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?
Seldom has any political candidate entered public life with so much of his philosophy already on the record: with 15 books and countless newspaper and magazine articles to his name, Ignatieff’s life is one long paper trail. Yet four years after his return to Canada and five months after becoming the de facto Liberal leader, he remains an enigma, aided in no small part by his penchant for disowning previously held positions when they prove controversial.
His support for the invasion of Iraq? That was in his former life as a cloistered academic. As a practising politician, he would later write in the New York Times, he can no longer afford “the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting.”
His enthusiastic embrace, during his 2006 campaign for party leader, of the carbon tax? In the wake of the party’s crushing defeat at the polls last October, that, too, is no longer operative: “You’ve got to work with the grain of Canadians, and not against them.”
Or take the set of apparently serious proposals for “nation-building” advanced in his latest work, True Patriot Love: for a high-speed rail line from Quebec City to Windsor; for widening the Trans-Canada Highway to four lanes, coast-to-coast; for a “national energy strategy” aimed at diverting the flow of oil and hydroelectricity from north-south to east-west.
Oh, that. Well, he wasn’t necessarily advocating any of these, you understand. They were just ideas. “It’s not a political manifesto,” he told a CBC interviewer. “It’s not the platform of the Liberal party.”
So it is with much of Ignatieff’s oeuvre. They are views. But they are not positions. As a writer, and as an expatriate, living abroad for most of his adult life, he has not had to dig in behind a policy (Iraq is perhaps the exception), to defend it in the searing heat of a political campaign, repeating it over and over again until it stamps itself on the public mind as a part of who he is. Even the 2006 leadership campaign was largely an intra-party affair, while his later, successful bid for the leadership was carried out entirely behind closed doors. That is why, notwithstanding his abundant writings, he remains a blank slate for most Canadians.
That may be about to change—at his press conference following last weekend’s convention, Ignatieff said the party would have a detailed, costed platform ready by next month. But there is little to suggest it will signal any brave departures—from received wisdom, from Liberal orthodoxy, from the status quo, or, in many respects, from the Conservatives.
