Michael Ignatieff’s reputation for arrogance, tailored for him with care by his Conservative opponents, never survives three minutes in his actual company. The Liberal leader is genial and accommodating to a fault, if those can be faults, and there are days in his endless battle with Stephen Harper when they probably can.
Ignatieff welcomed a visitor to Stornoway shortly before Christmas with coffee, small talk and a chuckle at the first question: does he have any New Year’s resolutions? “Keep smiling,” he replied. “Work harder.”
He will have to do much of the latter in 2010, after 2009 strained his ability to do the former. He jettisoned much of his senior staff in October and many of his assumptions soon after. He has failed to close the polling gap he inherited from Stéphane Dion. Now he will try again to be relevant. His aim is to be the guy who thinks about the future while the Prime Minister thinks only about tactics.
“I think that Canadians went through a very turbulent year. We’re still living in the after-tremors of September 2008”—the market crash that led to the recession of 2009. “Canadians were told in the first quarter of 2009: ‘The world, as you know it, is coming to an end.’ ” And to some extent, it really did: “The recovery, in lots of parts of the country, wasn’t one at all. This wasn’t a recession, it’s a restructuring.”
The effects of that restructuring are, Ignatieff maintains, the challenges of the new decade. “The markets of growth are India and China and we’re not well prepared.” Harper inherited a healthy economy from Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, but has set about dismantling it. “This government walked away from the remains of Nortel,” Ignatieff said. “It’s selling AECL,” the state atomic-energy agency. He listed a range of challenges related to the demographics of an aging population, the stability of pension plans first among them. “We’re in a new world. And the political question is, who’s going to prepare Canada for that world?”
This is the line Ignatieff has worked out since his new chief of staff, the cherubic Chrétien-era fixer Peter Donolo, joined him on Oct. 27. Donolo replaced Ian Davey, who once helped persuade Ignatieff to leave Harvard for politics in Canada. Soon after, a selection of other senior staffers received pink slips or demotions. Donolo’s crew were on the job in Ottawa in the 1990s, an era when the Iggyites they replace were proclaiming their disdain for politics in a succession of Toronto watering holes or, in some cases, still in high school. “What they bring to the table,” the Liberal leader says of his new helpers, “is they’ve been there.”
What he brings to the table, they say privately, is much the same quality, if only Canadians can be made to see it. “Isn’t it great that we have a leader who knows a bit about the world?” one said. Ignatieff probably can’t be sold as a Chrétien-style “happy warrior,” this person admitted, but he might work as a “cool cucumber,” unmoved by the daily fray, able to see far and plan well.
“People say, ‘You’re being too abstract, you’re being too academic,’ ” Ignatieff said. “But I tell you, when I talk to Canadians, that is what they talk about. ‘Where are we going here? I’ve got a job today, but will I have a job tomorrow?’ ”
Harper, by contrast, “is a funny guy. It’s all tactics, all the time. He governs crab-like, this way, that way.” The Liberal “thinkers conference,” which Ignatieff had promised for the autumn, then for January and will now be held in Montreal in late March, is part of this process. “We need to be seen, and in reality to be, addressing these big issues.”
But all of these conversations took place before Christmas. Even then, both Ignatieff and his new cohorts understood they will not have the luxury of acting in a vacuum in 2010, any more than they did in 2009. Ignatieff spent last year doing a lot of things that seemed bold at the time and wound up biting him on the nose. He put the government “on probation” and gave Harper a licence to brag extravagantly about his “economic action plan.” He forced Harper to spend the summer negotiating changes to Employment Insurance and then faced a choice about what to do when the talks came to naught. He decided to force an election in September and found he couldn’t. He lost support anyway, merely for trying.
Pages: 1 2
