So not all bad then?

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 1:52 PM - 1 Comment

Robert L. Fraser is unimpressed with True Patriot Love.

True Patriot Love is a well-written disappointment. There is little new or insightful about the Grants. The meditation on patriotism is light fare with no serious engagement with the difficult writings of his philosophical uncle, of which Ignatieff is more than capable.

We should all be so criticized

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 3:39 PM - 17 Comments

Gilles Duceppe gives Michael Ignatieff a blurb for the soft cover edition of True Patriot Love.

“Michael Ignatieff says that Quebeckers can choose to be Quebeckers or Canadians, in any order. You can be what you want, he tells us, but you can be sure that his Liberal policies will be Canadian, period.”

Iggy’s morally contemptible words

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM - 202 Comments

The other day the National Post ran an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Love. Most of it was just the usual boilerplate hogwash apparently obligatory if one fancies oneself a member of the intellectual wing of the Canadian establishment. You know the sort of stuff:

“Most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.”

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It took Iggy nine years to write 177 pages?

By Allan Fotheringham - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 29 Comments

Oh dear. Is Michael Ignatieff the most naive politician to ever come down the pike? Or the most insulting, presumptive sort of animal to travel the same route?

The obvious question comes apparent with last week’s publishing of his 17th “book” bearing the astonishing/embarrassing title of True Patriot Love. This coming from an author who has spent half his life, most all of his adult life, living outside Canada? Give us a frigging break.

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In search of a unified theory of Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 11:19 AM - 8 Comments

Ignatieff is too honest. “Talk about the audacity of hope. The newly crowned leader of the federal Liberal Party seems to be hoping that we can handle the truth in politics, despite the considerable body of evidence that we’d prefer to hear fairy tales from our politicians.”

Ignatieff isn’t honest enough. “It is hard to escape the worry that Ignatieff didn’t write that book either because he didn’t trust himself to get it right, or he didn’t trust Canadians to understand it. Instead, he’s given us a condescending  family history bookended by a romantic theory of nationalism and an election platform from the 1970s.”

Can a cosmopolitan be a patriot? Don't ask Ignatieff

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 10:28 PM - 52 Comments

There has been far too much, I think, written about Michael Ignatieff’s book True Patriot Love. But I promised to say something less glib than what I wrote a week or so back, but I’ve found it hard to say anything remotely novel about a book that has so little content, and so little to recommend what content there is.

It’s an appalling book, by turns cloying, calculated, and insincere. Andrew Coyne has given us pretty much the definitive statement on the terrible policy initiatives that are introduced the last chapter, especially regarding the East-West energy programs that have NEP II written all over them.  How unsurprising that Ignatieff is actually hobbled by having missed out on thirty-odd years of political strife in this country; how disturbing that his advisors haven’t sat him down and set him straight on the main bones of contention.

Regarding his attempt to position himself as the fourth in a line of nation-building patriots, I think Robert Fulford got it pretty much right: It is pretty darn weird from an ultra-cosmopolitan and liberal internationalist like Michael Ignatieff to be trying to rewrite his intellectual and personal biography to fit the family pattern.

There’s actually a good book waiting to be written about the Ignatieff family, its friendships and relations, and their role in building mid-century Canada and the post-war international order. The key figures here only get the briefest of nods in TPL — men like Lester Pearson (who paid a visit to check on the shell-shocked George Parkin Grant in London) and Vincent Massey. What makes them important is that they were liberals, internationalists,  and nation-builders; men who saw no contradiction between being cosmopolitans and Canadian patriots.

That is the obvious book for Ignatieff to have written. It is the one that would have tied together his personal biography, his family history, and his intellectual obsessions since Blood and Belonging. It is also, as it happens, the subject of a large academic literature of the sort he would have engaged with at Harvard. One recent addition to that literature is Natan Sharansky’s Defending Identity, a serious book that tries — and largely succeeds —  at reconciling the local demands of cultural dentiity with the global imperatives of liberal freedom.

It is hard to escape the worry that Ignatieff didn’t write that book either because he didn’t trust himself to get it right, or he didn’t trust Canadians to understand it. Instead, he’s given us a condescending  family history bookended by a romantic theory of nationalism and an election platform from the 1970s.

It’s a shame. I was starting to warm to the guy.

'We should encourage more of these types of people'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 1:32 PM - 0 Comments

Somewhat surprising paragraph from the definitive Zoomer profile of Michael Ignatieff.

Still, even those from opposing sides are excited by his political career thus far. “It’s fantastic when people who are accomplished and have a track record of success make this transition,” says Jaime Watt, a political strategist and former senior communications adviser for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. “We should encourage more of these types of people to enter public service. There’s been a fundamental shift in the electorate. We’re in an economic situation we’ve never been in before, and people want solutions that we’ve never had before. It’s a post-partisan world.” 

Still with the Canadian question

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 11:26 AM - 11 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks to the Star.

“My career has been a bit of a focal point for a debate about what makes a good Canadian.”

“There’s a funny idea out there that you can only be a Canadian if you lived in the country the whole time. It doesn’t seem to me to make any sense. More than one million Canadians live and work outside of the country at any one time. Are we saying they are less good Canadians than the people who never leave? On the contrary,” he said.

“Everywhere I go people say, `Well, it was good that you were out of the country – you know stuff.”

Gregg v. Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 1:48 PM - 13 Comments

Twenty-seven more minutes of conversation. About nine-and-a-half minutes in they move on from True Patriot Love to talking about Ignatieff’s political career. Haven’t got time to watch it all before QP. Will go ahead and assume there are at least half a dozen attack ads in there somewhere.

The left side of Iggy’s brain vs. the right

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 27, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 23 Comments

As always with Michael Ignatieff, there are the contradictions. Awaiting his coronation at next week’s party convention, the Liberal leader is everywhere, in interviews about and excerpts from his new book, True Patriot Love. And the more he speaks, the more the contradictions mount.

The Ignatieff who once declared in The Russian Album that “I do not believe in roots” now dwells on them at length, emphasizing his four-generation heritage of attachment to Canada. The ambitious intellectual who once believed that “life was elsewhere” now wants to be known as someone who is “anchored in the country.” The British television personality who publicly despaired, after the 1995 referendum, that he was “very hard put to see what kind of future we have” now burbles that “the country is not done. The story has only just begun.”

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New national dreams

By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 6 Comments

Q: Your new book, True Patriot Love, is in part an exploration of Canada, but also an exploration of your family and your family’s past in Canada. What led you to these subjects?

A: I previously wrote a book about the Russian side of my family, the Ignatieffs, but my mother’s people, who were Grants and Parkins originally from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, had an interesting story to tell, starting with a great-grandfather who helped to lay out the line for the transcontinental railroad, a grandfather who fought at the Somme, and my uncle who wrote Lament for a Nation. So when I began the book I thought I’m just going to write about that great-grandfather and his trip across the country. Before I knew it, I was writing a history of Canada seen through the eyes of one family.

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Bully

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 12:09 PM - 9 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks to the other Hour.

When he was a kid, his diplomat father sent 11-year-old Michael back to Toronto in 1959 to attend Canada’s most prestigious English-speaking private school, Upper Canada College. I ask Ignatieff if he was ever bullied at school.

“I remember bullies and I’m very hot-tempered, so I know how to defend myself,” Ignatieff replies. When asked to elaborate, Ignatieff will only say, “I hate bullies. I hate bullies in politics, I hate bullies in life. I don’t mind being argued with, I don’t mind being contradicted. But I hate bullies. It’s a red line for me. I absolutely hate being pushed around.”

'The daily bread of politics'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 10:44 AM - 4 Comments

Robert Fulford is unimpressed.

In 1987, the 40-year-old Michael was an academic and a journalist, little more than a footnote to a narrative focussed on his grandparents, Count Paul Ignatieff and Princess Natasha and the revolution that forced them into exile. But in 2009 he’s a star. He’s the fourth generation mentioned in the subtitle and his prose indicates that he’s conscious at every moment of the impression he’s making on potential voters. Even the title qualifies as an election slogan. Five years ago “true patriot love” would have been an ironic or hopelessly banal label for the work of a sophisticated intellectual like Ignatieff. But now that he’s in politics those words, while still mawkish and obvious, seem almost appropriate.

'Does this help us know you?'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 2:45 AM - 3 Comments

Rounding out his weekend, Michael Ignatieff talks to CBC.ca and CBC Radio 1. The latter, as a commenter here noted earlier, is particularly worth reviewing.

'There is more to inheritance than romance'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM - 1 Comment

Here is that exclusive excerpt of ours from True Patriot Love.

'That's too clever for me, Evan'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 20, 2009 at 2:41 AM - 8 Comments

Evan Solomon talks to Michael Ignatieff for CBC Sunday. (A transcript of the full interview is available at that link.)

At the end of the clip, Evan states that Stephen Harper wrote a similar book about himself at some point. That would seem to be a mistake. Though you’re welcome to read Paul’s book. Or this curiously listed coming attraction.

Jack Layton did pen his own survey of the land in 2004. And while Barack Obama did write Dreams from My Father, it was published in 1995. Audacity of Hope followed 11 years later.

Nation in progress

By Michael Ignatieff - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 9 Comments

Michael Ignatieff, 61, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, is also an eminent writer. His family memoir, The Russian Album, won the Governor General’s non-fiction award in 1987, and his 1993 novel Scar Tissue was shortlisted for the Booker prize. In 2000, Ignatieff and his wife, Zsuzsanna, retraced the journey his great-grandfather George Monro Grant undertook with Sandford Fleming in 1872. Grant and Fleming were mapping out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. Ignatieff’s aim was to see the country through his ancestor’s optimistic eyes and trace how four generations of his prominent family—including his uncle George Parkin Grant, author of Lament for a Nation (1965)—had grappled with the idea of Canada. Grant’s despairing view of Canada’s fate, that the nation was destined to dissolve into the American orbit, has made his book an icon of Canadian nationalism. His nephew’s view of our future, as set out in True Patriot Love (Penguin), is far more confident.

The Canada of the Grants was a small-town nation of modest brick houses with white verandas, Protestant and Catholic churches on wide, leafy streets and the railway station within walking distance. George Parkin Grant’s Lament for a Nation was a cry of grief and rage at its passing. But that Canada is still there. Just go to Richmond, Que., or London, Ont., or Halifax, N.S. There are beautiful streets in each of these towns where this Canada still remains. But there is a palpable sense that time is passing this Canada by.

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The Canadian question

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 2:21 PM - 27 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks to the Sun.

“I didn’t write the book as a defensive response to anticipated attack. I started this thing long before I was even in politics — and I would have finished it whatever happened — but there’s no doubt that it has the consequence of being a response to that.

“I’ve never seen a contradiction between loving your country and being outside it … sometimes you actually have to get out of your country to see it for what it is.”

The Star, meanwhile, spends a few days with Ignatieff in Southwestern Ontario and reports back.

The nation as dessert

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 1:51 AM - 23 Comments

Michael Valpy writes nearly 4,400 words for the Saturday Globe on Michael Ignatieff and True Patriot Love.

His idea of some of the mythologies that run deep in Canadians’ lives seems a little musty — the North, the land, the constitutional mantra of POGG: peace, order and good government. He writes at one point that because Canadians are three peoples living in a single state without sharing the same sense of country — English-Canadian, French-Canadian and aboriginal — they cannot create a single, uniting national myth, as Americans have done.

What, I ask him, does that say about our shibboleths of pluralism, of a culture of rights, of a more communal approach to life than the Lockean individualism of Americans? On the last issue, he tells me, this nephew of George Grant: “You can’t run this country without government, without a federal government that has an inciting, promoting, stimulating role in pulling the country together.

“And the job description of a prime minister, the job description of a federal government, is just one job — hold the country together, make it stronger. That’s all it does, and Canadians have a deep understanding of that. They don’t like big government. But they do think we can’t have a country unless we have a federal government that does some of this stuff. And this is, I think, the fatal ideological flaw of Harper’s conservatism because it fits a country that is finished, but it doesn’t fit a country that is not yet done. … Part of what I like about our country is the sense that we’re unfinished business. We’re not there. The dish is not done, and that creates a project for us, which to imagine it finished, imagining the building done, the pie cooked.”

You can listen to the entire interview here. Excerpts of Valpy’s conversation with Ignatieff have also been turned into a six-minute video. Oh, and there’s a book excerpt too.

The central question

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 17, 2009 at 11:45 AM - 9 Comments

John Geddes offers an extensive review of True Patriot Love.

 Ignatieff’s attempts to defend patriotism as a motivation is more interesting than any stump speech. Without quite saying so, he’s finally addressing the question that certain highly educated, frankly ambitious Canadians have puzzled over ever since he defied their expectations by returning to Canada in 2005: Why give up a Harvard professor’s chair, a regular pulpit in the New York Times Magazine, a loyal British fan base-all for dreary old Ottawa?

Book Review: Michael Ignatieff's 'True Patriot Love'

By John Geddes - Friday, April 17, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 34 Comments

There is a passage in True Patriot Love, Michael Ignatieff’s new book about successive generations of extraordinary men in his mother’s family, in which his uncle, George Grant, comes to terms with being a Canadian.

Grant, who would later become famous in his native country as the author of Lament for a Nation, was thriving at Oxford in the years after the Second World War, but he couldn’t deny the tug of home. “I love England,” Grant told his mother, “and think it is the greatest country on earth—but Canada is in one’s heart—in a way that this country can never be.”

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Old-time patriotism

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:54 PM - 23 Comments

The Ottawa Citizen reviews Michael Ignatieff’s True Patriot Love.

“America and Canada are both free nations,” Ignatieff writes. “But our freedom is different: There is no right to bear arms north of the 49th parallel and no capital punishment either; we believe in collective rights to language and land, and, in our rights culture, these can trump individual rights. Not so south of the border. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border — public health care, for example — have been ours for a generation. These differences are major and George Grant’s conclusion that they were minor misunderstood Canadian history and our enduringly different political tradition.”

The latest issue of our magazine includes an interview with the Liberal leader and an excerpt.