Crucially, none of these places are Ottawa. There are no Conservative talking points to refute, there is no self-possessed press gallery to please, no government legislation to twist oneself in knots over, no fascination of the day to chase or be chased by. And if he seems happier here, it’s because, he says, this is the part of the job he took to first. “You’d be missing the point if this was some ‘new me,’ ” he says. “Nothing’s being invented here. If it was a constant exercise in elaborate pretense, that would be exhausting. But it’s not. I’m having fun.”
This is an exercise in many things. The bus is a simple gimmick for the media to follow. The tour, with Liberal MPs in tow, is a team-building exercise (and it has sufficiently roused the Liberal caucus that something like optimism is being reported). The leader is said to be finding his voice. Riding associations are being rallied, local candidates are being promoted, the staff is being tested in preparation for a campaign. And he, contrary to the conquering hero he was first hailed as and the scheming villain he has since been made out to be, is demonstrating himself to be human. “I was laughing yesterday because people are saying, ‘You look better than you look on TV,’ ” he says.
At most stops, after he has waded through the crowd for a while, he will be called to the microphone to speak. Though the gist of each speech is the same, he speaks without a script, sometimes rambling, but often turning fiery. He will mostly spend his 20 or so minutes on stage contrasting himself with the other guy—Stephen Harper as the calculating, divisive, cynic who doesn’t believe in government, Michael Ignatieff as the big-thinking, doing-politics-differently leader of a future government that cares. He will explore all examples of strife and discord, from Richard Colvin to prorogation to the G20 summit to the census. Stephen Harper, he will note, wants to cut corporate taxes and spend billions on fighter jets and prisons, while the Liberal leader wants early learning for pre-schoolers and home care for the elderly. That is the pitch. And the medium, too, is the message: while Harper has been mostly unseen this summer, here is Ignatieff, in jeans and a checked shirt, not even a lectern between him and the people. “I think it’s going particularly well, because Harper has been such a great foil this summer,” says a senior Liberal.
“I’m having fun and they’re making mistakes,” Ignatieff says. He pauses, then corrects himself. “They’re not making mistakes,” he says. “It’s more complicated than that. They are revealing who they are. And that’s, frankly, a gift. We’re going to get to a clearer and fairer choice. That’s what I feel good about.
It’s getting clearer.” Indeed, if the heavy atmosphere of Parliament Hill often seems to shrink differences, on the stump, in this summer of the census, there seems increasingly to be a very real difference between how the two view the role and place of the state—a difference of the sort that could foretell a profoundly philosophical election.
But the summer is not endless and Ottawa is unavoidable. How to carry what’s happening here to what goes on there is, that senior Liberal says, a good question. A draft of the Liberal platform should be done before the fall and there may be policy announcements to follow. Ignatieff hopes he can return to the road as much as possible. Asked to explain the difference between the man he is here and the man he is on Parliament Hill, he laughs. “Well, I better figure that out,” he says. “I think I’ll go back to Ottawa and I just think it’s simple: lighten up. I’ll go back to Ottawa with a smile on my face.”
Pages: 1 2
