Is Michael Ignatieff tough enough for the job? Can he can get down in the gutter with Stephen Harper? Or is he too mild of fibre? Does he risk, as I put it to him in an interview at his Stornoway residence, becoming a John Kerry or Michael Dukakis? These were two high-minded American Democrats, and they got bulldozed by the Republican malice machine.
Comparisons arise because the Liberal Leader is seen as lacking boldness in both his political pitch and his policy-making. He has not responded in kind to the personal attack ads. He has not posted, with ringing clarity, an alternative vision for the country.
As he enters his living room, he wears a look of calm. All the calumnies visited upon him as Leader of the Official Opposition haven't bothered him much, he says, because he's out among the people for much of the time. It keeps his mind off the grime of politics. "I mean the part of my job I like the most has been my town halls and Liberal Express tour. …That part works for me. It sets up a contrast between me and a Prime Minister who hasn't taken an unscheduled, unscripted question from a Canadian in five years."
Proud of countless hours among the common folk, Mr. Ignatieff wants to make one thing clear: Observers have got it upside down. He's not the stranger to the people and the country. It's Stephen Harper who's bubble man. He has "lived his entire life in the bubble of Canadian politics," says Mr. Ignatieff. With a cutting edge, he explains that our foreign policy would be less amateurish "if this man had lived a little before he became Prime Minister."
It's quickly clear that he doesn't have an iota of respect for Mr. Harper. No other Canadian PM, in the Liberal Leader's estimation, has run such an authoritarian, undemocratic government. "I no longer care what this guy says about me or writes about me. What I care about is that he's lowering the ceiling for everybody else."
Fellow Grits like to see this high level of animosity in their leader. It will spur Iggy on, they say. But despite this, despite all the time among the people, Mr. Ignatieff is yet to find resonance. Mr. Harper sets the browbeating tone, just as the Republicans did with Mr. Kerry, a lanky articulate patrician with resemblances to Mr. Ignatieff.
The Liberal Leader contests the notion that he has failed to produce a vision. His vision for Canada, he says, is in the phrase "equality of opportunity." That's what the country is about, he argues, and that's what's being lost as our system of open democracy is being trampled over.
The PM, he charges, regards institutions that keep Canadians free as obstacles. "He thinks of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an obstacle. He thinks of the judges as an obstacle. He thinks of whistleblowers as an obstacle to be silenced. He thinks of Parliament as kind of a pesky irrelevance. I just have a different view of this." The Ignatieff view is that they are what democracy is all about.
He talks up his plan for democracy's restoration. He promises to introduce a "People's Question Period" wherein he and his cabinet ministers would submit to online, unfiltered questions from Canadians on a weekly basis. He talks about a reduction in the size of the Prime Minister's Office, an overhaul of the malfunctioning access-to-information system and many other reforms.
Openness, democratic reform, equality of opportunity. In the Ignatieff view, it's bold stuff. Others, pollsters included, don't find it striking enough to change an image that needs changing.
When I raised the comparison with the Americans, he jumped in. "I'm not John Kerry. I'm not Michael Dukakis. I'm prepared to fight. The idea that I'm going to go through an election campaign as some kind of Boy Scout is a serious underestimation of who you are looking at."
He said it with some anger. It was a good sign.
Lawrence Martin