Michael Ignatieff's self-pity party

You know, after the final humiliation of Michael Ignatieff on May 2, I thought that I would never have to write about him again. And you know what? I was pretty goddamned pleased at the prospect of it.

Unlike most folks, I don't blame Iggy for the final ruination of the Liberal Party of Canada. They were singing the Song of the Doomed well before he came along. You need always remember that the Grits were only ever a cohesive political unit because they loved winning elections more than they hated each other. But that started to change about 35 years ago. Even if Christ himself was the Liberal leader in May, eight out ten Canadians would still be practicing Satanists today.

The leadership wars that started in 1975 never really stopped. Sure, the party benefited enormously from the fracture of the Mulroney coalition, but in their almost operatic hubris, they overlooked the fact that it was the only thing that kept them alive. Chretien, almost by accident, prospered but the cancer that finally felled his party began to  metastasize a generation earlier. The Götterdämmerung of the Liberal Party was actually authored by Pierre Trudeau and John Turner. It accelerated downward under the momentous political incompetence of Ignatieff and Stephane Dion but I have serious doubts that anyone could have halted it.

Actually that's not true. Stephen Harper could have. If you look at the electoral history of this country over the last sixty years, you very quickly come to realize that Liberals didn't win federal elections as much as Conservatives had fucked up so horribly that voters had no other choice but to pick Ignatieff;'s much-ballyhooed "Red Door." When Conservatives have had a clean shot, with a united party and competent leader, they've taken it each and every time. And then they made a mess of everything.

But the Right Honourable Mr. Harper isn't the kind of cat that just throws power away, like, say, John Diefenbaker was. No, Harper is a cross between Dick Cheney and some of the higher life forms from the reptile kingdom. Regardless of how little warm blood seems to flow through their any of their veins; Harper, Cheney and lizards never seem to die. All three enjoy the closest thing that you'll ever recognize as eternal life outside of a fucking horror movie.

A combination of the Sponsorship Scandal, savage infighting and general incompetence made the Grits radioactive to the overwhelming majority of Canadian voters to the point that they'd probably lose a federal election to NAMBLA. And it might have been the most joyous thing I've ever witnessed. I'm not going to lie to you about that. I've actually been dreaming about it since childhood and now everyday really is Christmas, despite how shitty every other facet of my life is.

But very little of it was actually Ignatieff's fault. If he was a brave, smart or decent man, he'd go back to Harvard with his head held high, secure in the knowledge that he did the best he could with what he was given to work with. In fact, he turned out to be much better on the stump than anyone could have imagined.

Sadly, he insists on continuing to be Michael Ignatieff, whose tenure as leader can be defined as whatever the opposite of brave, smart and decent is. So he's re-litigating the attacks against him in the hallowed pages of The Globe and Mail, CSI style. The only problem with that is that all the victims on CSI are fucking dead.

According to a report from the Asia Pacific Foundation, Canada has become a nation of expatriates. Nearly three million Canadians – 9 per cent of our population – live and work overseas.

Most of these expatriates are in the United States, but you can find Canadians everywhere: on oil rigs offshore in Ghana, in NGOs in African villages, hunkered down at United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and in brokerage houses in Frankfurt, London and Beijing. Increasing numbers of our expatriates were born outside Canada, came to this country and now have moved on, taking their citizenship with them.

Canadians who stay at home are having trouble figuring out whether these expatriates qualify as “real” Canadians or just as “Canadians of convenience.” Should they be able to vote in our elections? Shouldn’t we make them pay taxes? And if they come back, do we welcome them home or wish they went back where we think “they belong”?

You know what? I follow politics and culture pretty closely, and I've never heard anyone ever bothering to figure out these things, let alone have trouble doing so. Not once.

I was away a long time in Britain and the States, it’s true, but I kept coming back, writing for Canadian newspapers, broadcasting on the CBC, summers teaching at Banff, lectures everywhere, writing several books on Canadian themes. I kept my Canadian identity up to date, just as I kept renewing my passport.

It was when I decided to go into politics that coming home turned into a war. All politics is local, and the question then became, “Are you one of us?” I spent five years fighting to prove I belonged, while my opponents stopped at nothing to prove I didn’t. Just in it for myself. Just visiting. Not here for you.

There was a weird insinuation: Why would anyone come home, unless you were in it just for your self?

That is such an adorable interpretation of what happened that I wish that I currently had a woman in my life that could crochet it onto a throw pillow for me. It's just so ... precious!

As ugly and mean as the "Just Visiting" ads were (which I say because there was hardly a shortage of other, issues-based fronts to attack Iggy on), they were effective because they established a narrative. And that narrative wasn't "expatriates are bad or somehow foreign", although Michael Ignatieff did self-identify as both British and American when he was in those countries, and he did so on television, which is known to be videotaped from time to time.

Ignatieff's communications team did try to spin it that way, comparing him to, among others, Neil Young and Jim Carrey, both of whom had found fame and fortune abroad. But all they managed to prove was that Ignatieff had the worst communications staff in the history of politics. When he finally got around to firing them in the fall of 2009, he was seen as weak for not actually having them murdered, and all he got for his trouble was a ramping up of the Liberal civil wars.

Neil Young left Canada in 1966 - and actually became the world's first undocumented rock star, not having a passport until after his first solo album came out - but he pointedly did not come back in 2005 with the idea in his head that we should turn the keys to the country over to him. And that's pretty much what happened in Ignatieff's case.

The loser trioka that came a-calling to Harvard to entice young Iggy away did so because they sensed that Paul Martin's leadership was on its last legs. That turned out to be the last correct political calculation they ever made. Once he had visions of being the next Trudeau placed in his head, Ignatieff cut the legs out from under a sitting Liberal MP in Etobicoke-Lakeshore and, within a mere year of his coming home, declared for the Liberal leadership. It should be noted that in the 140 some-odd years prior to 2005, only one Liberal leader had failed to become prime minister of Canada.

Just Visiting wasn't about xenophobia, it was about opportunism.That's why it was so effective, irrespective of how low-brow and silly it was. But it was an inescapable conclusion, and I think that Iggy knows it. Never once does he mention the political opportunism, real or perceived, that was the driving factor in the effectiveness of those ads. In ignoring that, he seems to think that anyone who would believe it is just stupid, or even bigoted. And I have yet to see anyone redeem themselves in they eyes of those that have repudiated them by calling them stupid or bigoted.

Worse, he's trying to do so based on the talking points of a communications team that so poorly served him that they were were all fired nearly two years ago.

It's almost as if he wants to be the University of Toronto professor that hopes his students forget their own immediate history. Let a thousand flowers bloom, indeed.