On Sunday, according to a report in The Chronicle (of Dunville, Ontario), Michael Ignatieff’s bus tour stopped in at Neil and Elsie Eubanks's farm in Hagersville. And, in his remarks to the 150 or so people in the crowd, Mr. Ignatieff is reported to have made a statement that must have jarred on the ears of political reporters covering the event:
"Everything that has ever happened to me that has been good in my life happened because I have had the enormous good fortune of being a Canadian citizen. Born here. Educated here. Had a publicly-funded education here that gave me my start."
It’s a well-known fact that, from the age of 11, Mr. Ignatieff attended Upper Canada College — which is about as elite an education as you can get in our country. So well-known is this fact that it’s hard to believe the Liberal Leader thought that he could get away with the kind of little white lies that are the specialty of crowd-pleasing politicians. Indeed, the truthfulness of Mr. Ignatieff’s remarks is already being called into question.
Perhaps the Liberal Leader’s statement was a slip-up, which would be understandable and forgivable given his gruelling schedule. Or, could it be that in using the words “publicly-funded,” Mr. Ignatieff was not referring to a public education as most people in Hagersville, indeed most Canadians, would understand the term?
Mr. Ignatieff may have been referring to a little-known program at the Department of Foreign Affairs that has taxpayers picking up the tab for educating the children of diplomats posted abroad, including when the diplomats are back in Canada. Perhaps this is what he meant by his “enormous good fortune.”
Of course, in this respect, Canadian diplomats are not unique: Unbeknownst to most Britons until today, their Foreign Office has a similar program. Today, that program makes an appearance on the front page of the Guardian as a bit of a scandal:
“The taxpayer is spending more than £15m a year to send the children of British diplomats and military officers to private schools such as Fettes, Winchester, Roedean and Marlborough.
The subsidies – costing as much as £30,000 a year in school fees – are being paid by the Foreign Office even when the diplomats have returned to the UK and then stay on for years.
The extraordinary hidden privilege has been unearthed by Gloria de Piero, a new Labour MP, in written questions. In a co-ordinated response, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development said the perk was necessary to ‘recruit, motivate and retain staff who are skilled and equipped to meet the department's objectives’.”
