Yesterday Michael Ignatieff wrapped up his first year as leader of the opposition with a convivial, even festive, final caucus meeting before the Christmas break. This, it must be said, comes on the heels of three and half months that he would do well to forget. First came the ultimatum that wasn’t. Ignatieff’s “withdrawal of support” was one of the great damp squibs.
The NDP recognizing the lunacy of driving the country into another election cycle acted out of a sensible combination of political expediency pragmatism and, dare I say it, principle to force the government’s hand on income support. Coming out the other end of this arrangement the NDP held its numbers across the country and made significant gains in Quebec. The Grits, on the other hand, saw their numbers fall though the basement. And Ignatieff’s leadership numbers have continued to tumble particularly in Quebec where his star power was thought to be irreproachable.
On top of that the latest issue of The Walrus magazine included a piece from Chrétien’s Boswell, Ron Graham, in which he (fluently) kicks Ig’s teeth down his throat. To wit:
“[Ignatieff] often claimed, in his own defence, that words didn’t really seem to matter as much when he was an intellectual – a justification that might chill the heart of every American kid who is still learning how to walk on artificial limbs because Michael Ignatieff once carried the day in an oh-so-frightfully-interesting debate. (Even his recantation in the New York Times was, as one wag put it, ‘more mea than culpa.’)”
There’s a lot that Michael Ignatieff has to apologize for (his defence of enhanced interrogation techniques in his book The Lesser Evil for instance) but suggesting however subtly that he’s somehow responsible for the wounds of American soldiers (the same soldiers who killed 300,000 Iraqi civilians) is, how to put it, a bit churlish.
And so with the Grit battalions in full retreat, today arrives a missive from Ig’s chief of staff Peter Donolo urging the troops to swear off tub thumping for an election and instead nurture their bona fides as the government in waiting. So the question becomes, beyond wolfing down a lot of constituency chicken what exactly would that amount to? What sorts of “Liberal” ideas would establish the Grits as “the clear alternative.” The scope of this challenge was clearly delineated in the ill timed missive from Janine Krieber that pointed to the current disposition of the party and sought a change of course, or else suffer the fate of similarly positioned Liberal parties abroad. So the status quo won’t do. What then?
This morning in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize Barack Obama said:
“We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their fundamental faith in human progress – that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey. For if we lose that faith – if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace – then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.”
