Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (34 page)

Now that he’s leader, he has restored morale. He generates interest. People, non-politicians, find him interesting. No, he’s not our Barack Obama or Pierre Trudeau redux, but he looks good opposite Stephen Harper and he clearly outshines both Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe. Check out the Liberal front bench these days. They’re smiling again, and it isn’t the forced rictus of the past two years.

There’s already talk that Mr. Ignatieff is visiting Quebec early, hoping to pick up where Mr. Harper clearly struck out in the last election. And where many say Mr. Harper has further damaged himself by the vigour of his attack on the participation of the Bloc Québécois in the horror the country came to know as the coalition. Wooing
Quebec under these circumstances is no less smart for being the obvious thing to do. Mr. Ignatieff will do fine there. A high brow and a patrician manner, a little flavour of the cosmopolitan, is not an unfamiliar combination to Quebecers.

All this, I’m sure, cheers the Liberal Party. But the best news for the Liberals comes in what some may have seen as throwaway lines at his early press conference as leader. Mr. Ignatieff—no Horace Greeley fan, I’m sure—spoke of going west.

The Liberal Party has long treated western Canada as some kind of political Ultima Thule, or, if I may maul a familiar phrase from
Hamlet
, an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no Liberal MP returns.” The smartest thing Mr. Ignatieff did at that first press conference was to pay tribute to the West as the “beating economic heart of our country’s future.”

Westerners have become all too familiar with eastern politicians ignoring them or treating them as afterthoughts, or less. There has been a mighty strain of condescension built into this country’s politics toward the West, and it has infected the Liberal Party in particular.

There’s no need to bring up yet again the great nightmare of the National Energy Program to illustrate this point. That policy burned the house of Liberalism in the West to the ground. Mr. Ignatieff is the first Liberal leader I’ve heard since the dread days of the NEP to make clear acknowledgment of the resentments and mischiefs it
inspired. These were the words he used: “I want us to reach out and hope that western Canadians forgive and forget, to be very blunt, some of the errors the party has made in the past.”

That’s smart. And, if he means it, wise as well. There was also considerable wisdom in holding himself somewhat at arm’s length from the coalition. Because, despite conventional wisdom, what ticked off the West about that jerry-rigged fabrication wasn’t so much the Bloc’s inclusion but that it nullified, by backroom deal, the West’s huge representation, by the ballot, in the Harper government. All those western MPs and cabinet ministers were suddenly going to be patrolling the corridors of opposition, just because Messrs. Layton, Duceppe and Dion had cooked up a deal to shunt them there. Many westerners saw themselves once again being dealt out of the power equations by eastern politicians.

So, Mr. Ignatieff is good news for the Liberals. And no more so than that his radar is tuned so early into turning the party’s fortunes around in the one region of the country that most of his recent predecessors barely acknowledged was on the political map.

Mr. Ignatieff will fish in Mr. Harper’s waters. There’s a turnaround. The season of miracles, indeed.

So much begins with the wonder and farce we came to know as the coalition: the pact, deal, improvisation between Messrs. Dion, Layton and Duceppe, that for a heady moment seemed destined to overturn the Harper minority, install Stéphane Dion as prime minister, and place Jack Layton with five other New Democrats in the federal cabinet. Gilles Duceppe and his Bloc were then, metaphorically, to ride shotgun on this tidy arrangement, by guaranteeing it would be impervious to confidence measures for a year and a half.

Merely saying that it didn’t fly is a serious understatement. But so wonderful a combination was not without its effects. If the coalition had not reared its various and confusing heads, Mr. Dion would still, in his manner, be leading the Liberal Party. Canadians were rightly staggered that a man who had, more or less, already been told by his own party that his days were numbered was, by this piece of artfulness, soon to be their prime minister.

The Liberals were forced to confront a fairly strong objection to this outcome. He had been found wanting, was on his way out in fact, but would do nonetheless as prime minister for a while. Logic of this kind is why the word perplexing was first invented.

Skipping all the glorious details, this is why, without a full convention, Michael Ignatieff is now Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. The fury that roiled public
opinion after the triple signing—Dion, Layton, Duceppe—forced the Liberal Party to confront its own leadership problems. Dominic LeBlanc dropped out first, Bob Rae conceded, and Michael Ignatieff slid ever so gracefully into its leadership.

The always snarky gods of irony turned the coalition from an instrument to unseat Stephen Harper as prime minister into an instrument to install Michael Ignatieff as Liberal leader. “Last to sign on, first to be king” should be the Ignatieff family motto.

The coalition gave cover to Mr. Harper to explode eighteen of his finest loyalists into the Senate. Eighteen senators in a single day. It enabled Mr. Harper, with minimum fuss, to go from ardent Senate reformer to a chartered member of the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” club. The coalition gave Mr. Harper his very own patronage Christmas.

That’s had its benefits. In the case of Mike Duffy, it put a merciful end to the longest audition in Canadian history. It ferried Mr. Duffy from an interviewer’s stool outside the Commons to a more accommodating perch on the stuffed velvet cushions of appointment paradise, the Red Chamber.

Early on, by the way, Mr. Duffy is showing signs of being Mr. Harper’s most inspired choice. His maiden speech (strange) had elements of pornographic fantasy. The scene called up was all about premiers Danny Williams and Robert Ghiz in bed together, with such flourishes as “when one is in bed with Danny Williams, he will come out on
top” and “where that will leave PEI in the end.” Is there a cover charge to listen to Senate debates now?
Mike Duffy Live
takes on a whole new meaning.

But however much Mr. Harper may be gratified to have Mr. Duffy as an apprentice standup comedian turning riffs on Danny Williams and Robert Ghiz sweating under the sheets, it can be as nothing to his satisfaction on hearing Senator Duffy’s ardent and blush-free tribute to him.

In a passage of exquisite piety, Mr. Duffy recalled that, in his days as a journalist, he “learned one cannot be a successful leader without sound political judgment and the courage to make tough decisions despite determined opposition.” This was followed by a sublime moment of sycophancy dressing itself up as candour: “I am here to tell honourable Senators today—this is where the hard part begins—Stephen Harper has both that judgment and that courage.”

So that was the hard part. Praising the prime minister who put him there. We have the coalition and its tormented aftermath to thank for that fresh page in Canadian political folklore.

The most immense transformation that grew out of the doomed coalition, however, was the complete conversion of Mr. Harper as a fiscal conservative. The budget just brought down is a great scattershot of huge spending, put together we may safely assume in the panic-laden days following the threat to Mr. Harper’s staying in power. It embraces deficit financing during a recession with a fever
that has Bob Rae chuckling in the op-ed pages. Chuckle he should and may.

Were Mr. Harper in opposition facing a Liberal government bringing down this budget, he would be on it like Savonarola rounding up heretics. This is a budget that would have made Jean Chrétien proud.

The coalition as a tactic was a massive failure. The coalition as an event has precipitated radical changes, pushed a dogmatic Conservative prime minister squarely into Liberal territory, and finessed the arrival of Michael Ignatieff into the leadership of the Liberal Party. And, of course, elevated Mr. Duffy.

John Greenleaf Whittier—it’s a great name for a poet. Love the Greenleaf. With that as a middle name, were he around today, it’s hard to think he wouldn’t be flogging his Muse in the great cause of global warming, penning odes to windmills or versicles for Al Gore. If he’s known at all any more, it’s for a mournful little couplet that earned almost proverbial status in years long gone by. I thought of it this week during the visit of His Obamaness:

The rueful maxim popped into mind during Barack Obama’s session with Stephen Harper. Were it not for the wisdom—as I see it—of Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s decision to give the prime minister the prorogation he so desperately needed during the coalition crisis, Mr. Harper might not have been standing there Thursday with the gloriously popular Mr. Obama. Instead, Canada would have been “turning its lonely eyes” toward Prime Minister Stéphane Dion and coalition partner Jack Layton doing the diplomatic equivalent of a fist bump on centre stage with the world’s most popular leader.

And Mr. Harper, glowering as only he knows how to glower, would have been ferrying himself as opposition leader out to Ottawa airport for a more rationed
tête-à-tête
at the tail end of the presidential visit.

But it was mainly Jack and Stéphane that summoned J. Greenleaf’s fortune-cookie melancholy. They could have been basking in the starlit moment, sharing the wave to the crowd, having the private lunch with the Western world’s newest hero. Alas, “it might have been.”

Aside from these purely fanciful speculations, I was taken by another, purely subsidiary, aspect of this week’s visit. This was the question, which got considerable grinding in the press, of how many minutes Michael Ignatieff was to receive for his “face time” (odious phrase) with Mr. Obama.

Depending on the day or the press release, it was to be thirty minutes, or fifteen minutes, then back up to twenty minutes; at one (surely ominous) point, it was only ten minutes.

The Ignatieff camp was plainly determined to have its due, reaching back to Mr. Harper’s time as opposition leader during the 2004 visit of George Bush. That, said Mr. Ignatieff, was a “good and extended meeting.” He continued, and the tone was almost Churchillian: “I will expect no less, and I’m sure I will receive no less.” There’s a lot of Harvard in that sentence.

In any event, it all turned out sweetly for him. He not only got as much of the clock as could be hoped for—a full 30 minutes—but was able to include Bob Rae in the picnic. Outside of the extempore visit by Mr. Obama to the beaver tail hut in the ByWard Market (that’s one shop that will survive the recession), I consider the resolution of the face-time-minutes crisis the human-interest highlight of the trip.

Mr. Ignatieff’s real coup in the last little while, however, is far beyond the hyped and specious drama of how much time he was going to get with the new president. The Liberal leader has been making speeches in the western provinces that, in their tone and substance, signal he does not intend to simply accept what has been one of the iron laws of Canadian politics for a generation or more: that the Liberal Party hasn’t a hope in hell of winning any real support out West.

Mr. Ignatieff has been speaking up for Alberta as the economic dynamo of the country, he has moderate words for the oil sands and he talks about the Liberal Party’s past sneakiness (that’s my paraphrase) of “running against the
West”—all in all, he gives every evidence of trying to put the Liberals into serious play in the deepest Harper territory.

This is a good thing, a very good thing. No parts, regions or provinces should be “owned” by any one party. The result is complacency and stagnation. Mr. Ignatieff is right to reject the lazy cliché that “the West” will never go Liberal.

His timing is opportune as well. Mr. Harper injured himself in the coalition crisis, and hasn’t helped himself greatly since with the budget, in the minds of very ardent Conservatives. Mr. Ignatieff’s pitch to a presumed monolith of Conservative support—and give him his due, the clarity of that pitch—comes at a near perfect moment.

A few more visits, a few more speeches and perhaps by the time Canadians face another election, Mr. Ignatieff may have removed some of the tired and regressive predictability from how Canadians vote. By that time, who got to wave with Barack Obama or how long they chatted will be one with the memory of John Greenleaf Whittier’s other verses.

There were others.

Thank you to:

Tim Rostron, editor at Doubleday Canada, for his diligence, cheer, patience and intelligence, who has been the shepherd of this enterprise, and who summons this slightly antique tribute to mind:
A Man of Taste, to great applause, he read the daily news/ And kept a close acquaintance with the Muse
.