Michael Ignatieff emerged out of the crucible of this week's historic budget debate with the lustre of having forced Stephen Harper to alter his swaying platform, yet maintaining the mutual dignity in which such power swaps ought to be conducted. His amendments improved the Tory package by strengthening and broadening its intent. In the process, the freshly minted Liberal Leader branded himself as a politician who treats his briefs like a slalom skier, skirting around the flagpoles with exquisite care but not allowing them to inhibit his speed.
In his new position as the country's alternate prime minister, Mr. Ignatieff has set the pattern of his leadership: to champion the lesser evil of whatever situation he finds himself in - which, when you think about it, perfectly defines the operational code of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Unlike his predecessor, Stéphane Dion, who tried to fill the position on the basis of consensual apathy, Count Ignatieff has quickly, perhaps too quickly, taken charge - and thereby hangs a tale. If history doesn't exactly repeat itself, it sets significant patterns, such as the astonishing fact that the carpetbagging Mr. Ignatieff, after an absence from Canada for 30 years, finds himself after the briefest of apprenticeships in contention for the country's top political post.
Curiously, this has been the rule, not the exception. All of the Liberal leaders who became prime minister during the six decades between the 1920s and 1980s were also carpetbaggers - in the sense that they wrested the leadership from the party's veteran worthies, who were shoved aside for the newcomers.
When Sir Wilfrid Laurier died of a stroke in 1919 and the Liberals gathered at their first full convention, William Stevens Fielding was his natural heir. A former premier of Nova Scotia, he had been finance minister in the Laurier cabinet and had negotiated the reciprocity agreement with the United States. Instead, the delegates chose William Lyon Mackenzie King, a fusty bachelor who took along two pairs of spare shoelaces whenever he travelled and had spent 10 years in New York as a labour consultant, working mainly for the Rockefeller Foundation.
Though an outsider to the established hierarchy, King set down the matrix for the Liberal ascendancy, mainly by choosing regional power barons as his ministers and giving them virtual veto power over policies that pertained to their fiefdoms. He retained the leadership for an unprecedented 29 years, in the end communing only with his Irish terrier, Pat, and his private secretary, Jack Pickersgill.
In 1948, when it came time for King to prepare himself to join his spiritual ancestors, he ignored such deserving successors as defence minister Brooke Claxton and Douglas Abbott in finance, and turned the party over to a non-political Quebec City corporate lawyer, Louis St. Laurent, who once told me that he dreamt of his civil law cases en français and common-law precedents in English. Known as Uncle Louis, he had the glassy stare of an ancient mariner who had seen too many albatrosses.
Ten years later, delegates to the Liberal convention bypassed the legitimate leadership claims of party insider and distinguished parliamentarian Paul Martin Sr. to hand the top spot to Lester (Mike) Pearson, who had spent all of his professional life (except for a youthful fling making sausages in a Hamilton abattoir) as a diplomat, mostly outside Canada.
In 1968, when Mr. Pearson felt ready to retire, seven impressive insiders presented themselves as well-qualified pretenders to the throne. Mr. Pearson cleared the succession for the ultimate outsider, Pierre Trudeau, whose only party credentials consisted of his militant membership in the NDP, when he viciously attacked the Pearson government's nuclear-tinged defence policy. And so it went.
John Turner and Jean Chrétien, who followed Mr. Trudeau, certainly were insiders, but both had dropped out of the Ottawa pecking order for significant periods and served time on Bay Street, the Canadian version of Colombey-les-deux-Églises (Charles de Gaulle's mouse hole), before returning to power in Ottawa as quasi-outsiders. Paul Martin Jr. had the good fortune of being fired by Monsieur Chrétien, so he, too, had a temporary pass as an interloper and certainly made the most of it. (The Dion incumbency was useful mainly to ensure the French-English alternation, which is the other great Liberal tradition.)
All this hocus-pocus has been political sorcery of the highest order because instead of having to defend their predecessors' records, each freshly minted leader could innocently protest, "Who, me? I wasn't even there ..."
Simplistic? Of course. But it has worked. And because of his current success, Michael Ignatieff is considered a carpetbagger no more. He has just joined that solidly established and wonderfully utilitarian Liberal tradition of the outsiders who have grabbed the reins of power. Now, watch for him to buy spare shoelaces.
Peter C. Newman is the author of the recently published Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul.
