Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  In September 2008, after two and a half years in power, Mr. Harper decided that his attack ads against our leader had softened up the electoral terrain sufficiently to allow him to call an election in search of a majority government. This is a prime minister’s prerogative, but in doing so, he reneged on his own promise to give Canada fixed election dates. In the campaign, we tried to paint the prime minister as a US right-wing ideologue. The real truth is that he is a transactional opportunist with no fixed compass other than the pursuit of power. In his campaign ads, he transformed his image from ruthlessly combative leader to a gentle, sweater-wearing hockey dad smiling beside the family fireplace.

  The election coincided with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the meltdown of insurance giant ICG and the worldwide destruction of savings, pensions and investments. Lonesome voices had been warning about the sub-prime bubble and the unsustainable ascent of housing prices, but no one was listening. The crisis caught the entire political class of the globe—us included—by surprise. We had been fighting our political games in capitals around the world, jockeying for power, and meanwhile, the dashboard of the global economy had been flashing red.

  In the face of the sudden global crisis, the prime minister’s political instincts deserted him and he misplayed his reaction, notoriously suggesting, as stock markets tumbled, that now was a good time to pick up some bargain investments. Unfortunately, we didn’t have anything much more coherent to say ourselves. We ran on a carbon tax, which, in the context of a sudden meltdown in financial markets, was good policy but bad politics. During my campaign for re-election in my own district, I received an education from the voters in the politics of climate change. One woman, backing her car out of her driveway, stopped, rolled down her window and said, “I have to pick up my kid at hockey practice every Wednesday at five. There isn’t any public transport out here in the suburbs, so all you Liberals are doing is jacking up the price of my gas.” She was locked into a high-carbon lifestyle and she couldn’t substitute a low-carbon solution, and she knew that even if you promised her public transit it would take years to arrive at the bottom of her street. Encounters like this are what make democracy a continual education for any politician. This woman helped me understand that carbon taxes will become politically palatable only when we solve our citizens’ substitution problems and make it efficient for them to shift to low-carbon solutions. On election day in October 2008, anxious and bewildered voters split their vote. They weren’t convinced by the carbon tax and reduced us from 103 to 77 seats. They increased the Conservative seat total from 124 to 143 but denied the prime minister his majority, believing that he had mishandled the unfolding global financial crisis. Voters gave Jack Layton’s New Democrats on the left eight more seats. The centre of Canadian politics was fragmenting in the face of the oncoming financial storm.

  In November 2008, the leader of our party, Stéphane Dion, faced up to the magnitude of our defeat and announced that he would resign and make way for a new leader. There would be a leadership convention to name a successor six months hence, in May 2009 in Vancouver. I wasn’t especially elated, since the state of our party was dire, but I declared my candidacy and set to work ensuring that this time victory would be mine. Only Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc, a seasoned young MP from New Brunswick, entered the race. It was down to the three of us.

  When the House returned in November, Prime Minister Harper surprised everyone by failing to bring forward any measures to deal with the gathering economic crisis. He ignored the meltdown altogether and instead proposed ludicrously partisan measures—including withdrawal of public funding for political parties—that were calculated to inflame the opposition. This was astonishingly combative and ill-advised political behaviour from a prime minister who was supposed to be a master strategist. Within a month of securing an increased number of seats in the House, he was provoking the opposition and jeopardizing his control of the House of Commons. For the first time in two years, he had given us a real opportunity to counterattack. But we were without a leader. Then, out of the blue, without consulting anyone but a handful of his loyalists, Dion announced that he had negotiated a secret pact with Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois to defeat the Conservatives and form a coalition to replace them. Normally an election would follow a government defeat in the House, but since there had just been one, the new coalition partners believed they could go to the governor general, the head of state, and seek her permission to form a government of their own. If that coalition could command a majority in the house, no new election would be necessary and a Liberal–NDP government would take over. The Bloc Québécois would not have seats at the cabinet table, but the coalition’s future would depend on their support in Parliament. The coalition agreement proposed a serious package of stimulus measures to pull the country out of recession. Dion published his coalition plan, revoked his resignation and announced that he would serve as temporary prime minister of the coalition government until the party reconfirmed his leadership at a convention. Nothing like this had ever been proposed in Canadian politics before, and it came as a thunderclap, especially to me. Although I was the party’s deputy leader, I had been excluded from the secret negotiations with the other parties. What I saw was a desperate leader clinging to power by any means, resorting to a coup de théâtre to survive. It might just have worked had he been an adroit and effective performer, but he drew only laughter and dismay when he presented his plan on national television, in a performance so poorly produced and so ineptly delivered that cruel wits called it a beheading video.

  It was an episode that serves to remind just how unfathomable behaviour can be in politics. Here was a principled political leader with a fine reputation for standing up to separatist rhetoric in Quebec, now making a secret deal with the leader of a separatist party. Here was a leader who had written eloquently about politics, now unable to explain the coalition in simple terms voters could understand. Here was a constitutional expert who failed to grasp that a coalition, however legitimate it might be in theory, lacked all legitimacy in reality. The problem was not a coalition itself. You can make coalitions among winners. The British Conservatives and Liberal Democrats showed how to do it in May 2010, and while that coalition has had a difficult ride since, there has never been any question of its legitimacy.5 In our case, it was a coalition of losers. The government had just increased its seats in the House of Commons, while we had lost seats. How were we to explain to the people that we were throwing out a government duly re-elected two months before? A prime minister defeated in the House of Commons would ask the governor general to dissolve Parliament and hold new elections. How were we—no small detail this—to persuade the governor general to call on us to form a government instead? Why wouldn’t she send us back to seek a mandate from voters? Would we have any chance of getting such a mandate against a government already howling that we were staging a coup? Why would voters support a coalition of losers who just months before had been campaigning against each other?

  I was aware as anyone else that unless progressive forces in Canada got together, the Conservatives could be in power for a long time. The NDP and the Bloc Québécois were political rivals—we’d been fighting them in the back alleys of Canadian politics for years—but I didn’t see them as enemies. Had we all come out of the election with more seats, I could have supported a coalition with the NDP alone, but we hadn’t. We still needed Bloc votes to survive votes of confidence in the House of Commons, and I couldn’t see how a party committed to national unity could allow its fortunes in government to be dictated by a party dedicated to breaking up the country. I didn’t agonize about any of this. It all seemed perfectly clear to me. The coalition crisis was one of those moments when I positively enjoyed the drama, since I knew what I had to do.

  Dion insisted I sign the coalition document, as all other MPs in the three opposition parties had done. I refused and then was ordered to do so. Refusing a leader’s d
irect order might have blown the party apart, so my colleague Irwin Cotler and I became the last members in the Liberal caucus to sign on, but only after I had made my opposition clear. By this time, the party was close to coming apart anyway, divided from top to bottom about the coalition deal. My opponent in the leadership battle, Bob Rae, had been in the NDP most of his political life and so the idea of a coalition with them seemed attractive. He also thought we had our foot on the prime minister’s neck and should keep it there. But most of the caucus thought as I did, and support for Rae, Dion and the coalition began to drain away. In mid-December, after polarized debates within the caucus, Dion realized that he no longer had the support to proceed, and he threw in the towel. Dominic LeBlanc announced that he had moved his support to me. Bob Rae then looked at the numbers and threw down his cards. The caucus of Liberal MPs and senators met and elected me temporary leader of the party, subject to confirmation by the rank and file at a party convention to be held in May in Vancouver.

  So here I was, leader of the party at last, in the middle of a full-blown constitutional crisis that had split us in two. Ahead of us loomed a vote of confidence in the House, moved by all the opposition parties. In mid-December, the prime minister, now cornered, went to the governor general, who allowed him to prorogue Parliament, thus enabling him to avoid defeat in the House of Commons. By this stratagem, Harper saved his government. We all went home for Christmas to think matters over.

  Over Christmas, the NDP leader and I met in secret and he implored me to defeat the government and then govern in coalition with his party. I can remember how eager Jack Layton was, how he talked about giving “a new politics” a chance. I told him that I would have difficulty bringing my caucus along. The problem was more fundamental than that. What kind of “new politics” was it when it had emerged, half-baked, from secret deals with separatists in backrooms? There was enough of a gulf between politics and the people as things stood. A coalition would widen this into an abyss. I had a very clear idea of what awaited me if I were to become prime minister in these circumstances. At every public appearance, I was sure to be greeted with a demonstration of citizens accusing me of stealing the job. We were also in the midst of what was rapidly developing into the worst financial crisis since the thirties. Opportunism may be a virtue in politics, but exploiting a crisis of this dimension was sure to earn us contempt. This was no time to test the patience of the voters, no time to assume that their cynicism was equal to our own. It was time to listen to the people when they said: save our jobs and stop playing games.

  I often replay these events in my mind, wondering whether I could have seized Jack Layton’s offer of a “new politics,” but I have concluded that we just didn’t have enough seats between the NDP and the Liberals to command a majority in the House of Commons: the coalition lacked legitimacy and stability. Some day in the years ahead, a realignment bringing together Liberals from the centre and the New Democrats from the left might well offer Canadians a credible alternative to the long Conservative hegemony. But it wasn’t there in December 2008, and it couldn’t be conjured out of a hat and sold to the Canadian people just months after an election in which they had sent the Conservatives back to Ottawa with more seats. So I turned down the coalition, not knowing that as I did so, I had just given up my one chance to be the prime minister of my country.

  SEVEN

  STANDING

  IN JANUARY 2009, with the cameras rolling and television comedian Rick Mercer helping me load a mattress off a truck and carry it up to our new bedroom, Zsuzsanna and I moved into Stornoway, the official residence of the leader of the Opposition, in a tree-lined suburb of Ottawa. Bob Rae showed up to give us a hand and everyone laughed when he unloaded our television on camera and dropped it onto the driveway. In this and other rituals we sought to stitch together our relationship and offer the public at least the image of a team of rivals. Too much had happened between us to restore our friendship, but he was professional enough to understand that we had to behave as if we were playing on the same team.

  As for Zsuzsanna and me, we’d never lived in a house so distinguished. Between 1940 and 1945, it had been the home of the Queen of the Netherlands, then in exile during the Nazi occupation of her country. In my study there were pictures of the Queen as a little girl, and every spring the tulips the Dutch government had given Canada as a thank-you present for giving a home to the exiled royal family would burst into bloom all over Ottawa. Over the fireplace hung a magnificent gouache portrait of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Liberal prime minister, a handsome and wily master of politics at the peak of his powers. I was now the interim leader of the party he had once led and I couldn’t help but look at the portrait and feel the eyes of the old master upon me. Stornoway brought home to both of us the measure of the office I had just won. We certainly appreciated the grand old house, especially the huge screened porch with the view over the back garden, and the family of raccoons that lived beneath it. On summer nights, the raccoons would wander out into the garden, and their regal disdain as they went about their business made it clear that they regarded us as intruders, which in a way we were. In a democracy like ours, the perks of office should always be modest, but the pleasures of Stornoway were very welcome, raccoons included. In the two and a half years that we lived there, it was wonderful to come home after our constant road trips to be welcomed by Josh Drache, Jerry Petit and Expie Casteura, our affectionate and kindly staff.

  In Parliament, I moved into the big office in the corner—where my father had taken dictation from Prime Minister King years before—and had my first meetings with my advisors, plotting strategy. By then I had borrowed a line from Prime Minister King, who had tried to skate his way through a divisive dispute over conscription in 1944 by saying, “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.” For me it was coalition if necessary, but not necessarily coalition. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien came to see me for breakfast at Stornoway and strongly pressed the case to sign the coalition deal and bring down the Harper government. You have to listen carefully to a man who won three majority mandates in a row, but I was surprised at his lack of concern about the problem of legitimacy. He seemed to assume the Canadian public would simply roll over and accept a coalition between parties that had once been sworn enemies. I simply disagreed. By this time, I was convinced that the coalition was useful to us as a political tool to extract maximum advantage from a government on the run. We wanted to keep the prime minister guessing as to whether we would vote for his budget or not, and thus to secure a budget we could support. In January, Harper invited me to a meeting to discuss ideas for the budget, and when I showed up in his office, I got the impression of a once-cocky leader now hanging on by his fingernails, rattled by his mistakes and worried that he might not survive the upcoming vote in the House. When he asked for our economic proposals, I told him that it was his budget, not ours, and he would have to take responsibility for what was in it. I didn’t want to go into coalition with him any more than I wanted to go into coalition with the other opposition parties. I wanted to hold on to our place as the big red tent in the centre of Canadian life where fiscal conservatives and social progressives alike would feel welcome. Our gambit worked. When the government finally brought in its budget in late January 2009, it contained the largest stimulus package in Canadian history, forty billion dollars that would be spent on infrastructure investment in roads and bridges, job-sharing programs to bring down unemployment, and improved relief for those out of a job. Before agreeing to vote in favour of the budget, however, we insisted that the government report to Parliament every quarter, detailing how the stimulus money was spent. We feared that they would politicize the infrastructure money and spread it around their own constituencies. Once they agreed to this reporting requirement, which one minister later admitted did something to keep them honest, we voted in favour of the budget. The other opposition parties voted against. The coalition was dead and buried. I had no doubt that it had s
erved its purpose. Because the government had been threatened with defeat, they had launched a deficit spending program that saved the Canadian economy from a depression.

  When President Obama came to Ottawa on his first foreign trip, in February 2009, the coalition crisis that had gripped our capital for two months had barely subsided. We met for thirty-five minutes in the VIP lounge of the airport, with Air Force One on the tarmac visible through the windows and secret service agents in raincoats and black glasses in every corner. Right away, he said, “I hear you’ve had a bit of a crisis up here,” with a wry smile. That was more than an understatement. Had things worked out differently I might have been meeting him as the prime minister. The president, newly inaugurated, was jaunty, self-assured and astonishingly at ease with his new trappings of power. The fact that he had inherited the worst economic crisis since the 1930s didn’t seem to weigh him down. He knew his brief, didn’t need cue cards and had a thorough knowledge of the Canadian political situation. He had a nice way of being both jovial and all business, and when I talked about the need for the two North American economies to keep their borders open and not succumb to the protectionist pressures that already were leading Congress to pass Buy America procurement legislation, I could tell he was listening carefully.