Ignatieff missed out on new leader honeymoon - Opinion

THE ENVELOPE from “Wood Lane, London, United Kingdom” that was delivered to members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery recently had Canadian Conservative fingerprints all over it.

It was a four-year-old article from the British leftist periodical New Humanist that detailed the split between Michael Ignatieff, now Canadian Liberal leader, and his liberal fellow travellers over the issue of torture in the war against terror.

Having supported the American invasion of Iraq and written about the acceptability of lower level forms of torture, the New Humanist article suggested Ignatieff had created the groundwork for more brutal forms of torture that the United States carried out in its offensive.

Read Also

Producers face the reality of shifting grain price expectations

Significant price shifts have occurred in various grains as compared to what was expected at the beginning of the calendar year. Crop insurance prices can be used as a base for the changes.

Many of his liberal colleagues in the article denounced his view as George Bush lite.

Welcome to the world of politics in the next election campaign, which the Liberals can trigger as early as October.

The Conservatives will portray Ignatieff as a disciple of American values, an outsider who was not in Canada for the formative debates of the past three decades, an intellectual removed from the Canadian reality.

Liberal handlers will try to portray the Liberal leader in a far more generous light.

This week, Liberals are in Sudbury, Ont., to discuss, among other things, whether to trigger an election for November when the public opinion polls generally (with one pro-Conservative exception) show voters poised to elect a fourth consecutive minority government with no guarantee it would be led by Ignatieff.

After a low-key summer during which he was much criticized by commentators for not offering Canadians a sense of who he is and a vision of what he would do, Ignatieff clearly has a problem.

Despite public coolness to the icy Stephen Harper, the new Liberal leader has not enjoyed the typical public honeymoon accorded new leaders.

Conservatives have been exploiting the fact that the 62-year-old spent most of his adult years in Great Britain and the United States, returning in 2004 when the Liberal leadership was opening up. “Just visiting” is the label they would like to tag on him.

Ignatieff’s recent family memoir True Patriot Love was an attempt to situate him as a Canadian patriot despite his many years away. It also identifies him as a member of one of Canada’s most impressively accomplished and connected families.

“Since everything about Canada was invented, everything about it must be re-imagined over and over again,” he wrote.

Critics say that of course Canada has to be imagined for the Liberal leader, since he was not here for most of the major national traumas of the past quarter century.

His support of the Iraq invasion and low-grade torture notwithstanding (both positions since recanted), Ignatieff had the unfortunate habit of identifying himself as an American while writing at Harvard University.

In small ways, the book reinforces the point. First Nations reserves are, in his writing, reservations, the American term.

And for those who will try to exploit his patrician past and appearance, an anonymous Liberal defender did not help by recently telling a reporter that Ignatieff is committed to Canada and his new job because he skipped his normal European holiday in July to stay in Ottawa working.

That should sell in Swan River.