Meet Canada’s John Kerry
by G. Wander

A prophesising orator that would be better suited to early 19th century politics, Michael Ignatieff is your grand dad’s politician. Unfortunately for those of us now living in the 21st century where a sound bite and 140 characters are the norm, we find ourselves often scratching our head and wondering just exactly when Mr. Ignatieff intends to get to the point.

In the venerable halls of Harvard he may have been comfortable hearing himself talk, but in the lesser honoured halls of the House of Commons his voice is often one of a person who is being diplomatic at the turn of every sentence.

It has been a long 18-months since Mr. Ignatieff took the helm of Canada’s Liberal party and many in Canada have yet to fully understand how the man that Maclean’s once named, “Canada’s Sexiest Cerebral Man” plans to lead this country through the early stages of this new century. Aside from the obvious Liberal party rhetoric on the environment, where they have proven themselves to be much more talk than action – we haven’t seen any unique platform points or an agenda that does not seem as though it was created by committee in a caucus meeting.

There have also been some fairly significant missteps. A proposed coalition that was buried before the dust settled in the prairies and support for the Iraq war while a professor at Harvard. In more recent weeks and months we’ve seen Mr. Ignatieff at once support a private member’s bill and within the same breath deride that very bill and send the MP to the back-benches for having proposed it. It is in these flip-flopping actions and in his lack of brevity when explaining his decisions that we see a resemblance to another very intellectual politician that had all the makings of a fine leader, but, lacked the understanding of the world within which he was running – that man was John Kerry.

The similarities almost end there, if it weren’t for the fact that Mr. Ignatieff has yet to run and lose an election to a well-oiled right wing machine.

We’ve seen attack ads being run by the Conservative party over the last few years, in fact, they started to run the day after Mr. Ignatieff formally won the leadership in May 2009. Some modern strategists would say that this would be a good time to address the attacks without addressing them. That positioning yourself as the new guy who is such a threat that the sitting government is willing to run attack ads when you have yet to receive the keys to your office could be seen to the public as providing you credibility in an instant. Instead, Mr. Ignatieff decided to let the ads air without a response. Letting them do exactly what the Conservatives had hoped; to fill the vacuum that existed. Little was known of Mr. Ignatieff in Canada among the citizenry outside of the handful of scholars and intellectuals who had followed his work over the nearly 30 years he was living outside Canada.

Without having run in an election, Mr. Ignatieff had already been swift-boated.

In recent months, he has taken an approach that seems disingenuous. With a bus tour across the country, hosting barbeques and doing his best to seem salt of the earth. Unfortunately for him, it’s a little too late to come across as the everyday politician, especially since nothing on his resume is ‘everyday’ at all. Canadians are not afraid of elitists; in some shape or form most of us consider ourselves to be part of the elite as it is. Canadians as a whole tend to regard themselves as above other nations when it comes to discourse and our knowledge when it comes to matter of government and politics.

The issue we have is with ineffectual leaders who bend more to their advisors and do not listen to their instincts.

Stephen Harper has portrayed himself as a counter-point to Ignatieff, as the hockey loving super-dad who gets his point across bluntly and quickly at the expense of eloquence. His own governing style is one that most Canadians find off-putting and to be deceitful and not in the spirit of good governance. Even with that being the case, he has managed to hold on to his job as Prime Minister with a minority government longer than any other Prime Minister in history has done in his situation. It is not because he is serving up long-winded platitudes and arguments, but because he is making decisions and sticking to them, and even when he does change his mind he convinces the public it was because of thoughtful consternation and not due to poor judgment in the first place.

Mr. Ignatieff nearly pulled the plug on the government in September of 2009 when the recession in the United States was in full swing and the opportunity to unseat the Conservatives seemed within grasp. Instead, he once again bent over to the polls and did not listen to his instincts. With the polls showing that Canadians did not want another election he decided to retreat, further tarnishing his image as someone who epitomizes the Liberal Party of the 21st century as the party of all talk and no action. Is there any coincidence that when the Conservatives had a chance to name their recovery plan, it was named Canada’s “Action” Plan?

That may have been the last chance that Mr. Ignatieff will have at winning an election, even if a minority. Polls always show that Canadians do not want an election. We almost certainly don’t want an election if we don’t have a choice in leaders that we can support; yet, when an election is called we perk up and start to realize there is an opportunity for a fresh new start.

It is not for Mr. Ignatieff to wait it out and hope we realize just how smart he is and how capable, the onus is on him to get out there and campaign properly and show us he can handle the job because if he waits too long, the Conservatives might just find a way to fix all the problems they’ve created in the last few years.

They say that to win, you should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This is something that should be a natural lesson for a man who has written over 15 novels and though he may be lauded by the critics for his prose, it is time Mr. Ignatieff realizes that he will only win a potential next election with poetry.

G. Wander is trained in the science of politics and the art of sales, having received his B.A. in Political Science as well as having done his previous studies in Business Administration. He worked on various campaigns for Members of Canadian Parliament and volunteered on countless others. He is currently a screenwriter and novelist with various novels in development. He is a self-professed socialist-idealist in his heart, with capitalist-facist tendencies in his head. In other words, perfectly balanced.