The backroom boys behind Michael Ignatieff

Today's Toronto Star has a profile of Michael Ignatieff (Unravelling Ignatieff by Linda Diebel, November 19). The article doesn't tell me anything about Ignatieff I haven't heard before, but I did find this passage interesting:

His supporters — and they are committed enough to make him frontrunner — portray Ignatieff, 59, as a 21st-century Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Thus, it was perfect that the man credited with a lead role in wooing him home from Harvard University was Ian Davey, son of Keith, the storied Liberal "Rainmaker." It's already legend how, in late summer 2004, a select group of Liberals, Davey among them, gathered in a North Toronto home where they agreed Ignatieff, internationally acclaimed author, broadcaster, pundit, should be the next party leader.

Later that year, Davey led an advance party to Cambridge, Mass., where Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Their conversation sparked a chain of events that included Ignatieff's keynote address to a Liberal policy convention in March 2005 and an exclusive dinner that June at Yorkville's Il Posto, where the big dog, Senator David Smith, Canada's most powerful Liberal, looked him over. He liked what he saw; it was mutual, and Smith would become co-chair of Ignatieff's leadership bid, with Davey as manager.

Ignatieff had it all: a record as a Trudeau Liberal in the '60s, dark good looks and an appealing mien of barely suppressed energy within his tall, lanky frame. He even had an agent, the canny Michael Levine, to arrange rare public appearances and create a buzz.

The myth grows. "It was Keith, an old friend of mine, who said, `He'd make a great prime minister,'" says Levine of Ignatieff's delivery of the Keith Davey lecture in 1998. "It's not that he didn't have that ambition," says political economist Stephen Clarkson. "He told people 15 years ago that he thought about coming back to become prime minister."

Read all of Linda Diebel's article.

After the Liberal movers and shakers decided to make Ignatieff the next Trudeau, they parachuted him into the Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding in Toronto where many of the riding association members were Ukrainian. The Ukrainians had hoped to nominate one of their own as the candidate for the January federal election and weren't happy that the party had sent in an outsider. The Ukrainians were also upset because in his book, Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism, Ignatieff had written some passages they considered anti-Ukrainian. My own background is Ukrainian and I have read Blood and Belonging. I also saw the TV series on which the book was based. I wouldn't say the book is anti-Ukrainian, but there is a lot scepticism towards ethnic nationalism. As Linda Dieble puts it in her Star profile:

It's fitting to seek the writer in the writing and so it is that Michael Ignatieff best describes himself. "If anyone has a claim to being a cosmopolitan, it must be me," he writes in Blood and Belonging, his 1993 book on ethnic nationalism. With his father born in Russia, his mother in England and a career spent outside Canada, he can't be expected to be an ethnic nationalist. He describes the essence of a rich, urban life without frontiers, but ultimately pegs himself as a "civic nationalist" who recognizes the role of the nation in providing security. Still, there is wistfulness in his observation: "If patriotism, as Samuel Johnson remarked, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so post-nationalism and its accompanying disdain for the nationalist emotions of others may be the last refuge of the cosmopolitan."

As I've written before, the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism isn't so clear-cut in the real world because even the United States, which is often described as non-ethnic "proposition nation" has a British cultural core, to which non-British immigrants have assimilated. I give Ignatieff some credit for recognizing the connection between liberal democracy and a shared national identity, but his support for multiculturalism and increased immigration make him just another Liberal in the Trudeau mould.

See also:

Michael Ignatieff wants to boost immigration to 350,000 a year

Eloquent letter writer challenges Ignatieff's proposal to raise immigration levels

Is Quebec nationalism "civic" or "ethnic"?

Technorati tags: Canada politics Liberal Party leadership Michael Ignatieff