Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Wednesday, November 25, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick
What is it about Canadians and eggheads? It's not like we haven't got plenty of them visible and active in the public sphere ergo, e.g., to wit, i.e., Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, John Polanyi and dare I say it, Michael Ignatieff.
Organizations whose very purpose is to stay the hand of our more feral aspects on a global scale (the UN, the ICC, Pugwash, etc., etc.) are fairly crawling with Canadians. And yet within our own border mention the word "idea" and you're liable to get the following or it's like (these pulled from Macleans in response to the Grits announcement of an ideas conference scheduled for Montreal in late March) :
-- "All are welcome....but only if you're not from the west, are a socialist, adhere to the cult of global warming, live in a downtown urban riding, don't own hunting rifle, believe the CBC is balanced…"
-- "Is it really a 'spirit of openness' to limit the ideas to those from either 'Big L Liberals' or 'progressive thinkers and experts'?
What about the rest of us? We're Canadians too, even if we don't merit that high-sounding 'progressive' label. And who knows? We might even have ideas worth hearing."
-- "Reading that made me a bit twitchy, feel faint and break out into hives all at once. I know this is boilerplate liberal talk but it is not government's role to decide where we will be in a decade. It's role is to let Canadians live our lives peacefully and let us decide individually where we will be in 10 years.
And when pols talk about taking advice from teenagers, all I can think of is Mao's Cultural Revolution. People should not be allowed to vote until they are at least 30 years old and have lived a bit."
Even this august publication had a bit of sport at the expense of the Grits' good intentions:
"Scared by the 'just visiting' Tory attack ads (remember those?), Michael Ignatieff had gone into full retreat. At least that's the view of the members of the new team around the Liberal Leader. And so they are now trying to reboot his image - get him back on track as the lantern-jawed Harvard intellectual and ideas guy who had initially captured the imagination of Canadians."
"Lantern-jawed Harvard intellectual"?!? It's unlikely Ike ever damned Adlai Stevenson with fainter praise. That said, if the press in Canada were to be even handed in their cynicism, it's not like the Tories don't have "ideas." Take the swath of new legislation aimed at getting tough on crime, particularly white-collar crime. Lately Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and his parliamentary secretary Daniel Petit wrote in the National Post:
"We also introduced Bill C-52 to deal with white-collar crime. Among other things, this bill creates a two-year mandatory jail sentence for fraud over $1-million; provides additional aggravating factors for sentencing; requires judges to consider requiring offenders to make restitution to victims in all fraud cases; and finally, allows communities that have been harmed by the fraud to submit community impact statements to the court… These bills give priority to the rights of law-abiding citizens. We are calling on all of our colleagues in the House of Commons to do as we are doing and stand up for victims, not criminals."
The irony in promulgating these "ideas" at this time is that it comes hard on the heels of a ferocious debate among the Tories ideological brethren to the south. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that formerly tough-on-crime conservatives like ex-Republican attorneys-general Ed Meese and Dick Thornburgh are working diligently to support efforts to stem the tide of "overcriminilization."
"Such so-called overcriminalization is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the point in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of 'honest services,' is, the brief said, both 'unintelligible' and 'used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.'
… Several strands of conservatism have merged in objecting to aspects of the criminal justice system. Some conservatives are suspicious of all government power, while others insist that the federal government has been intruding into matters the Constitution reserves to the states."
One wonders whether a similar debate will ensue among Conservatives in this country. Somehow I doubt it. So bring on the lantern-jawed intellectuals I say. We have nothing to lose but our hypocrisy.
(Photo: Michael Ignatieff speaks in the House of Commons on November 25, 2009. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)