Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  That’s why Liberals are in politics. That’s what we stand for:

  Hope, opportunity, environmental stewardship, international leadership.

  We have always had one other great and powerful vocation: unity.

  Look around this great hall tonight!

  Anglophones et francophones, tous ensemble!

  Men and women of every faith and race: tous ensemble!

  First Nations, Métis, Inuit peoples, tous ensemble!

  Westerners and Easterners, Northerners and Southerners, downtown and small town: tous ensemble!

  Tous ensemble! I cried, and my supporters in the great hall took up the chant. All Canadians everywhere, citizens of one great country, Tous ensemble!

  Down in the crowd were my oldest and truest supporters, the team from the Etobicoke–Lakeshore constituency. When other delegates had taken up the chant, one of my constituency people, an Anglophone, kept asking, above the din, “What does he mean? Tous ensemble? What’s he talking about?”

  I had meant we were all together.

  Zsuzsanna and I left our suite and went down onto the floor for the balloting. You cannot imagine the noise, the lights, the cameras everywhere, the microphones waiting for you, the strange ebb and flow of a convention floor, the conga lines of singing delegates, the strange collective madness of the crowd that takes over a big political gathering where a real decision is being made. The balloting in the convention hall took all afternoon. I toured the lines of those waiting to cast their vote and thanked people for support. We led on the first ballot, but more narrowly than we had hoped, and stayed ahead on the second, but rivals combined and by the third, I was behind. The fourth ballot would be decisive. Bob Rae had just been eliminated on the previous ballot and had to decide what to do with his support. I was on the convention floor with Zsuzsanna and we walked toward the Rae camp. Camera crews followed us together with a surge of supporters. If Bob were to endorse me on the floor, the leadership would be mine. We had known each other since childhood. Our parents were friends. That afternoon, I had embraced his mother, sitting with the family on the convention floor. We had been rivals at university. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship while I went to Harvard. When he was going through a rough patch, he came and lived on my couch for six months. He went into politics in the New Democratic Party and rose to become premier of Ontario before suffering a tough defeat. He was an able politician, a lifer longing for redemption. As far as he was concerned, he had earned his chance and I hadn’t earned mine.

  So there we were, suddenly at the moment of truth in which friendship and politics clash, surrounded by camera crews and journalists with microphones held out to catch every syllable, and the deafening chants of forty-five hundred delegates, alive to a decisive moment. As I stepped into the cordoned area where the Rae followers were gathered, John Rae, Bob’s elder brother, blocked my way. He had been Prime Minister Chrétien’s political confidant and manager for thirty years. I’d known John since childhood. We’d both been on the floor of the 1968 convention that chose Trudeau as leader of the party. Now we were face to face, and the question was whether he would reach out and shake my hand. If he did, that meant the Rae camp would come over to me. The leadership would be mine. Instead, he did something that shocked me then and shocks me now to recall it. He bared his teeth with the ferocity of an animal defending a lair, extended his arms, went into a crouch to ward me off and screamed, “Back!” I’d never seen a face so twisted with rage and anger and a strange and touching desire to protect. This wild, passionate, animal desire to win and the animal hurt at losing must figure in any honest account of politics. That was it. I backed away. If he and his brother couldn’t have it, I wouldn’t have it either. The Rae camp released their delegates and, on the fourth ballot, the convention chose Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker whose many qualities included the fact that he was neither Bob nor me.

  Once the result was announced, Zsuzsanna and I made our way from the convention floor, wading through the debris of confetti, discarded noisemakers and placards, toward a hotel ballroom where our shell-shocked supporters had gathered. I stood on a chair and thanked them but I can no longer recall what I said, because I only remember a young Quebecker, Marc Gendron, who had been with us from the beginning, crying on Zsuzsanna’s shoulder, and our calm and zen-like personal assistant, Marc Chalifoux, losing his composure and his eyes filling with tears.

  As for the two of us, we were dry-eyed in defeat. This was politics as it truly was, brutal, exciting and risky. We had done battle and we had done our best. As we shared a meal and a glass of wine alone in our hotel room above the convention centre that night, as delegates streamed home by bus and train and plane back to all the corners of the country, we knew we had done as well as amateurs could have done. We had tried but we had not been ready. If there was still another chance, we would stay and try our hand with Fortuna once again.

  SIX

  RESPONSIBILITY AND REPRESENTATION

  SINCE THE ROMAN FARMER CINCINNATUS left his plow to save the republic from danger, outsiders have stepped into the political arena and portrayed themselves as anti-politicians come to save politics from itself. I’d played the Roman farmer and I’d come up several hundred votes short. As I wound up my leadership bid and returned to the capital to begin my life as a member of Parliament, I had to stop playing the gentleman amateur. It never pays to pretend that you are better than the game or even to think that an amateur can beat the professionals. There are good reasons why politics is a game for professionals, for men and women who make it their lives’ work. Most politicians these days start their careers in their twenties as staffers and then move into elective office in their late thirties; they spend their entire lives in the bubble of the political world. I had assumed politics had a place for amatuers but I had been wrong. Outsiders can win—Barack Obama showed how—but he won, first of all, by learning his trade through those humbling years in the Illinois senate. Then, having learned the basic skills, he set out to beat the insiders at their own game by mobilizing an electorate—youth and minorities—that both parties had neglected and by using the power of social media to draw them into his campaign. When I was running in 2006, the astonishing Obama campaign was still two years in the future. No one had yet shown how an outsider could win.

  Our party had flirted with me as an outsider and ended up going with an insider. The new leader, Stéphane Dion, had been in politics for a decade. He had shown courage during the referendum on Quebec separation in 1995, debating the arguments of the separatists and making the case for Canada and national unity with flair and conviction. He had gone on to be a campaigning minister of the environment, though he had to wear the Liberal government’s failure to implement the Kyoto Accord on climate change. During the leadership campaign, I had challenged him on this during a debate in Toronto: “We didn’t get it done, Stéphane.” My punch landed and so there was not much love lost between us. He had won the leadership by siphoning away the youth vote with a strong environmental appeal and by persuading the party elites that they were safer with an experienced hand. Now, as is often the case in politics, rivals had to become allies. This, by the way, is much misunderstood by press and citizens alike. Voters find it morally puzzling that opponents can attack each other one day and then turn around the next day and begin to work together again. Where is loyalty, conviction and principle in all this? As Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln shows, parties cannot hold power successfully unless competitors put mutual dislike aside, at least publicly, and learn to function as a “team of rivals.”1 Much pride and hurt must be swallowed in the process, but sometimes, as in the case of Lincoln, rivals come to admit—how rare this is—that their rival actually deserved his status as the first among equals.

  I didn’t feel much rancour in defeat, but I also knew that long years of opposition stretched ahead, working for a leader whose basic political instincts did not strike me as immediately convincing. O
ne option was simply to fold my hand and decide politics had been a mistake. A couple of days after my defeat at the Montreal convention, the dean of the Kennedy School, who had been following my itinerary in Canada more closely than I suspected, phoned and asked whether I would like to come back to teach. I was touched and surprised but I explained that my decision to return home had been sincere, and besides, the people of Etobicoke–Lakeshore had elected me as their representative and I owed them some representation. Needless to say, I had other motives too. I thought the party had made a mistake, and there were quite a lot of people coming up to me in airports saying, “It should have been you.” On the strength of this and an instinct that I owed it to the people to stay on, I met Dion after the convention and demanded that I be made his deputy leader, a post whose only value was that I would lead the Opposition’s attack in the House of Commons at the daily Question Period whenever he was absent. Dion reluctantly agreed because he had little choice: he was a compromise winner with a weak base of support. Over the next two years, he did his level best to keep me out of the loop, and so, for all the fine speeches we both made about creating a team of rivals, we were never a team, just rivals. But it’s how politics usually turns out, and had I been in his position, I might have done the same. I was the ghost at his feast.

  My leadership team predicted that Dion wouldn’t survive another election, and so they urged me to wait my turn. We knew that at least one of our rivals, Bob Rae, would try again. We agreed to keep our leadership ambitions out of sight. Parties rightly punish plotters, or at least those whose plots are too public. Like a good soldier, I wiped the frown off my face and fell in behind the new leader. I applauded his speeches, gave advice that was mostly ignored, never raised the flag of discord and bided my time. Every morning in the frigid Ottawa winters, I trudged up the hill to Parliament, past the shivering drunks waiting for the Salvation Army hostel to open, and waved back at my wife, at the thirteenth-floor window of our condo. Over the next year, I toured the country giving talks to the party faithful in high-school gyms, living rooms and church basements, trying to sustain their motivation, and at the same time, my own. People don’t understand just how much leaders depend for their own morale on the rank and file, on their willingness to turn out on a rainy Friday night and give you a round of applause. When you are in opposition, all you have to keep you going is the party faithful. There are no spoils of office to distribute, no legislative victories or meetings with world leaders to recount. There is only faith, the belief that if we stick together we will win together.

  Besides rallying the faithful, I had to pay off a campaign debt of over a million dollars. We did it one fundraiser at a time, and it took a year of comic and not-so-comic interludes, like fundraising dinners with burly and well-padded construction bosses in Montreal, whose warmth and rough charm never quite erased my suspicion that if I were to cross them they might fit me up with a pair of concrete overshoes. Other fundraising moments gave me some inkling of what large amounts of money sometimes do to human character. One billionaire who had made his fortune in mining convoked me to a meeting in a snowy parking lot in Toronto one frigid sunlit afternoon in December. When I showed up, I looked for a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce, but there was only a decrepit cream-coloured Chrysler, vintage 1988, in the far end of the lot, and I circled it before I knocked on the window. The hefty figure in a parka burst out of the door and said, “We’re going for a walk.” I was dressed in my best politician’s topcoat, suit, tie and polished black shoes. He was dressed for a hike. We descended deep into a Toronto ravine and he barked questions all the way down the steep wooded incline. “Why do you want to be prime minister?” When he didn’t like the answer, he would bark, “Try it again. You can do better.” And so it went, stumbled answer, barked interrogation, all the way down, until he pronounced himself satisfied and we returned to the car park, me frozen solid, he cracking jokes and beaming with rude good health. So this is politics, I thought as I bid him goodbye at the parking lot and he got into his beat-up car and drove away. With strange encounters like this, I paid off all my debts.

  Besides paying my debts, I was responsible to the people who had elected me. Your awareness of what these responsibilities are begins when you take your oath of office in a wood-panelled room near the House of Commons Chambers on Parliament Hill. What surprised me is that the oath included nothing about the people who had voted me into office. Instead, as in all Commonwealth democracies like ours, I swore an oath to Her Majesty the Queen and her heirs and successors. The “heirs and successors” part stuck in my throat, since I think we ought to decide, when the current Queen dies, whether to continue to acknowledge her family as our sovereign. Even if we continue to do so, there’s a strong case for an oath that defines the basic allegiance of elected representatives toward their citizens. Other democracies have this. For all my very real admiration for Her Majesty, I didn’t believe I had responsibilities to the Crown alone. Our current oath of allegiance reinforces rather than reduces the gulf between the representatives and the citizens we represent. It seemed regrettable that I was not able to swear to uphold the Canadian Constitution and to defend the rights of the people of Canada.

  After taking the oath, I was entitled to take my seat in the House of Commons. In all democracies, the chamber where the people’s representatives sit is a magnificent place. It is so in our capital: the House of Commons has soaring neo-Gothic ceilings, magnificent stained-glass windows, and finely carved wooden desks with seats for more than three hundred members, facing each other across a green carpeted gangway. In the middle sits the mace, symbol of Parliament’s authority, and at the top of the gangway, the focus of all eyes is upon the Speaker’s chair, a veritable throne beneath the Canadian coat of arms. A gallery for visitors runs around the chamber so that the people and the press, who have their own special section behind the Speaker, can watch and report on the debates.

  The first time I took my seat in the chamber it was deserted, as it often is, and there was a lady vacuuming the green carpet and another one sweeping order papers into a black plastic bag. I sat there and recalled that this was where Winston Churchill gave the famous speech in December 1941 with the line that brought the house down: “When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their general told their prime minister, In three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken, [pause] some neck.”2

  In the Speaker’s office, just off the chamber, Yousuf Karsh took the photograph of Churchill that became his iconic image, cigar and cherubic defiance incarnate. It hangs there still and MPs come and have their pictures taken in front of it.

  I sat there in the chamber and thought that this was where Canadian leaders had debated the execution of the rebel Riel in 1885, the conscription crisis that tore English and French Canada apart in 1917, the decision to go to war in 1939 (two years before the United States), the pipeline in 1956, and how to confront Quebec separatism in 1980 and again in 1995. It was as if the words spoken in these great debates still hung in the air. No democracy has any health in it unless debutant MPs think of the chamber with awe and respect, and unless young citizens dream of taking their place there one day. In the lobbies off the chamber, where the members lounge about on sofas, making calls, seeing constituents or rehearsing their speeches, you can easily think you’ve just been elected to a gentlemen’s club, but when you enter the chamber, you remember you’re not a member of a club but the representative of the people. You’re there to speak for them.

  Every time I would meet a group of citizens in the lobbies of Parliament, I would tell them that this was their house, the people’s house. It was theirs, I believed, not just because their taxes paid for it and their votes had put me there, but for a deeper reason. It’s in politics that we define who “we” are. We create this “we” by making a thousand contentious decisions about how much to tax the people for the services they receive, how much to regulate this or that ma
rket, how much to placate this or that interest without compromising a public good. Out of a thousand such decisions, brokered compromises and deals in the corridors—many of them reluctantly entered into, with imperfect information, bad faith and not a little deception on both sides—a common life is stitched together that allows us to live with each other. We persuade each other to compromise and abide by the compromises we make. Compromise is impossible unless adversaries are open to persuasion.4 A person like me wouldn’t have left a good life in the academy to enter the House of Commons unless the romance of democracy had exerted a powerful hold on my imagination.

  In my years in politics, I did see democratic persuasion at work countless times in caucus meetings when my party colleagues would stand up and get us to see an issue as they saw it in their districts. Many times, these meetings would change my mind on an issue. I saw democratic persuasion work in union halls, church basements and town hall meetings. Citizens would get up at the mike and tell me how badly this or that federal program was working and I would come away determined to fix the problem if I could. They believed in their system of government and wanted it to work. So I wouldn’t say our democracy is in difficulty. It is alive and well in citizens’ hearts, or at least I believe so. Where it isn’t so healthy is in the place that should be the very temple of our democracy, the House of Commons. I can’t remember a speech I heard in five years that was actually meant to persuade, though I heard dozens that faithfully recited party talking points. The dead hand of party discipline meant that we all, and I include myself, did not so much represent the people who put us there as represent the party that kept us in line.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the hold of party discipline on political behaviour in a parliamentary system like ours. In my time in politics, my friends were Liberal, my colleagues were Liberal, my social gatherings were Liberal, and even when I got in line to board a plane to return to the capital for work at the end of a weekend, I fraternized with Liberals, not with the MPs from other parties who were lining up to board with me. It was only after I left politics that I realized, with an absurd surprise, that there were some pretty good Conservatives and lots of decent New Democrats. When we were actually facing each other in the House of Commons, we never wasted a single breath trying to convince each other of anything. The party whips had already decided the votes, and it was our job to shout down our adversaries or throw them off their stride with a good jibe. Small wonder that Prime Minister Trudeau famously said that off Parliament Hill most MPs were nobodies.3 I’d always hated this remark because of its arrogance and contempt for democracy. The trouble was, it had the sting of truth. As for solutions, they aren’t hard to envision: more free votes, parliamentary committees free to choose their own chairman and run their own business free of party discipline, reining in the prime minister’s power to prorogue and dissolve Parliament on a whim. This would loosen the place up, make it less predictable and controllable, but also more genuinely representative of the people.