William Lyon Mackenzie King, the politician who served as prime minister for longer than any other mortal, over 21 years, has returned to offer his services to Canadians once again, this time in the guise of Michael Ignatieff. Perhaps the word "mortal" is ill chosen. WLMK believed in reincarnation and never did anything without consulting a sooth-sayer. He would only enter or leave the House of Commons when the hands of the clock were in a special alignment to one another. His diaries are full of conversations he had with the dead, whether his mother, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, or Franklin Roosevelt.
Clever of Mackenzie King to return as Michael Ignatieff, a man who spent most of his working life outside Canada. (For much of the First World War, King was in the U.S., organizing company unions in Colorado for the richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller.) Ignatieff has encouraged Canadians to think of him as an amalgam of Wilfrid Laurier, Pierre Trudeau and Barack Obama. King wanted to be thought of as combining the best of Laurier, which caused Laurier's widow to come close to swooning in horror at the Liberal convention of 1919, and his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, first mayor of Toronto and the leader of an armed rebellion against the British crown.
King was deeply averse to change, though he often tried to appear sympathetic to those who fought for reform. Someday perhaps a few of the less radical ideas of the CCF could be implemented, he mused, but only in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, it was his self-appointed task, to remain at the helm holding together the contradictory elements of Canadian society, labour and capital, French and English, East and West.
A master of the fine art of letting the Conservatives destroy themselves, King staunchly avoided presenting anything new to Canadians especially during federal election campaigns. He was lucky in his opponents, sharp edged Tories such as Arthur Meighen and R.B. Bennett who were loathed by most Canadians. King's job was to show up at the helm of a united party and to encourage Canadians to "throw the bums out" and later to keep them out. When he came back to power in 1935, he let the Depression and the reputation of "Iron Heel" Bennett do the job for him. Six years of economic misery had taught him nothing.
In the coming weeks, we will watch Michael Ignatieff present himself as a prime minister in waiting. He will offer reassuring sentiments to convince Canadians that he is civilized and vaguely progressive. There will be no new ideas, no green-shift, no reappraisal of the mission in Afghanistan, no plan to rebuild the Canadian economy and create jobs for Canadians. Ignatieff's campaign will be all about presenting contrasts with the Iron-Heel Conservative of our time, Stephen Harper. Ignatieff will be a little friendlier to labour, a little more caring about pre-schoolers, a little nicer to Quebec, and a little more concerned about the environment than Harper. Meanwhile, he will tell business audiences that he will return the nation as swiftly as possible to fiscal probity, while keeping taxes low and spending tightly under control.
It remains to be seen how Canadians will respond to the Second Coming.
Your latest blog posts about the parties have been uniformly excellent, James. However, Ignatieff has been singularly uninspiring. People by and large do not like him or think he has a compelling reason to be threatening an election. And while people do tend to turn out incumbents in hard times, many Canadians have to be comparing their fate to that of the States and European countries who fared much worse.
Ignatieff also has to face a well-oiled Conservative attack machine. They started their characterization of Iggy early and they have been largely successful in getting their message out about him. Meanwhile, following your excellent piece on the NDP I must observe that it's hard to see where the determined NDP are going to take their votes if not out of his hide; he's vulnerable from the left (on grounds such as these, or the Bloc's campaign saying they're two parties with one opinion) and that's going to require him to talk about some thorny issues, to differentiate himself from Harper.
As much as I love to believe that Harper is poised to lose (if "poise" is appropriate), I can't help but think that Iggy can lose just as hard.
In 2001 Ignatieff became a professor at Harvard and director of its Center for Human Rights policy. During his tenure he STRONGLY SUPPORTED the war on Iraq. Surely an academic would know that the claim of WMD's was a hollow one, and that blaming Iraq for the 911 attacks was utter nonsense. How can a man who support Human Rights also support an illegal war based on lies?
What does that say about Ignatieff? That he is an Israel firster? Yes, that would be one thing. Could you say he is also willing to 'bend the rules' to support a political agenda? Yes. Is he a corruptible individual? Yes.
Does this kind of person have the INTEGRITY to lead Canada? No.
I love it. What is the liberal left doing in Canada these days when they want to sound clever? Why, taking the vicious slags and exaggerations that Stephen Harper launches against their own, and embellishing them and repeating them ad nauseum.
Maybe you should go and read some of the Daily Howler blog and one man's opinion of what this kind of 'journalism' has done to harm liberals in the US. It was neither clever nor apt to call Ignatieff a reincarnation of Mackenzie King. It's very unfortunate that the profligate Conservatives, under Stephen Harper, took a balanced budget and a deficit that was under control and spent it all so that Canada has entered the recession without any of her own reserves to fight it. If the Liberals win a majority or a minority, they certainly won't have lots of new money to put into programs, but it will still be fiscally prudent to invest in the new green industries that the whole world will be needing almost immediately. You seem to think that you somehow channel Mackenzie King to divine the policies of Ignatieff and have declared he has 'no plan to rebuild the Canadian economy', as if any of the other leaders has a coherent and complete plan. Stephen Harper certainly doesn't. His minions have made various and sundry declarations about what the ecomomy was or wasn't doing, and Jack Layton has been sniping from the sidelines, but isn't any closer to a magic fix than any of them. What will be the priorities of the next Government will depend in large measure on how the US and world economies fare. What's wrong with Ignatieff stating his priorities in broad terms, but being vague on exactly what he'd do? No honest politician, except a rigid idealogue, could promise much more than that.