An end to Ignatieff’s Canadian adventure

Who can blame him for leaving here, after all the taunts, tears and laments?

The day after Michael Ignatieff lost his seat in the federal election in 2011, two friends made a bet. One said that Ignatieff would return to Harvard within six months; the other said he would wait three or four years.

Now, after a sojourn at the University of Toronto, Ignatieff is returning this fall to teach full-time at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which he left in 2005 for his unfortunate adventure in Canada.

If he had wanted out three years ago, who could blame him? And now that he is leaving, who can blame him? What is there left for him in Conservative Canada except tears, taunts, cries and laments?

His political sabbatical was a disaster. He led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history — worse than 1958, worse than 1984 — becoming the third party in Parliament, unprecedented in their long history.

Under Ignatieff, the party went from official opposition to prospective oblivion. If the Liberals run third again in the next election, behind the New Democrats, there will be pressure from progressives to merge with the NDP, as there was in 2011. And that will be the end of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Ignatieff is a historian. Surely his place in history, even in the history of the country he is leaving, matters to him.

If the party’s over, it will be he who killed it. To salvage his reputation, Ignatieff has to hope that Justin Trudeau succeeds in 2015.

There is every chance that Trudeau will succeed — if only because he isn’t his anguished, dour and conflicted predecessor.

As Michael Ignatieff was no Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau is no Ignatieff. What Trudeau lacks in intellect, he makes up in temperament, which was ultimately Ignatieff’s undoing. He didn’t have the stomach for the blood sport of politics and it devoured him.

Ten years ago, then at Harvard and living abroad for almost three decades, he yielded to the siren call of a trio of emissaries to come home, where they seemed to think he would be immediately embraced by a lost people.

But it all went horribly wrong. Ignatieff ran for the Liberal leadership in 2006 as the front- runner and blew it. Later, having become opposition leader by acclamation, he tried to bring down the government less than a year after the 2008 election — in a recession. It was folly.

In the leaders’ televised debate in 2011, he could not explain his frequent (though legitimate) absences from the House of Commons — a question taken from a front-page story in the Globe and Mail, so obvious that Jack Layton was not going to ask it. Yet Ignatieff was surprised and could not give the obvious answer.

The poor man is brilliant, decent and congenial but lacks self-awareness and a political instinct. His big mistake was surrounding himself with untested advisers who did not know enough. Even today, some of them don’t get it.

Judgment, instinct. Days after his defeat in 2011, while many around him were facing unemployment, Ignatieff let it be known with unseemly haste that he had an appointment at the University of Toronto. It was insensitive.

Last year, he wrote an elegant memoir about his tortured political odyssey. Largely an exercise in plea-bargaining, it was artlessly honest, up to a point. But it would have been more credible had he accepted responsibility for forcing the election in 2011 for which he was unready. Then again, maybe he felt that he never would be.

So who can blame Michael Ignatieff for leaving this all behind — even if it were not for Harvard, where he can truly be the eminent thinker and writer that he is?

His decade or so in Canada has been a calamity for him and his party. He never looked comfortable. He offered love and found none in return. He wasn’t “just visiting”; he didn’t know the destination — or himself.