O’Leary brushes off his ‘Ignatieff problem.’
Kevin O’Leary was on Global’s Sunday political talk show The West Block this weekend, and that in itself is already an interesting little factlet, isn’t it? We have all just witnessed a U. S. presidential election in which the television news industry was taken hostage, paralyzed, by the logic of television. Ninety- nine out of a hundred American news personnel would have agreed if surveyed, and would still agree now, that the nomination and the election of Donald Trump were unthinkable and dreadful phenomena. But viewers were helpless to turn away when he was onscreen, and thus television, considered as a collective, was equally helpless.
Even in criticizing Trump, TV could only magnify him. It made his person, in a matter of a few weeks, the lone issue in American politics. It is not as though five cynical executives sitting in corner offices somewhere made a conscious decision to obliterate all pre- existing political debate in the United States in exchange for big bags of money. (Probably.) It was a medium’s autonomic nervous system in action.
It is possible to think that Canada is safe from this sort of thing, protected by its size and its culture and the inbredness of its media establishment and maybe even the benign motherly influence of the CBC. From that standpoint, Global giving Kevin O’Leary free political advertising induces despair. ( Indeed, we must begin to consider whether bilingualism is our only steady defence against dubious international adventurers.)
I wish there were a way to characterize O’Leary’s appearance on the program as something other than advertising, but he was largely allowed to O’Leary- ize at will for seven minutes, complete with a softball question from Vassy Kapelos that basically boiled down to “Do you have any really cool tax ideas to tell us about?” Since he is Kevin O’Leary, I am not sure it would have been worse for him if he had been contradicted and resisted. That would just be even better television.
O’Leary used the airtime to roll out his solution to his Ignatieff Problem: namely, that he has been mostly truant from the country he hopes to lead, and for a very long time. As Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff did not think he had an Ignatieff Problem. I know, because I pointed out the problem before it helped to obliterate his political hopes, and I was inevitably shrieked at for questioning his patriotism, or for being senselessly parochial.
Pointing out that Ignatieff ’s feelings about Canada were not the issue made no difference. And when the Conservative Party of Canada made cunning use of Ignatieff ’s incredibly slight personal acquaintance with living in Canada as an adult, the Liberal brain trust had no good answer.
The temptation to defend O’Leary and to try living with his truancy, despite the Liberals’ Ignatieff experi- ence, will be irresistible for some Conservatives. It is gruesomely fascinating how well the two men line up. They live in the same part of the U. S., and O’Leary’s dreamy Conservative credentials as a loud famous business whiz almost seem designed to parallel Ignatieff ’s Liberal ones as a globetrotting intellectual.
What we learned on Sunday is that Kevin O’Leary may have an Ignatieff Problem, but he has a totally different strategy for handling it. Ignatieff ’s approach was to try to fix the truancy problem by actually moving back to Canada for a little while and enduring the role of an ordinary opposition MP. O’Leary’s answer to the problem is: “F--- you”.
All right, that is not a perfect summary, but it captures the spirit. Kapelos asked O’Leary whether his leadership campaign plans i nclude “spending more time in Canada.” O’Leary immediately said “I’m a global investor. I travel all around the world.” He noted that he was doing the Global spot while at an investing conference ( in Hollywood, Florida). “That’s what I do. That’s how I stay in touch with where capital is.” He went on to point out that he can “reach out to Canadians” by means of the Internet.
Ignatieff, in reckoning with his truancy problem, at l east felt the need to meet the expectation that a candidate for prime minister should live in Canada, even if that candidate had been off chasing glory in real countries for decades. O’Leary, in answering Kapelos’s question, cut this Gordian knot, burned the pieces, and swallowed them. In his mind it is not reasonable for us to expect him to be physically present in Canada, at all, as a candidate for prime minister.
A Conservative party member who cares at all for the interest of his party will notice that O’Leary’s myriad of brilliant ideas for improving Canada’s competitiveness could just be borrowed — or stolen! — by someone else, someone who is biographically eligible to be PM. If these ideas exist, they could presumably be written down, shared and discussed, incorporated into the party platform. If O’Leary wished to dethrone t he Liberal Satan without interrupting his important career as a global investor, one might expect him to do just this, as a matter of patriotic selfinterest.
Did you say “Ha!” too? That kind of talk is not for O’Leary. It does not suit his character, in any sense of that word. He does not bother, as Ignatieff did, to make ponderous speeches about how much he loves the version of Canada he may dimly remember or have seen from an airplane. That would be a display of disgusting weakness! A loser’s approach! What O’Leary is doing is offering a trade, and this becomes all but explicit at times in the record of the Global broadcast: give me power and I will rid you of Trudeau. Otherwise, I won’t lift a finger. And, by the way, you’re welcome.