‘I’m a human being’
THE ROOKIE Academic’s candidacy sparks reaction But approval moves him to tears
Who knew it was going to be this hard? Indeed, it has been so rough that all it took recently to bring Michael Ignatieff to tears was the sound of 12 people clapping.
In the midst of the imbroglio over his nomination as Liberal candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ignatieff, 58, walked into a room of supporters of Jean Augustine, the MP who bowed out on his behalf, and they rose to give him a standing ovation.
“ It made a huge difference to me emotionally,” he told the crowd, at the opening of his riding headquarters Sunday. Later he would elaborate: “ Look, I’m a human being. . . . It was one of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me.”
For the rookie, other things haven’t been so nice: accusations of being a “ virulent Ukrainophobe,” over comments taken out of context from one of his books; the ugliness of the nomination itself and the somewhat predictable fallout from the tall poppy syndrome. Expatriate Harvard professor, author once short- listed for fiction’s Booker Prize, acclaimed journalist returns home after two decades to run for office.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this when, on a late summer Tuesday in 2004, senior Liberals, mostly lawyers, gathered in the North Toronto living- room of Alfred Apps. They weren’t there to discuss the legacy of leadership, or so Apps insists because “ everyone was too sophisticated for that kind of conversation,” but they were intent on bringing in new blood.
Present were Ian Davey, whose father Keith was the storied “Rainmaker” for Pierre Trudeau, to whom Ignatieff has been compared; Daniel Brock, former assistant to Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and Sachin Aggarwal, Ignatieff’s campaign manager. Names came and went until Rocco Rossi, executive director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation who worked on John Tory’s run for mayor, let out a whoop: “ I’ve got it.” He said he was thinking of someone as well known in his field outside Canada as Mike Myers and Céline Dion. “We started guessing,” remembers Apps. “ It was liked a game of Clue. Suddenly, the penny dropped for me. Eureka! Michael Ignatieff.” And so it began. Over the next few months, they launched a campaign to entice Ignatieff to leave his post as executive director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard, move with his wife, Suzanna Zsohar, to Toronto and run for Parliament. Former Liberal cabinet minister David Smith played a role; party president Mike Eizenga asked him to be keynote speaker at the policy convention last March and he met with Prime Minister Paul Martin. And therein lies the first hurdle — whispers that he’s out to replace Martin.
“ Let me make that for the record very clear,” said Ignatieff, anger flashing across his angular features. “ When they came to me, make no mistake, at no time did they say this is a covert campaign against the prime minister of Canada. He’s the prime minister and he’s the leader of my party. This party has been plagued by fractionalism and by plots and it has to stop. The party has been rendered ill by its internal division.”
Hurdle No. 2, he has already elucidated. The Liberal party has more plots than Macbeth. Take the case of Bruce Davis. Davis, 44, a Liberal activist in Etobicoke-Lakeshore for 23 years, began his campaign for
the nomination over a
year ago, only to discover party elites had
other plans.
In contrast, Ignatieff
didn’t have to organize.
“ The team put itself
together,” he said. “ One of the wonderful things about this experience is that I don’t think I made a phone call.” Davis was blindsided. “ The party system has a way of trumping you,” he said yesterday, “and when you’re trumped, you’re trumped.”
After a flurry of speculation about what he would do — he said last week that he was considering running as an independent — he announced his support for Ignatieff yesterday, in a news release crafted “ after a lot of back-and-forth” with Ignatieff officials. He’s content with the decision not to run and says he’ll work hard for Ignatieff. Davis touches on another potential hurdle for Ignatieff — how much to sublimate one’s own beliefs to the larger cause. “ I think there is a change in terms of Ignatieff the intellectual leader versus the political leader,” said Davis, referring to their disagreement over support for the U. S.- led war in Iraq, which he opposes.
Ignatieff says: “ On Iraq, I have no regrets. I took them because I’d seen people tortured, gassed and murdered in Iraq,” he said, of a month- long journalistic trip for the BBC/CBC. “ Most Canadians don’t have that experience. I did and I felt I had to stand with Saddam’s victims. But if you’re in elective political office, you have different obligations than representing your own conscience. Jean Chrétien had to speak for the whole country.” One in an occasional series