Not that he has been unwilling to stake out controversial ground in the past. He showed an early readiness to break with liberal consensus over the miner’s strike in Britain, a heresy every bit as bold as his later defence of the Iraq war. His advocacy of the carbon tax was nervy—denounced as reckless folly at the time by, among others, Stéphane Dion—as was his endorsement, in the same campaign, of recognizing Quebec as a “nation.” Indeed, in this latter regard he went further than any federal leader has been willing to go, before or since. (I do not say this as praise.)
But a review of his other policy pronouncements does not reveal much in this vein. For the most part, they are unremarkable: pragmatic, cautious, occasionally contradictory. In other words, squarely in the mainstream of modern liberalism—or conservatism, for that matter.
He plainly has some familiarity with economics; as a young scholar at Cambridge, his work focused on the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment—Smith, Hume and all that. Yet his grasp of the subject seems loose, a bit pop, and bound up in the Practical Man’s instinctive suspicion of anything he regards as “ideology.” Which is to say, coherence.
Thus he is for balanced budgets in general, but deficits in the present. He is for free trade, but also for “fair” trade. He does not explicitly call for a tax hike, but neither has he ruled one out. If it is unlikely that he would subject the country to crazed dirigiste experiments in industrial strategy (“government cannot predict where the economic opportunities of the future will emerge”), it is equally hard to imagine him pulling government out of any sectors it is now in.
He seems especially prone to the value-added fallacy, the notion that secondary processing is innately preferable to mere resource extraction. His 2006 platform, for example, vowed “to increase the amount of food processing in Canada,” as part of a “national food policy” that also pledged “to increase the market share of Canadian food consumption provided by Canadian producers.” He is equally vexed, in his latest work, that “so much of the oil and gas we produce flows south without even being processed.” Emphasis added, perhaps.
Energy policy is a particular source of confusion. He promises to “end our costly dependence on fossil fuels,” yet defends Alberta oil sands development as “an integral part of the future of Canada.” He will not impose a carbon tax, yet must know that without it, or something very like it, we have no hope of meeting our targets for greenhouse gas reductions.
But then, economics is not really his thing. As he said in his first speech to a Liberal convention, back in 2005, the Liberal party has three essential preoccupations: national unity, national sovereignty, and social justice. “Everything else,” he said, “is detail.”
Very well. Let’s deal with those in order. Ignatieff often speaks of Pierre Trudeau as his inspiration. His rhetoric is similarly packed with allusions to One Canada, bound by a “spine of citizenship,” united in the equal enjoyment of common liberties. He is an advocate of federal power, pointing out that we are already the world’s most decentralized federation. He has written at length in defence of “civic nationalism” against the divisiveness, even barbarism, of ethnic nationalism.
