"We engage in this act of imagination because we need to. The lives we live alone do not make sense to us unless we share some public dimension with others. We need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live."
His idea of some of the mythologies that run deep in Canadians' lives seems a little musty — the North, the land, the constitutional mantra of POGG: peace, order and good government. He writes at one point that because Canadians are three peoples living in a single state without sharing the same sense of country — English-Canadian, French-Canadian and aboriginal — they cannot create a single, uniting national myth, as Americans have done.
STEPHEN HARPER'S FLAW
What, I ask him, does that say about our shibboleths of pluralism, of a culture of rights, of a more communal approach to life than the Lockean individualism of Americans?
On the last issue, he tells me, this nephew of George Grant: "You can't run this country without government, without a federal government that has an inciting, promoting, stimulating role in pulling the country together.
"And the job description of a prime minister, the job description of a federal government, is just one job — hold the country together, make it stronger. That's all it does, and Canadians have a deep understanding of that. They don't like big government. But they do think we can't have a country unless we have a federal government that does some of this stuff.
"And this is, I think, the fatal ideological flaw of Harper's conservatism because it fits a country that is finished, but it doesn't fit a country that is not yet done. … Part of what I like about our country is the sense that we're unfinished business. We're not there. The dish is not done, and that creates a project for us, which to imagine it finished, imagining the building done, the pie cooked."
It's got to be done, he says, by "imagining what it's like to be in the helmets of other people and then imagining a common project we might do together and doing it in a free society."
The country has been bruised, he says. Pummelled by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords and the near-death experience of the 1995 Quebec referendum.
Then came deficit-slaying. "Then we had a government that said, 'Let's lower all expectations down basically to zero. We're going to give you retail politics. We're going to get the government off your back.'."
He believes it's time for government to build again. He says the markets have always run north-south — "It's not just a dire capitalist plot; that's where our standard of living comes from" — while the country runs east-west, and the task of Canadian nation-builders has been to balance the two.
He talks about building the high-speed rail line between Quebec City and Windsor, building a national energy corridor.
At the end of our conversation, he says: "The most important line in the book to me is somewhere near the end of the introduction, I think I say that one of the reasons why these people [the Grants] are inspiring to me is that they believe in us more than we do ourselves. There's a part of the faith they had in the country that I find inspiring.
"So, you think, 'Okay, let's see what happens.'."
Ottawa airport's Zeena — who recalls her encounter with Mr. Ignatieff but declines to say any more about it — no doubt will be watching.
Michael Valpy is a writer with The Globe and Mail. His 2006 profile of Michael Ignatieff was nominated for a National Newspaper Award.
