The enigma of Michael Ignatieff

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman Staff
July 28. 2006
I may be showing my age here, but I'm old enough to remember one of the proudest moments in Canadian history -- Prime Minister Lester "Mike" Pearson winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That was back in 1956 when Pearson took on the role as "honest broker" and extricated the old imperial powers of Britain and France out of a sticky situation when they attacked Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal.
Back then, we were pretty darn proud that it was Canada -- not the U.S., not the Soviet Union, or any other Great Power -- that pulled the world back from the brink of war. And it was Pearson's resolute action that set the template for Canadian foreign policy for the next 50 years. We became the world's peacekeepers, a role that mostCanadians cherish to this day.
Well guess what?
There's a man, a towering intellectual, in fact, who rejects Pearson's legacy and thinks Canada should take on a different role on the world stage. This internationally renowned scholar, author and would-be Prime Minister thinks our role should be to act as the George Bush Flunky of the North. This man "unequivocally" supports Canada's role inAfghanistan where 19 Canadians have now died and he also supported the U.S. war in Iraq where more than 2,500 American soldiers have been killed and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives as "collateral damage."Believe it or not, in a recent scholarly paper this man argued in favour of what he called a "lesser evil approach" to terrorism whereby "coercive interrogation" -- torture his critics say -- would be justified by countries fighting the war against terrorism. This man, a Harvard man in fact, has spent almost all of his illustrious, scholarly career outside of Canada and only returned to the Great White North in 2005 to plunge into politics. He promptly got elected in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore and with the defeat of the Martin government and the election of the minority Conservative government, he quickly became the leading candidate in the Liberal leadership race.
And he, Michael Grant Ignatieff, will be here in Cranbrook Tuesday Aug. 1 at the Prestige Resort Hotel to tell local liberals, and the general public, why he should be the next Prime Minister of Canada. If you have any interest at all in the political future of this country, you might want to be there. We haven't had a federal politician of this caliber call on us for a long time. It should prove interesting.
As a politician, Ignatieff is a huge enigma because he's been in the game for such a short length of time. But there's no questioning his academic and career credentials which are nothing short of brilliant: Trinity College inToronto, Oxford, Harvard, King's College Cambridge, the London School of Economics, UBC, the University of California, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Car Centre for Human Rights Policy. The list goes on and on. He was also a journalist at the Globe and Mail, a broadcaster at the BBC, an editorial columnist for the Observer newspaper, an internationally acclaimed documentary maker, a historian and a novelist.
This is no ordinary politician.
He even has great genes. His grandfather was Count Paul Ignatieff, who was the Tsar's last minister of education and one of the few Tsarist ministers who escaped execution by the Bolsheviks. His father was the Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff and his uncle was political philosopher George Grant author of Lament for a Nation. In his book, "The Russian Album," Ignatieff explores the importance of memory and obligation in the context of his family. He speaks English and French and has a basic knowledge of Russian, the native language of his father.
So what's a heavy thinker like this doing justifying the policies of an intellectual lightweight like George Bush? I'm told by a member of Ignatieff's campaign team that he now acknowledges Iraq is a "mess" and that the only reason he supported the war initially was out of loyalty to friends he has in Kurdistan. As far as Afghanistan goes, Ignatieff reminds people that it was the Liberal government of Paul Martin that authorized the mission in the first place and he is only following that policy.
However as the body bags keep returning home, this admitted peacenik can't help but wonder if supporting the war in Afghanistan is smart politics for someone who wants to be Prime Minister of Canada? Even more troubling is a statement that Ignatieff made about Canada's traditional role as a peacekeeper. According to an article in Wikipedia, Ignatieff said at one campaign appearance: "the thing that Canadians have to understand about Afghanistan is that we are well past the era of Pearsonian peacekeeping."
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't want to live in a country led by someone who believes Canada is "well past" its traditional role of acting as peacekeeper.
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