Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  I was now nominated, possibly the most controversial candidate in the Toronto area. Over the next fifty-five days, my campaign team—a mixture of downtown lawyers, computer whiz kids and local community people—tried to turn me into a competent politician. It wasn’t easy. I must have been a comic sight when I began canvassing door to door, believing that every voter deserved a Socratic dialogue of many minutes’ duration. My team would roll their eyes and drag me away to the next house.

  Without realizing it at the time, I had passed through the looking glass into the unique psychic world of anyone seeking public office. I was about to spend the next five years of my life in a state of constant dependence on the opinion of others. A French writer of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan, once called a nation “a daily plebiscite,” and for those seeking public office, democracy is exactly that, a daily plebiscite where you assess, every second of the day, how people look at you in the street, how they greet you when you come up and shake their hand, how they react when you come down the aisle of an airplane and settle into your seat.8 Nobody who has not run for office can quite understand how dependent you become on this daily plebiscite, on the cues, the smiles of recognition, frowns of disapproval that citizens send you when you are out in the public square. I counted on it more than I counted on the polls. The former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, was reputed to have said, hundreds of times a day as he progressed through New York City, “How’m I doin?”9 Now I understood that this was indeed the question. How am I doing? How do you think I am doing? My own answers to this question scarcely mattered. I put my fate in the hands of everyone I met. I had no idea how completely this ongoing, minute-by-minute scrutiny by my fellow citizens would take me over and begin to shape my sense of my own worth.

  As I canvassed for votes in the shopping malls, apartment blocks and snowy suburban streets of Etobicoke–Lakeshore, I would search every face for signs of support, learn to evaluate subtle cues of indecision, evasion or outright rejection. People, by and large, are astonishingly polite to canvassing politicians, but they also send you signals. The man who takes your flyer through the window of his car, then rolls it up and drives on, is telling you he’s never going to vote for you in a million years. The woman drying her hands on her apron when she comes to the door, but stays to hear your pitch, just might come over; the old man who tries to get you inside to have a good chat is just lonely; the young woman who pops her earphones out of her ears at the subway stop and nods approvingly when you make your pitch about funding higher education is going to vote for you, if she actually remembers to show up on election day. I began to understand who my natural constituency was and who was beyond my reach. We had support among young people, educated professionals and minority groups, but we were losing out to the Conservative Party in the wealthier districts in the riding, among the houses with the big driveways, and we were having to compete hard with the New Democratic Party, to the left of us, to hold unionized workers and poorer households in the south of the riding. We were the party in the middle, and we’d run the country for most of the twentieth century by owning the middle ground, but I could feel our support bleeding away from both sides.

  We took over a disused bank at a busy intersection as our headquarters—I had a windowless cupboard to myself in the basement vault—and the place was soon swarming with campaign workers. If you love politics, campaign offices are wonderful places. It is organized chaos: half-drunk cups of coffee everywhere, the remains of Chinese take-away and pizza strewn on tables, Hungarian soup prepared by my wife, perfect strangers streaming in and out, press hanging around waiting for an interview, young pols in back rooms filled with maps, marked in colours to denominate friendly from enemy territory. We even had a minister of the church, Rob Oliphant, who was to become a fine member of Parliament himself, drop by the office regularly to offer spiritual advice, especially to me. The core of the operation were the “data monkeys,” young men and women, grey-faced and sleep deprived, staring at the canvassing returns on computers, figuring out, in the murk of battle, where we stood.

  In the chaos of that disused bank, I saw, for the first time, what a political party could be. In a time of social fragmentation, where we are ever more walled off by class and income, race, religion and age, where so many people live alone, where the public square feels deserted, a political party is the place where strangers come together to defend what they hold in common and to fight in a common cause. Whenever the canvassers would flood in and be handed their polling sheets, before they went out to knock on doors in the snowy streets, I would stand on a rickety chair in the middle of the room and tell them that they represented not just me or their party. They represented the best of the country. A political campaign like ours broke down the barriers of race, ethnicity and class that keep us separate. I had never worked with such astonishing diversity: the Ahmadiyya Muslims, led by a Pakistani military man, Major Khalifa, who flocked in to leaflet the riding at night; the Italian carpenters who hammered in the lawn signs; the Caribbean communities who had supported my predecessor, Jean Augustine, and now, at first hesitantly, came out to work for me; the students and young lawyers, led by Brad Davis, Milton Chan, Mark Sakamoto and Sachin Aggarwal, drawn into my campaign because of the chance it gave for their generation to renew their party; the magnificently robed Somali women from the Maybelle, a multi-storey housing project in the north of the riding; Polish Catholics who managed to reconcile their faith with our party positions in favour of gay marriage and abortion; some Ukrainians, including the pastor of a local church, Father Terry, who stood against the hostile tide in their own community; and a phone bank of canvassers who made their pitch for our party in a babble of a dozen different languages.

  Certain individuals stood out. Steve Meganetty, the “sign guy,” a tall, white-haired man in jeans with a deadpan drawl, plastered the whole constituency with our election signs. He was a long-time party veteran who drove an hour and a half each way from his home in Niagara to help me out. He was sick of the party infighting that had broken out when the current prime minister, Paul Martin, had forced out his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, in 2003. Since that time, a once-great national institution had fragmented into warring clans. When I asked Steve why he came down every day to work for me, he said simply, “I want my party back.”

  Then there was Baljit Sikand, a warm-hearted Sikh man who always sported amazingly stylish and highly coloured turbans and who ran the Bloomingdale Limousine Service, with dozens of drivers, from a small cabin beside a greenhouse in Etobicoke. If you had Baljit on your side, you had a sizeable portion of the local Sikh community, and you also had the benefit of the unparalleled local intelligence that anyone who runs a taxi and limousine service in a community is bound to acquire.

  It was a December-January campaign and I did three canvasses a day, dressed in a parka I had once bought for a trip to the Arctic, together with snow boots, snow pants, toque and gloves. The sun went down at 3:30 p.m., so we slogged through the snowy streets in the dark, my canvass team and I, determined to show that the “carpetbagger,” the “parachute candidate,” as my opponents were calling me, could earn it the hard way.

  We knocked on thousands of doors, and I still remember some of the encounters. There was the lady who came to the door, drying her hands on her apron, with a little boy in tow. “Brian here has asthma,” she said. “What are you going to do to get the pollution out of the air?” I did my best, half-frozen in her doorway, to give her an environmental platform she could believe in, but as she went back inside to finish getting Brian his supper, I wondered whether I had made the sale, and I felt the gulf that separates voters’ preoccupations from the rhetoric of policy platforms. But I also began to understand, from this encounter and a hundred others, that I was doing politics for her.

  A young couple in tears opened the door on Christmas Eve, and when I said I would come back later, they beckoned me in and told me they had just returned from a funeral for their nephew. He had be
en out with some friends when they had been caught in a sudden exchange of gunfire between two drug gangs. Their nephew, barely twenty years old, had been struck in the back by a stray bullet and killed instantly. I went to the memorial service for him down at City Hall several weeks later. When, in Parliament, we led the fight against the government’s attempt to dismantle Canada’s gun laws, I was standing up for those grief-stricken constituents I had met on Christmas Eve.

  Politics at the doorstep also give you the measure of the divided worlds that it is a politician’s job to reach across. I remember an elegant woman in a baronial doorway at the end of a winding driveway, questioning me on the party program and then dismissing me by saying she couldn’t possibly vote for any party that would raise her taxes. Then there were the miserable, unlit, stinking apartment buildings where immigrant families would not open their doors, and those poor young adults who did were half-naked, tattooed, eyes wide open with crack and gone to the world.

  Our local campaign drew support from Liberals across Toronto, and as we gained in experience, we gained in enthusiasm. The national trend, however, was going the other way. We had gone into the election thinking our party would win. The Liberal government had cut the deficit, and our methods of restoring fiscal discipline in the 1990s, however brutal, were admired worldwide. The economy was growing and the prime minister was widely credited with creating the conditions for sustained prosperity. But we had been in power for thirteen years and both the party and the government were visibly tired. We were also tarnished. In the wake of the 1995 referendum that had almost resulted in a victory for Quebec separatism, the government had authorized a program to sponsor events in Quebec that would boost the image of Canada in the minds of Quebeckers. Some of the money, millions of dollars in fact, had found its way into the wrong hands, and half a dozen crooked operatives had skimmed some into their own pockets. The prime minister had ordered an inquiry and guilty parties had gone to jail, but the Conservatives were baying for our blood over the “sponsorship scandal” and the public seemed to be agreeing with them.

  In the middle of the election campaign came a thunderclap. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties, announced an investigation into whether the Liberal minister of finance had leaked market-shifting information to brokers and investors in the stock market. The accusation was absurd and the police eventually acquitted him of all blame, but once the police stepped into the election campaign and announced their investigation, an unprecedented interference in a national election, our lead in the national polls evaporated.

  Ten days before election day, the “data monkeys” came to me with long faces, saying we were running behind. The Conservative Party was beginning to surge. So confident had they become that Stephen Harper, the leader of the party, came to the big Ukrainian cathedral in the riding and called on the assembled crowd to “send Ignatieff back to Harvard.” We summoned an army of canvassers and I knocked on doors from eleven in the morning until nine thirty at night, while my wife manned the phones at the constituency office and cooked meals to keep us going. On the final weekend of the campaign, the Liberal Ukrainian faction disgruntled at my candidacy walked into the Conservative headquarters in the riding and switched their support to my opponent, whereupon the New Democratic national leader, Jack Layton, sent out thousands of robo-calls baldly announcing that our campaign was disintegrating and that all progressive voters should come over to them. All in all, it was a wild end to the campaign.

  On election night, January 23, 2006, against expectations and thanks largely to the influx of nearly five hundred canvassers, we won handily in Etobicoke–Lakeshore. I had learned the simplest lesson in politics: show them you want it. We showed them, and the people gave me their support. It is a strange, ennobling experience to be given such a vote of confidence and trust from thousands of fellow citizens. Up to that moment, I had spoken only on behalf of myself. I had been responsible only for my family and myself. Now I had to speak for strangers and be responsible to them.

  In the packed basement of the Hollywood, a local discotheque and dance bar, with television cables laid across the floors and the lights glaring, I thanked these perfect strangers, my fellow citizens and also the hundreds of volunteers who had made victory possible. Zsuzsanna had copied out a Hungarian poem for me to read if I won, and I liked the sober and simple message it sent. Ian Davey, one of the men in black, whispered, “Lose the poem”: I read it anyway, József Attila’s final lines of “By the Danube”:

  I want to work. It’s hard for human nature

  To make a real confession of all that we’ve done.

  The Danube, which caresses the past, present and future,

  Has pulled us in, tenderly, as its swift waters run.

  From the blood of our fathers shed in former wars

  Flows peace, a common memory and mutual regard,

  To put order in our common affairs: this is our task.

  And it will be hard.10

  It was an odd thing to read out in that noisy basement discotheque, packed with waving supporters and journalists, and almost certain to confirm the impression that I was an intellectual landed from outer space, but I didn’t mind. “Putting order in our common affairs” became one of the ways I used to define my vocation in politics in the years ahead.

  Barely an hour later, still in the basement of the Hollywood, we all watched as the polls closed and the voters across the country gave Stephen Harper and the Conservatives a narrow victory. They had a plurality of seats and votes, but not enough to command a majority in the House of Commons. Just as I was adjusting to this reversal of fortune, and realizing that my political career would actually begin on the opposition benches of Parliament, Prime Minister Martin appeared on television to concede defeat and announce that he was resigning as party leader. A leadership campaign for his successor would begin immediately. The camera crews and journalists who had come to see whether the “parachute candidate” could land safely were now crowding around asking me whether I would be a candidate in the race. If so, the journalists implied, I would be the front-runner. In a blaze of camera lights, Fortuna had taken charge of my life.

  I barely remember the weeks that followed, apart from coming up to Parliament for the first time, attending the first meeting of the Liberal caucus and listening while departing and defeated MPs spoke to their caucus colleagues for the last time. We who had survived should have listened more carefully to those defeated colleagues. We thought the Conservative victory was temporary. We, the natural governing party, would be back soon. We kept reassuring ourselves with the idea that we had been sent to “the penalty box.” Defeat was merely a time out. That was my first lesson in the encapsulating effect of illusion in politics, how everyone ends up saying the same thing, even though it happens to be wrong. Our defeated colleagues, some in tears as they remembered their time in office, seemed to know better. They were saying, “You may not realize it now, but you are headed off into the wilderness.” Little did we know how far ahead the desert sands of opposition stretched out in front of us.

  In the weeks before the new Parliament was convened into session and I had to take my seat for the first time, the men in black reappeared and we met to figure out how to run a national campaign for leadership. We had assumed the race would be years ahead, and now it was right in front of us, with a national convention designated for Montreal in December. There would be forty-five hundred delegates, elected in the 308 ridings across the county, and they would choose the next party leader at the Montreal convention in a secret ballot. We did not know it then, of course, but this would prove the last time in our politics that a leader would be actually selected at a delegated convention like this. It promised to be a raucous and hotly contested affair, and we had to get ready. Volunteers were signing up for the fight, and money—we would need millions—was beginning to come in. This was no time for me to play Hamlet. Was I in?

  Nothing had turned out as we had expected, but Zsuzsanna and
I both understood that we had come back for this and that, despite my lack of political experience, we might never have a better opportunity. So we were in. Truth be told, I felt like a trainee skier starting a descent at the top of a black diamond run. I could hear the ice beneath my skis and I could feel the downward momentum of acceleration. But I told myself I had taken the chair to the top of the hill. Now I had to get myself safely down.

  Eight weeks after winning my first election as a member of Parliament, having only just sworn my oath as an MP, I announced my candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Ahead of me stretched nine months of a transcontinental leadership race that would take me to every part of the country, and to places inside me I had not known existed.

  FOUR

  READING THE ROOM

  THE SHEER PHYSICAL CHALLENGE of a national leadership campaign in a country our size began to sink in. We are, after all, the largest democracy by size in the world, a vast country of six time zones, five regions and two official languages. The leader of the party was to be chosen in December in Montreal by delegates nominated by about sixty thousand members in each of the 308 ridings, spread across five thousand kilometres of the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from north of the Arctic Circle to the American border. To win the leadership, I would have to win over a majority of these delegates, whether they lived on aboriginal reserves up north, in fishing out-ports down east or in fancy apartment towers on the west coast. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres and thousands of handshakes, parleys, late-night negotiations, deal-making meetings and fundraising rallies lay ahead.

  In the weeks that followed my own announcement, twelve candidates entered the race, experienced men and women who had held elective office and served as ministers in government. All of them knew more about politics than I did. It was a strong field and it included Ken Dryden, the former goaltender of the Montreal Canadiens; Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker who had bested separatist nationalists in debate in the 1990s; and last but not least, my childhood friend Bob Rae, who had left the New Democratic Party and joined the Liberals in order to contest the leadership.