Can Michael Ignatieff bridge our solitudes?
We Canadians like to think of our vast land and small population hugging the U.S. border as a nation distinct from our southern cousins. However most foreigners would be hard-pressed to distinguish between English Canadians and Americans (French-speaking Quebecers are, of course, linguistically unique).
There's an argument to be made that we derive our national identity from what we aren't (American) rather than identifying with each other through common ethnicity, language, culture, history or religion. No wonder Canada is often referred to as a nation of solitudes.
Which brings us to Michael Ignatieff.
The Liberal Party leader is portraying himself as prime minister-in-waiting. But in typical Canadian fashion, he's offering himself as savior based on what he is not: vindictive Stephen Harper, hopeless Stephane Dion and certainly not a willing partner with the dreaded socialists who so eagerly wanted a Liberal-NDP coalition propped up by Quebec "nationalists."
Canadians are desperate for someone to come and save them from the hopelessness that is the federal political scene today. Ignatieff would seem to be perfect.
The grandson of Count Pavel Ignatiev, minister of education under Russia's last Czar, Ignatieff is being spun by Liberal spin-doctors as the perfect philosopher-king to lead Canada.
Ignatieff's lineage is dazzling: he was born in Toronto to George Ignatieff (a Canadian diplomat) and Alison Grant (sister of George Grant, a Red Tory philosopher and author of Lament for a Nation).
Ignatieff is a big thinker with a huge international reputation for a slew of academic and fictional books. He has garnered truckloads of awards, honorary degrees and coveted lectureships from some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He has headed up Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights and written screenplays.
Good looking, eloquent, fluently bilingual, the man sounds like an updated version of Pierre Trudeau. In fact, the editors of the New York Times gushed that Ignatieff's ascendancy "puts his country on the cusp of an unusual moment, in some ways a throwback to the era of the dashing Pierre Trudeau, another smart-set intellectual who served as Prime Minister."
And there's the problem. Will Canadians really go for a politician who looks like a lefty-liberal who champions human rights and social justice and who has a record as a conservative who embraced George W. Bush's war on Iraq?
Compared to the previous two Liberal leaders, Paul Martin and Stephane Dion, Ignatieff comes off looking like Alexander the Great. Moreover, unlike the other party leaders in Ottawa, he's can't be accused of almost wrecking the country through Machiavellian schemes that thrust us into a Constitutional crisis or political opportunism that invites separatists into government.
As much as Ignatieff might present himself as a change agent, we need to ask ourselves whether Canada has finally broken off into solitudes which will never become whole.
Will the West support an intellect who smells like Trudeau and only came back to Canada a few years ago from his comfy, American ivory tower at the behest of the Liberal Party's Eastern establishment? Will Quebec be weaned from the separatist dream weavers after so many years of having their way with weak federal governments? Will Newfoundland's anger over cuts to its equalization payments spill over the entire Maritimes?
We might do well to remember that change doesn't happen just because we elect different politicians to office. Real change starts at the heart level, as it did when the prophet Jeremiah told the ancient Israelites, "If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever."
More recently, Mahatma Gandhi said, "We must be the change we want to see in the world."
Wise words for Michael Ignatieff and the rest of us.
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