Ignatieff Appeals To Old School Liberals

National Post reader Angelo Zenga generously nominated me for prime minister of Canada in a letter to the editor last week. I appreciate the compliment, but the campaign consultants can quit working on their Power Point sales pitches: I'm not running.

Mr. Zenga was responding to the rumours swirling about Michael Ignatieff as a potential candidate for the Liberal leadership. I possess no special insight into the mind of the new University of Toronto professor, but I will venture this guess: He's not running either, not really or anyway not for long.

And yet I can understand why numerous Liberals are attracted to the hope of an Ignatieff candidacy. Michael Ignatieff is a man of ideas -- a commodity of which today's Liberal party is utterly bereft.

Many Liberals remember the Trudeau years nostalgically. Back then, their party introduced new ideas seemingly every week. The National Energy Plan, multiculturalism, direct government investment in private-sector companies, law reform, Canadian content regulations, regional development subsidies, wage-and-price controls, the "Third Option" in foreign policy and so on and on and on. Politics then was exciting for Canadian Liberals and even, as they saw it, ennobling. Their party stood for something more than self-enrichment and corrupt campaign practices (although of course even then they did plenty of both). Ignatieff conjures up fond memories of those vanished days. He represents to a certain kind of Canadian Liberal what Louis Napoleon represented to French Bonapartists after Waterloo and St. Helena: a dream of remembered glory in a shabby and reactionary time.

But could it ever be more than a dream? On the evidence: Not likely.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Liberals had a coherent vision of the kind of society they wanted to build: a united, bilingual society with a powerful central government leading the economy and redistributing wealth -- all in hope of building a nation strongly distinct from the United States.

The trouble is that the vision didn't work -- as the Liberals themselves had to acknowledge. Bilingualism did not weaken Quebec separatism. The powerful central government horribly mismanaged the economy. The redistribution of wealth laid crushing taxes on the Canadian middle class. Nationalist economic policies invited American protectionist responses.

Today, the Liberal party is a schizophrenic political beast. It has its real policy: balance the budget, oppose new social programs, keep Quebec in line through bribery and patronage, open the border to U.S. trade and do more or less as the Americans ask on security matters. And it has its pretend policy: invoke social justice, promise lavish new programs, spout poetry about Canadian unity and needle the Americans.

The party has ideals and it has policies. But it keeps each rigidly separated from the other.

Those Liberals who hanker after an Ignatieff candidacy imagine that this one man can somehow bring their ideals and policies back into alignment. Highly intelligent as Mr. Ignatieff is, however, this project seems beyond even his ingenuity.

In March, 2005, he spoke to a Liberal policy convention in Ottawa, (You can read his speech at www.goodreads .ca/lectures/ignatieff.) The thing that leaps to the eye is the way in which Ignatieff carefully balances seemingly irreconcilable opposites. He duly quotes the old adage that to govern is to choose -- and yet he himself painstakingly tiptoes away from choices. Thus he proposes a massive national commitment to post-secondary education -- while also calling for a more "sensible" level of taxation. He called for joining the American missile defence program while opposing the militarization of space. He denounced Quebec separatism while praising the highly centralizing Trudeau policies that gave Quebec separatism life in the first place. This approach to politics was cuttingly described by a Canadian poet five decades ago:

He skillfully avoided what was wrong

Without saying what was right,

And never let his on the one hand

Know what his on the other hand was doing.

The inescapable fact is that modern liberalism is an intellectual mess. It is not and cannot be a politics of ideas. It is a politics of the reactionary defence of things as they are -- spiced up by random give-aways to powerful interest groups. That is why it expresses itself so vaguely: It knows it cannot stand up to close scrutiny.

And here's a way to test the point, and without the trouble, expense, and ultimate absurdity of an Ignatieff-Frum election: Why doesn't somebody -- the University of Toronto, maybe, or Global TV -- invite the two of us to share a platform somewhere and debate whether liberalism and the Liberal party any longer have anything concrete to offer to solve Canada's pressing problems: stagnating standards of living, the weakness of Canada's democratic institutions, security in an age of terrorism, rising disorder in Canadian cities?

At the Liberal convention in Ottawa, Mr. Ignatieff endorsed "deep and passionate" debate. In recent years, the Liberal party has owed its survival to its success in dodging that very thing -- and to a canny reliance instead on insincere promises and the cynical stoking of fear. Would an Ignatieff candidacy alter that sorry record? I'd be happy to meet him in any public forum to put the proposition to the test.