn’t feel this awkwardness at all. It only comes up when you are trying to speak accurately and truthfully. Oddly enough, I suspect that most of the public will clue into this, and realize that they will be able to tell immediately if he is lying or covering something up. His answers in the interview gave evidence that he is fairly honest, as politicians go. When he didn’t know the answer something or hadn’t made up his mind on a policy, he simply said so, without any apparent embarrassment. When issues were complex, he broke down his answers with classical Aristotelian techiques, laying out the parts and groups, defining his terms, comparing possible solutions, arriving at a conclusion where it was possible. But this was not done in a cold, clinical way. He came across more as someone who delights in solving complex puzzles and wags his tail when he does so. I was very impressed. Could it be that we have actually gotten lucky?
I have heard nothing, so far, that suggests any degree of personal corruption or dishonourable behaviour. He looks competent, has a good record, and most of what he said seemed pretty sensible. He was very thorough in his analysis of what the Conservatives have screwed up in their current administration, and could pinpoint the lapses in logic that have precipitated those screwups.
Another piece of political news. After threatening to force a “re-opening” of the gay marriage issue, and demanding a free vote on the question, the Harper’s Conservatives got exactly what they deserved. When the final vote was counted, even more MPs had voted to protect gay marriage rights than had the first time around. This included some prominent Conservatives. Harper’s “core” moron constituency has been firmly, thumpingly told to go to hell. That was the Canadian people speaking. Canadians are not stupid, on the whole, and they are not going to let any party, whatever other policies it might offer, play up to the small, noisy minority of ignorant nitwits.
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