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The audacity of Michael Ignatieff

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Naive and egotistical, Canada's Liberal leader isn't the saviour his supporters believe him to be.

ignatieffLate last month, near the end of a prolonged period of uncertainty in Canadian politics, the Conservative government of prime minister Stephen Harper tabled its 2009 budget, the long-awaited response to the Liberal-New Democrat coalition that had been formed late last year, a last-ditch effort by the government to remain in power.

The question, though, was not so much whether the budget's economic stimulus package was good enough but, politically speaking, how the Liberals – and specifically new leader Michael Ignatieff – would respond to it. Now with the power in their hands, would they seek to bring down the government by voting against it with their coalition partners, or would they back away from the coalition, thereby effectively killing it, and, for the time being at least, prop up the government by voting for it? Ignatieff, who had never been comfortable with the coalition, and whose ascension to the leadership in December was itself the coalition's death knell, chose to vote for the budget and thereby to support the government.

And so for all the budget's flaws – and he listed many of them – all Ignatieff offered by way of amendment was for the government to be held accountable: "We will require regular reports to Parliament on the budget's implementation and its cost – one in March, one in June and one in December." That was it. After all the seemingly noble rhetoric about "helping Canadians", about "pay equity for women" and about "the green economy", after all the drama of the past couple of months, all Ignatieff wanted was three reports. His kingdom for three reports.

There is nothing wrong with accountability, and, to be fair, Ignatieff stressed that he is "ready to defeat [Harper] and lead in his place" and "ready to act in the national interest, as the gravity of this economic crisis demands".

On Thursday, he sat down for a brief meeting with President Barack Obama in Ottawa. To his credit, he approved Obama's decision to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and pushed for the return of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr to Canada. They also discussed Afghanistan, with the two leaders in agreement that the situation there is far from clear. On trade, a key issue in Canada not just because of Nafta but because of the "Buy American" provision in the recently passed stimulus package, Ignatieff indicated that both men desire maintaining an open and productive relationship between the two allies.

But why not demand more in return for his support of the budget than three reports? Why not propose tangible amendments addressing Employment Insurance, for example, or the coming deficits? Why not seek to differentiate himself from Harper, and the Liberals from the Conservatives, in a genuine and meaningful way? And why antagonise the New Democrats? (New Democrat leader Jack Layton responded to Ignatieff's caving in by suggesting that the new Liberal leader was just like his ineffectual predecessor, Stéphane Dion, that a new Conservative-Liberal coalition had been established and that Ignatieff's demand for reports was "a fig leaf".)

Why did Ignatieff do what he did? Because he has no interest right now in bringing down the government and thereby being compelled to share power. Because his political career has been about his own glorification, about his desire – for it seems to be the only reason he entered politics in the first place – to be prime minister. He may generously be called a chameleon, a shifty academic difficult to pin down, but perhaps more accurately he ought to be called an egotist who is sure of his own superiority and who seems to lack any real passion for the country he intends to lead.

Ignatieff was first elected to Parliament in 2006 from a suburban Toronto riding into which he was conveniently parachuted. With the party at the time clinging to a minority in the House of Commons under then-leader Paul Martin, Ignatieff was seen by many to be the Liberal future, the eventual leader. Handed a safe seat, it was only a matter of time. He lost the 2006 Liberal leadership race, much to his chagrin, but he remained a looming presence, the deputy leader ready to take over at the first opportunity.

He may not be the party's saviour, let alone another Pierre Trudeau – Liberals long for the next Trudeau like Republicans long for the next Reagan and Conservatives for the next Thatcher – but he has certainly boosted the party's credibility. Yet it is not at all clear what sort of a leader he'll be, nor ultimately how successful he'll be in the long run. Indeed, while his academic credentials are undeniably impressive, he lacks political and parliamentary experience, much-needed during these turbulent times and with a minority government in power. And his positions on such matters as pre-emptive war and torture, both of which he has defended in terms of his "lesser evil" theory – as in, they're lesser evils than, say, terrorism – are rather controversial, not to mention deeply unpopular among Canadians.

As the Toronto Star's Haroon Siddiqui put it back in December, Ignatieff has been even more of a George Bush cheerleader than Harper:

As is well-known, Ignatieff supported the war in Iraq, a position he only semi-retreated from last year, in year four of the botched occupation. Even then, he argued that he had been wrong for the right reasons (saving the Kurds from Saddam Hussein), while opponents of the war may have been right for the wrong reasons (ideological opposition to Bush).

He also supported the use of such harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects as sleep deprivation and hooding, even while saying he opposed torture.

He was also an advocate for American exceptionalism in defiance of international law.

While "[his] supporters argue that he was merely thinking aloud as a public intellectual," he actually "was among those liberals – a professor of human rights at Harvard, no less – who provided intellectual cover for Bush's neoconservative policies," "a noisy apologist for some of the worst foreign and domestic policy disasters of American history," advocating positions that "were the exact opposite of where a majority of Canadians stood on issues that are a point of differentiation between Canada and the US." Ignatieff may be a liberal in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, but he's also something of a neocon-lite.

The key issue in Canada remains the economy, but where is Ignatieff on the economy? It was reported before the budget was tabled that he was "developing his own alternative stimulus plan for the Canadian economy with a close circle of advisers," but there weren't any specifics. "I think what Canadians want us to do is to have a budget at the end of January that protects the most vulnerable in our society," he said, which is all well and good, but high-falutin' rhetoric and the request for three reports just don't cut it. When presented with the opportunity to take a stand and help Canada's "most vulnerable", he backed down and cowered behind his political calculations and personal aspirations. He doesn't even seem to grasp the historic nature of the economic crisis, which he has called "once-in-a-generation". It is likely going to turn out to be far worse than that.

With an air of haughty detachment, an arrogant sense of entitlement to leadership, limited charisma, Bush-friendly positions on key foreign policy issues, hardly any record on (and relatively little knowledge of) social and economic issues and next to no experience in the political trenches, Ignatieff is hardly the saviour so many Liberals delusionally think he is.

And yet, Ignatieff continues to be a widely admired and respected figure, perhaps more beyond Canada's borders than in Canada itself. A glowing profile in the New York Times published on 30 January captured the mystique and perpetuated the myth, painting him as an international celebrity come home to rule his people like a philosopher-king, another and perhaps more impressive Trudeau, a man with a "positively novelistic" life who was recruited by the Liberal party for the express purpose of being their saviour.

To me, though, he has never seemed to be much of a Canadian, and certainly not enough of one to be our prime minister. It's not that he has spent so much of his life overseas – mostly in Britain and the US. It's that he has seemed to aspire actively to be anything but Canadian, and more specifically to be American. Which is fine, in a cosmopolitan sort of way, but he comes back to Canada with an air of condescension about him, as if he has seen the world and conquered it and has now decided, with the coaxing of a party eager for him to lead it back to the promised land, to sully himself in the world of politics supposedly on our behalf but really because he just wants to be prime minister, so great would it look on his resumé, a capstone to a long and successful career.

Today's Canada is very much Trudeau's Canada, the Canada of Trudeau's vision, for better and for worse. Trudeau was, like Ignatieff, an intellectual, but, unlike Ignatieff, he obviously cared deeply about this country and sought to leave his mark on it, which he did. Ignatieff may feel "passionately and proudly Canadian", and there may be a bold vision behind his egotism, somewhere, but he has a lot to prove before he should be considered anything more than an opportunist, if not a self-absorbed charlatan.

The Guardian

Michael JW Stickings is the founder and editor of The Reaction, a liberal political blog. He lives in Toronto.