Yet, influenced by the later work of his mentor and biographic subject, Isaiah Berlin, he is willing to concede powers and legitimacy to those same forces of division, in the name of that most exalted of postmodern ideals, recognition. He praises as a defining Canadian value the collective’s power (he says “right”) to suppress individual rights in matters of language. His 2006 platform proposed not merely to “recognize” the Québécois nation, as in the Conservative resolution the House of Commons eventually endorsed. It was to entrench Quebec’s status as such in the Constitution, along with that of hundreds of Aboriginal nations, with whatever legal and political repercussions this entailed. He is less Pierre Trudeau than Charles Taylor.
Indeed, for someone who has written so thoughtfully about the excesses of nationalism abroad, he seems to have absorbed a peculiarly vulgar form of its Canadian expression. While he disavows the National Energy Program and other artifacts of 1980s economic nationalism, his nation-building proposals are a retreat even further into the past, to the railway nationalism of Sir John A. He repeats all the most dreadful national clichés: that we are the meeting of “two peoples” (utterly anachronistic: nobody at Confederation thought that way); that our constitutional motto is “Peace, Order and Good Government” (it is standard legal boilerplate; if there is a defining passage, it is rather to be found in the preamble: “a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom”); that what makes Canada distinct from the United States is its devotion to a laundry list of Liberal policies (thus reading out of the discussion the millions of Canadians who disagree with every one); and that the only way we can justify Canada’s existence is by way of such invidious comparisons.
On defence and foreign policy, the record is more encouraging. Iraq notwithstanding, he remains a humanitarian interventionist, a liberal hawk. He favours a robust Canadian military capacity, and has no use for anti-Americanism (the new U.S. empire’s “grace notes,” he wrote in 2003, are “free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known”). He was an ardent supporter of the Afghanistan mission, voting with the Conservatives to extend it in 2006, yet also embraces the withdrawal of Canadian troops after 2011. At the 2005 convention he appeared to endorse Canadian participation in the American ballistic missile defence program; later he backed away. He has been properly scornful of fetishizing the United Nations as the fount of all legitimacy, calling it “a messy, wasteful, log-rolling organization.”
Social policy, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. He is careful to bow before the latter-day Liberal deities of universal publicly funded daycare and the Kelowna accord—though whether he will specifically commit to either, with the hefty price tags attached to each, remains to be seen. He is sound on the perverse incentives of the welfare trap, less so on Employment Insurance—his proposed 360-hour standard of eligibility is a costly precedent that will prove hard to undo. He is entirely unsound on the lunatic nonsense known as “equal pay for work of equal value.”
Where he is most interesting, and seems most committed, is on the subject of education—not surprisingly, given his background. Half of his acceptance speech was given over to it. His 2006 platform included a useful proposal for converting a part of federal funding for education to a per-student, rather than per-capita, grant—“to reward those provinces’ institutions that attract the best and the brightest from across the country.” The pending platform is said to be heavily focused on the “knowledge” issues—education, training and research. He seems inclined to be quite radical here: at the 2005 convention, he brashly urged the party not to get “tangled up in federal-provincial battles over jurisdiction. Let’s just do it.”
So there you are: taken together, these provide some clues to the shape of Ignatieff’s thinking. But they do not tell us what his priorities would be, or how these broad inclinations would translate into specific policies. They suggest the general direction he would take. But they do not add up to a program of government. For that we will have to wait at least a month.
