Michael Ignatieff drags around the longest paper trail of any Canadian politician. As an author, professor, high-brow journalist and broadcaster, he wrote a stack of books, countless lectures, and many articles, not to mention documentary scripts, usually about human rights, foreign affairs, and security. But not much about the economy. And as federal Liberal leader—the job he landed sooner than expected at the end of the recent parliamentary crisis—economic policy is his first priority. He’s not in a mood, though, to fill in all the blanks when asked exactly what ideas he wants Prime Minister Stephen Harper to adopt in next month’s recession-battling budget. “I want to be constructive,” Ignatieff told Maclean’s, “but I don’t see any particular reason why I should be especially helpful.”
Constructive yet not too helpful—it’s a pretty fine line. Ignatieff finds himself facing, from the very start, the dilemma that eventually confronts all Opposition leaders. On the one hand, the job is by definition to oppose. On the other, public approval tends to attach to politicians who project a positive vision. The trick is to present compelling ideas, but somehow not give them away to the governing party. So in the consultations leading up to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Jan. 27 budget, Ignatieff’s challenge will be to display enough economic competence to build credibility for his Liberals as a government-in-waiting, without letting the government-in-fact simply snap up the best parts, and then boast it has built a multi-partisan consensus.
Ignatieff revealed just enough in an interview to leave no doubt he’s adopting the stance of a classic, centre-straddling Liberal. He argues that an economic stimulus package should put money in the pockets of the low-income Canadians who are bound to spend it. “There are all kinds of ways that we could pump money into this economy that, unless targeted, will just go to people who have disposable income anyway,” he said. “The trick is to get stimulus to the people who’ve got little disposable income, so they can keep their families afloat, and, in doing so, keep the economy afloat.”
Casting the stimulus package as a chance to redistribute wealth puts Ignatieff squarely in the camp of social-justice Liberals. But he placed just as much emphasis on using stimulative spending to reward companies for boosting productivity during the downturn. “We have to think about how we seize opportunity here,” he added, “to become more energy-efficient, to produce cars that people actually want to buy, to commercialize R & D, to invest in infrastructure that is badly needed, to address the productivity challenge that we’ve talked about for 10 years.”
Ignatieff said he “would not be drawn out” on specifics. But in separate interviews, his finance critic, Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, and a key economic adviser, Ontario MP John McCallum, both touched on the same cluster of ideas. They stressed infrastructure spending and benefits targeted at those hardest hit by the downturn, with Brison suggesting the employment insurance system should be used to flow more money to the jobless, especially in Ontario. Neither mentioned any tax cuts beyond those already planned.
Ignatieff’s two-pronged prescription—stimulus based equally on compassion and competitiveness—might sound suspiciously like a politician trying to be all things to all people. But his interest in blending ideas about creating and spreading wealth go back to his early days as an academic. In 1983, when he was a research fellow at Cambridge University, Ignatieff collaborated with economic historian Istvan Hont on a paper about the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, and icon of economic conservatism Adam Smith. They read Smith’s Wealth of Nations as more than the foundational work on how competition creates prosperity. “Our argument,” Ignatieff and Hont wrote in the introduction to an essay collection entitled Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, “is that the Wealth of Nations was centrally concerned with the issue of justice, with finding a market mechanism capable of reconciling inequality of property with adequate provision for the excluded.”
Ignatieff studied Smith at about the same time Harper was taking economics at the University of Calgary. Whether in England or Alberta, the academic atmosphere of the early 1980s was charged with the conservative doctrines of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. For Harper, that climate was formative, pushing him permanently to the right. Ignatieff remained a Liberal, but the era’s lessons weren’t lost on him. “If you’ve studied and written about Adam Smith, you’re a believer in markets,” he said. “But Smith always believed that markets had to be regulated. So I’m a market guy, and I think we’ve all discovered that light-handed, smart regulation by government is needed to keep markets safe, honest, fair and transparent—that’s the lesson of the past six months.”
He is also keeping up on the way his elite U.S. network sees the global slump. When Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, from 2000 to 2005, the university’s president was economist Lawrence Summers, who was recently named director of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Ignatieff mentioned Summers when he talked about how his Harvard stint sharpened his thinking on the economy. “If Larry Summers is at the lunch table,” he remarked, “you tend to learn things.” He also made a point of looking up a recent quote from Summers and reading it aloud: “All financial crises end, and when they end, they end in ways that create spectacular opportunity.”
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