"I had this dream"

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 7 Comments

Michael Ignatieff goes back to teaching:

No country for good men

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 381 Comments

Perhaps the cliché has it right and all political careers end in failure. But few end as abruptly, and with as much a feeling of missed opportunity, as that of Michael Ignatieff. Continue…

(Still) Searching for a new Liberalism

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 5:39 PM - 82 Comments

A few days ago, I asked my twitter followers if anyone could say what the Liberal party’s campaign slogan is. It drew a handful of jokeysnarky responses, but no one actually managed to produce an answer as to what the slogan actually is.

It was a trick question, anyway, because the Liberal party doesn’t have a campaign slogan. Continue…

Paul Wells on who's losing out in the polls

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 16 Comments

Paul Wells on the Liberals' platform

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 4:05 PM - 0 Comments

Coyne v. Wells on why we still have to talk about a coalition

By Claire Ward - Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 11 Comments

Shot and edited by Tom Henheffer
Produced by Claire Ward

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Video from Ignatieff's campaign

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 4 Comments

When I wasn’t tweeting, blogging, preparing my article for the next issue or arming for battle with Colleague Coyne, I shot some video on Monday and Tuesday from the Ignatieff tour. Here are some highlights. I’ll try to bring you more video as the campaign progresses.

Iggy's (continuing) problem, Harper's opportunity

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 11:33 AM - 113 Comments

As others have pointed out, and as I’ve said myself, Ignatieff’s formal disavowal of any post-election coalition with the NDP and the Bloc does not mean he has sworn off trying to form a government with their support.

Indeed, if Harper does not win a majority, that is the almost certain result: though it’s always possible Harper might try to strike a deal with them himself, and not impossible they would accept, the greater probability by far is that a Conservative minority government would soon be defeated in the House. Depending on the numbers, and assuming Ignatieff could give the Governor General some assurance, sans coalition, of its stability, a Liberal minority government would then follow.

That’s fine. It’s how the system works. But it still presents Ignatieff with a problem, and Harper with an opportunity. The problem for Iggy is similar, though less acute, to that which bedeviled him so long as coalition talk was in the air. His strategy for winning left-leaning voters, who might otherwise vote NDP, depends upon insisting that they must vote Liberal to keep the Tories out — that unless the Liberals win the most seats, they are doomed to be governed by the Conservatives. But if in fact the Conservatives can be removed from power without giving the Liberals more seats — if the other parties can combine to defeat them in the House and put the Liberals in government in their place — then the NDP-leaning voter can vote Dipper in good conscience, and the traditional Liberal fear campaign loses its potency.

To be sure, Ignatieff can plead with voters to give him enough seats to persuade the Governor General to call upon him: without the cement of a coalition deal, he’ll need some other means of proving his ability to provide stable government. But it doesn’t have quite the same dire appeal as Us or Them.

That’s why Iggy is so reluctant to talk about what would happen if the Liberals don’t win the most seats. (Even the no-coalition pledge neglects to mention it, an elision which at first appeared as if it might have been intended to provide an escape hatch, but which I am accepting the party’s word does not.) And that’s why it’s perfectly fair game for Harper to talk it up. He just has to be less hysterical about it.

It’s not a matter of such parliamentary transfers of power, by a vote of the House rather than a vote of the people, being “illegitimate” — an argument he is in no position to maintain. And he’ll have a hard time keeping up the argument that Ignatieff is simply lying through his teeth for five weeks. The point is, he doesn’t need to. All he needs to do is point out that the most probable alternative to a Conservative majority is not a Liberal majority, but a Liberal minority, in cahoots with the NDP and the Bloc. It needn’t be a coalition, with New Democrats in cabinet and all that, but it would still very likely involve some sort of deal that would pull the Liberals to the left — particularly if the Liberals do not possess even the plurality of seats in the House, and must pitch the Governor General on their ability to hold a government together. (Of course, if by some miracle the Liberals seemed headed for a majority, that argument would be moot. But then Ignatieff would face a different problem: NDP switchers defecting back to the left to force him to work with the Dips.)

That’s Harper’s appeal to centre-right voters: Us or All of Them. But it also has the virtue of reminding left-wing voters of their options. And if he doesn’t, you may be sure Layton and Duceppe will. Iggy may have put the coalition monkey to bed, but he still has a problem on his hands.

CODA: The problem facing Harper until now has been this: so long as the choice appeared to be between a Conservative majority and a Conservative minority, a certain number of centre-right voters preferred the latter. That’s one reason he’s been unable to get above 40% in the polls.

But the election presents an opportunity to recast that choice, since it presumably removes the option of a Conservative minority: such a government would almost certainly be defeated at the first opportunity. So now Harper can present the choice as one between a Conservative majority and — on present standings — a Liberal minority, heavily dependent on the NDP and the Bloc.

That sort of government might sound perfectly fine to a lot of voters, but not to the ones he needs: centre-right, Lib-Con switchers. The ones who until now have been opting for a Conservative minority. He’s got to impress upon them that that’s no longer an option.

Iggy's coalition problem

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, March 25, 2011 at 9:49 AM - 373 Comments

The day-after-the-budget press conference was going rather well for Michael Ignatieff, until the predictable, inevitable question arose: If the Tories failed to win a majority in the coming election, would he form a coalition with the other parties to unseat them and form a government? In other words, is the Tory accusation, repeated at every opportunity, true?

“There’s a blue door and a red door in this election,” he said. Voters can take the blue door (the Conservatives) or the red door (the Liberals), ie they can elect a Conservative government or a Liberal government.

With respect sir, the questioner shouted back, you haven’t answered my question.

Ignatieff began again. “There’s a blue door and a red door…” Continue…

Coyne v. Wells on the looming election

By Claire Ward - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 5:55 PM - 65 Comments

Shot and edited by Tom Henheffer
Produced by Claire Ward

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Aaron Wherry on why we're heading to an election

By Claire Ward - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 5 Comments

Shot and edited by Claire Ward

Coyne v. Wells on the budget

By Claire Ward - Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 10 Comments

Shot and edited by Tom Henheffer
Produced by Claire Ward

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Coyne v. Wells on the unlikely possibility of an election

By Claire Ward - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 3:12 PM - 23 Comments

Shot and edited by Kerrin McNamara
Produced by Claire Ward

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The Networked Headwaiter

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 1:54 PM - 35 Comments

One of the least-encouraging things to come out of the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference is Michael Ignatieff’s assertion that what is needed is some sort of “new” form of federal leadership. Instead of the old “command and control” model, the federal government should work towards a form of “networked governance”. Or as he wrote in a piece for the Sun, federal leadership should be about “convening”; “Ottawa needs to bring the country together in common purpose, and build networks of responsibilities that are focused on outcomes.”

Ugh.

In his piece on the conference, colleague Geddes poked some fun at this, and suggested that the idea was pretty vacuous. I disagree. The problem with this idea is not that it’s vacuous, it’s that it is all-too-well defined. Call it “convening”, call it “networked leadership”, it was never given a more accurate description than when Pierre Trudeau mocked Joe Clark for acting like a headwaiter to the provinces.

Trudeau meant it as an insult, but Paul Martin turned it into his job description. Remember that awesome meeting he convened when they fixed health care for a generation? Or if that was too long ago, check out how much headway Harper’s network leadership is making in getting us a national securities regulator.

The provinces have their little talking shop, it’s the grandly named and more grandly useless Council of the Federation. The only reason to have a federal government is to have a body that can get things done in the face of objections from provinces and other purported stakeholders. Command and control isn’t a perversion of the federal government’s role, it is its bloody mandate.

LRC Watch

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 11:16 AM - 24 Comments

The Literary Review of Canada has apparently just obtained charitable status, which is great news for the publication.

My most recent charitable work is now available online; it’s a set-up piece of sorts for the Liberal big thinkers conference coming up at the end of March. The piece expands on some stuff I’ve written here and in the Ottawa Citizen about the Liberal party’s struggle to find a new identity. I suggest that what the party needs is not so much one or two Big Ideas, but a better brand in which to fit a number of sound policy ideas into a coherent narrative.

The Walrus: Politics 101 and Culture 2.0

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 9:16 AM - 29 Comments

I picked up my first copy of the Walrus in ages yesterday, keen to read Ron Graham’ cover story on why Michael Ignatieff hasn’t “knocked our socks off.” Huge disappointment. The piece is positioned as a view-from-30 000-feet look at the broad sweep of the Liberal party from Pearson through to the present, trying to use that as a larger frame to show why Michael Ignatieff was probably doomed to fail in his ambition to be the new Pierre Trudeau.

Don’t bother. It’s an annoyingly written piece that repeats the long-familiar story of the three Toronto boys who drove down to Harvard and sold Ignatieff a bill of goods,  and presents nothing in the way of original analysis. It’s the sort of article that, after asserting that  Bay Street powerbrokers tend to identify their own interests with those of the nation, feels obliged to punctuate the point  by saying, ”As Madame du Deffand is said to have remarked when told of the political philosopher Helvetius’s theory that every action, including generosity and kindness, is based on self-interest, ‘Helvetius has revealed everybody’s secret.’” It’s like John Ralston Saul was stealing in during the night and rewriting Graham’s copy.

Graham also claims that Ignatieff’s memoir/campaign pamphlet True Patriot Love was cut a lot of slack by “most commentators” because “they were his friends, had the same agent, loved the idea of one of their own in power, hated Stephen Harper, or never bothered to read it.” Maybe it’s because I love Stephen Harper, but my recollection is that the book was panned by “most commentators” as an intellectual embarrassment.

So why pick up the new Walrus? For Adam Sternbergh’s  piece about the return of the Kids in the Hall, which doubles as an elegy for the Toronto scene of the mid-1990s, and triples as  a smart comment on how the wonders of Web 2.0 have rendered old cultural forms obsolete.

I’m a sucker for Adam’s writing. I loved The Kids in the Hall, hung out on the edges of the crowd Adam is writing about for a few years (and even saw his sketch troupe, Joke Boy, a couple of times at the Rivoli), and am increasingly interested in the way the elimination of friction points in the transmission of information changes the incentive structure of cultural production.

On this last point: The most interesting thing I’ve read on this is still Lawrence Lessig’s decade-old book Code, which argues that many of the everyday freedoms we take for granted in a liberal society are not due to legal or constitutional protections, but simply because they’re too difficult to enforce. I’ve argued, here and elsewhere, that cool ceased to be a credible political stance when MTV made it impossible for subcultures to hide and flourish for any length of time.

Sternbergh argues that sketch comedy (which he calls “that most Canadian of comic forms”) was killed off by YouTube. Where once you had groups coming together in rec rooms and hashing out sketches, then gathering in teams at clubs and theatres across the city to try to out-funny one another, that energy is now “dispersed online in a thousand digital shorts.”

It’s a smart argument, one I find highly persuasive. Can you think of similar examples — aside from newspapers — of cultural formats that seemed natural but which have been fundamentally altered or made obsolete by the apps and tools and gizmos and tempos of Culture 2.0?

Michael's Gambit

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 7, 2009 at 12:14 AM - 31 Comments

So Michael Ignatieff woke up to a nasty Sunday morning surprise — our their Kady has the most fun with the story, of course. I also agree with Susan Delacourt — while there is a question of journalistic ethics here, but the Liberals should not make that the focus of their response. I’m also not super interested in the question of who is behind this, since he (or, less likely, she) is merely the agent of a substantial constituency within the party.

The weakness of the support for Michael Ignatieff is a consequence of a number of factors, not all of which are directly related to Ignatieff’s own weaknesses. The Liberals are paying the price — AGAIN — of not having had a proper leadership campaign. It’s like they say about civil wars: they have to be fought until once side is either decimated or capitulates out of exhaustion. Negotiated settlements just leave the antagonistic power structures intact.

Ignatieff didn’t win the leadership, he was installed. So maybe the time has come for him to force the issue: Tell the party to  back him or sack him. You have to think that either outcome would be preferable to the status quo.

Sweet revenge for Denis Coderre

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 88 Comments

They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and Denis Coderre has always been fond of generous portions. There was a weekend between Sept. 25, when Michael Ignatieff stopped taking Coderre’s advice on Liberal candidate nominations in two key Montreal ridings, and Sept. 28, when Coderre convened a news conference to resign as Ignatieff’s Quebec lieutenant. During that time, sources say, the Liberal leader telephoned his pugnacious deputy repeatedly. Coderre wouldn’t take the calls. He preferred to plan his revenge at leisure.

So on Monday, Coderre, a scrappy Liberal lifer whose Rolodex is as formidable as his self-regard, told a national television audience he could no longer run his leader’s Quebec operation or serve as his parliamentary defence critic because he had consistently been “short-circuited” by “the leader’s inner circle in Toronto.” Hours later, five other Liberal officials in Quebec with ties to Coderre quit their own positions. Le Devoir’s headline the next day said the party had been “decapitated” in Quebec. Continue…

Ruining Quebec from Toronto

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 9:19 AM - 21 Comments

The Globe and Mail’s package today on Ignatieff, Coderre, and the “Toronto Team” is great. The bios of Davey, Apps, Fairbrother, and Rossi are gems. How mean is this?:

Alf Apps, 52, Liberal party president

A Toronto lawyer and businessman, Alf Apps has had his hand in Liberal causes – and internal spats – since the days of John Turner. He helped to recruit Paul Martin into politics, and was an early champion of Michael Ignatieff, becoming national party president after Mr. Ignatieff assumed the leadership. Mr. Apps is considered partly responsible for the imbroglio over the riding of Outremont.

Dreamworldview

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 1:34 PM - 100 Comments

The Liberals’ new English language ad, filmed, it appears, in Narnia…

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3364268&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

Ignatieff and the Canadian establishment(s)

By John Geddes - Monday, August 31, 2009 at 6:50 PM - 29 Comments

This week’s issue of the New Yorker features a profile of Michael Ignatieff by Adam Gopnik, who writes from the perspective of a fellow Canadian who has known Ignatieff for many years. Gopnik is always well worth reading, and here brings particular feeling to the question of what might lure a successful Canadian expat home.

Continue…

Piling on

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 22, 2009 at 9:16 AM - 54 Comments

New column, in which I stop short of imploring Michael Ignatieff to get out of Canadian politics while he still can.

link

Ignatieff in Iran

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 9:52 AM - 20 Comments

Michael Ignatieff was in Iran on the eve of Ahmadinejad’s victory in 2005. He gave talks, met with reformers and students, and wrote it up for the New York Times Magazine. The piece is worth reading now for all kinds of reasons: It gives a nice snapshot of the state of the reform movement at the time, and helps explain why Ahmadinejad was so popular in the first place. It also contains some of the cut-rate intellectualizing that makes Ignatieff’s academic positions so shaky, such as when he replies to a cleric’s demand for proof that rights are universal with the following:

I gave the answer I use in my class at Harvard — that if I were to go up to him, right now, and smack him across the face, anywhere in the world the act would count as an injustice and an insult. Human rights law codifies our agreement about stopping these intuitively obvious injustices.

Well, not quite.  Anyway, it’s easy to go back over things written in different contexts and pull out Telling Quotes or Portentous Passages, but I thought this was interesting:

Many young Iranians I talked to were so hostile to clerical rule that I found myself cautioning them against going too far in the other direction. Many seemed in favor of a secular republicanism in which religion was excluded from politics altogether, as it was in Turkey during the rule of that country’s modernizing dictator, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. As Isaiah Berlin warned, however, if you bend the twig too far, it will snap back in your face.

And especially this:

In any event, America has almost no capacity to promote democracy inside Iran, and some capacity to do harm to Iranian democrats. Every Iranian I met wanted to spend time in the United States — and wished there were more scholarships to take them to America — but nearly every one of them laughed when I mentioned the recent Congressional appropriation of $3 million to support democratic opposition groups inside and outside the country. Iranian democrats look on American good intentions with incredulity. It would be fatal for any of them to accept American dollars. ”Do they want to get us all arrested as spies?” one said to me.

Hence the paradox: the Middle Eastern Muslim society with the most pro-American democrats will strenuously resist any American attempt to promote democracy inside it. It is easy to understand why. ”We fought for our independence,” Semnanian told me. ”You think when our people fought to drive out the invaders from Iraq for seven years, we were fighting only Saddam? We were fighting the U.S.A., Britain, the whole world. We saved our country. And now we are free.”

Read the whole thing.

He has lukewarm water in his veins

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 7:34 AM - 30 Comments

I really don’t see how the Liberals, and Ignatieff, come out looking good on this either way. You’re the opposition, guys. How long does it take to decide to oppose the government?  What happened to Mr. “I have ice water in my veins”? Mr. “We are tired of sitting down”? Or as he told Mike Duffy: “In a word, no more sitting on our hands. You got me absolutely right, Mike.”

The question for the Liberal party should not be, “can we support this or that measure or piece of legislation?” That’s the question the two non-serious parties, the Bloc and the NDP, get to ask themselves, because their entire raison d’etre in parliament is to barter their small amount of support for whatever influence they can.  But the Liberals, and only the Liberals, are the government in waiting. The minute Ignatieff became the official leader, he should have made it crystal clear that he thought he should be the prime minister, that he wanted Harper’s job, and that as far as the Liberal party is concerned, there should be an election as soon as possible, as a sort of re-do of the Fall Fiasco.

That would at least have given the party a strong, confident, and principled basis for their behaviour in parliament. The rest of the Commons, as well as the Canadian people, would have had a clear understanding of where the party was coming from. If the other parties decided to keep supporting the Tories, well, that’s their prerogative. And if there is an election, so much the better for the Libs.

Honestly, I don’t kow where the Liberal party keeps finding these beta-males to put in charge. It’s bad enough that Ignatieff keeps getting what is clearly awful strategic advice. What’s worse is that he keeps taking it.

***

UPDATE: Le Devoir is reporting that Ignatieff has decided to spend his summer at his villa in Provence, despite Chretien apparently advising him to bring the government down:

L’ancien chef libéral, Jean Chrétien, conseillait aussi à Michael Ignatieff de déclencher les hostilités dès maintenant. De passage au Nouveau-Brunswick samedi, M. Chrétien a dit que le pays avait besoin d’un nouveau gouvernement. «Je pense qu’à ce moment-ci, le Canada serait mieux avec un gouvernement différent. Alors, si le peuple a la chance de se prononcer, que le peuple se prononce», a-t-il dit, alors qu’il participait à un événement partisan en compagnie du député Dominic Leblanc.