Liberals need Ignatieff

It is easy to dislike Michael Ignatieff. The bouffant hair, the exquisite diction, the pencil-chewing pensiveness: he is the public intellectual from central casting, the “thinking woman’s crumpet” of so many admiring profiles. His international celebrity would be cause enough to resent him. But that he should be fully deserving of it -- his views are both reasonable and provocative, marked by intellectual rigour and informed by on-the-ground reporting -- is enough to drive one mad.

Mostly it is easy to dislike him for his friends. The “influential Toronto-area Liberals” who are said to be laying the groundwork for a future Liberal leadership campaign -- the news that he is shortly to return from Harvard to take up a position at the University of Toronto can only fuel the speculation -- are exactly the sort that would. The excited chatter his shadow candidacy has aroused, all that gushing about philosopher kings and parallels with Trudeau, raises feelings of the most acute dread, inspired as one suspects it is more by the usual media weakness for glamour than by anything else.

That he was glamorous -- the clothes, the car, the girls -- was the least attractive thing about Trudeau. It spoke to the emptiest part of him, and the shallowest part of us. As a prime minister, moreover, he was at his worst when playing at philosophy -- all those windy sermons on things he knew nothing about, like the economy -- and at his best when he went with his gut, as in his lifelong battle with the separatists and others who would destroy his beloved Canada.

The Trudeau accession was in any case a fluke. It is a rare alignment of the planets that permits a man with little or no experience of politics to be thrust directly into high office, and with good reason. Experience is an asset in public life, as in most fields. The allure of the knight on the white horse, unsullied by actual contact with the profession, soon fades, and even if it were possible to imagine such a person governing successfully, it is unlikely he would ever get the opportunity. The chances of Prof. Ignatieff emerging triumphant from the shark pool that is the modern Liberal party cannot be rated highly.

And yet for all that I do like him, and hope he runs. There is his evident personal decency, for starters, the almost exaggerated courtesy with which he treats opponents and opposing points of view. Civility, of course, is as alien to the goonish sloganeering of our politics as intelligence or eloquence. But while it is always possible that his voice would be lost in the yahoo chorus, it is perhaps also possible that the others would suddenly sound tinny by comparison.

That’s if anyone is willing to listen to him. The most remarkable thing about the enthusiasm Mr. Ignatieff’s putative candidacy excites among the Liberal party is how directly contrary are most of his beliefs with those of the Liberal party, at least in its current incarnation. Granted, the party is famously flexible about its principles. But give it credit for some consistency. It is unswervingly, almost reflexively anti-American, predisposed to see in the United States the source of most of the world’s troubles and all of ours. And, under its current leadership, it has become entranced by “asymmetric federalism,” a grand name for what would otherwise look like a grubby series of ad hoc deals with the provinces.

This puts the party, it should be said, squarely in the mainstream of Canadian political thought. For the past four decades, Canadian intellectuals have been obsessed with the supposed threat to our existence posed by the colossus to the south, even as they ignored or even encouraged a very real internal threat, that of the limitless ambitions of the provinces. Those who dissented from the anti-American orthodoxy could always vote for the Conservative party, but at the cost of accepting that party’s provincialism. Those who resisted the decentralist tide had a home in the Liberal party of Trudeau, provided they could stomach its anti-Americanism. Under this government the circle was made whole, the two sides of the consensus joined.

Yet Mr. Ignatieff, unusually, stands against both traditions. He has been a prominent supporter of the war in Iraq, and more broadly of the use of American force abroad, both in the short-term objective of suppressing Islamic terrorism and in the broader campaign to spread democracy. He is not only an unabashed proponent of the United States as a force for good in the world, but even has a kind word or two for the present administration (though he is far from uncritical of it).

Speaking to last spring’s Liberal convention, he went so far as to advocate Canadian participation in missile defence, scant days after the Prime Minister had rejected it. As if that were not insolent enough, Mr. Ignatieff warned against allowing the federation to drift still further apart, a theme he has taken up in subsequent appearances, notably with respect to the cracks in national unity opened by the Martin government’s wheeler-dealer approach to fiscal federalism.

Needless to say, his hawkishness on foreign policy is likely to be as infuriating to certain sections of the Liberal party as his neo-Trudeauism on domestic matters is to others. Which is to say that a Liberal party under his leadership is an unlikely prospect. But it would be a Liberal party that decent people could support again.