Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  In trying to reach the public, my team and I decided on a strategy that tried to bypass the press by appearing at a series of open-mike town halls in college campuses, community centres and high-school gyms across the country. It was a high-risk enterprise since you never knew, for example, what that strange-looking man in the toque with a sheaf of papers in his hands might say when he got up to the mike, but it was a strategy that announced, loud and clear, I was prepared to listen and learn from my fellow citizens. By then I wanted to escape from set speeches and live more dangerously. Taking unscripted questions nearly every week from a live audience is the best way I know to learn the country, to know what’s on people’s minds, to feel the pulse. These open-mike town halls were great democratic events, but they took me away from the House of Commons, opening the door to an opportunistic attack from the NDP claiming that I was not turning up for work. But I believed in these almost weekly encounters and felt they were essential to breaking down the barrier between politician and citizen.

  With my parliamentary caucus, I at first struggled to find a way to handle the large egos of my colleagues, all of them frustrated at being out of power, anxious to have my ear, always vulnerable to the latest rumour or poll, febrile, skittish and liable to betray secrets to any passing journalist. Over time, I began to appreciate the caucus’s political savvy: here were men and women from every region of the country, most of them more experienced than I was, with the lifers’ virtues of humour, fatalism and hope that good news was just around the next corner. We would meet every Wednesday in the magnificent high-ceilinged Railway Committee Room of Parliament, with its gigantic murals of the heroes marching wearily back from the battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917. In opposition, it was easy to identify with these sombre, mud-spattered figures. For two hours, we would deliberate together, with some colleagues talking at the mike while others read newspapers, played with their BlackBerrys or shared whispered gossip and wisecracks. There was the usual quantity of hot air, common to all party meetings, but we all snapped to attention when anyone cut to the chase and proposed something of consequence. At first, I dreaded caucus on Wednesdays, but I eventually came to depend heavily on what my MPs and senators were telling me. They knew what their constituents were talking about back home, what they were picking up from the other parties in the lobbies, what the journalists were whispering. There were a few dire souls—we never figured out which ones—who leaked from inside the caucus: no threats of punishment could winkle them out. By and large the caucus stuck with me and I never had to face revolts or uprisings. By then, I knew how much I needed them. When I had to rise at the end of our Wednesday meeting and summarize our discussions, I was usually able to convey what all leaders have to tell their troops—that we must hang together or verily we would all hang separately.

  One emotion that kept us united was shared fury at the government we were opposing. As one wit remarked, they gave the impression of being less a government than a motorcycle gang. On the undoubtedly correct assumption that the best defence is attack, Mr. Harper maintained his grip on the Commons by constantly attacking the opposition and by using every rule in the book to maintain partisan advantage.

  We asked repeatedly for true estimates of the costs of Canada’s largest procurement decision, the purchase of the F-35 fighter aircraft. Marc Garneau and Dominic LeBlanc, our caucus critics, dug into American congressional reports on cost overruns and asked, over and over, when the government would tell Canadians what each plane would cost. There was never an honest reply, and in their failure to give us one they proved the plane was a bad buy for our country. Mark Holland, another caucus critic, pressed the government to explain why the cost of security at a global summit in Toronto of G8 and G20 leaders in 2010 had run to more than a billion dollars. Ironically, this was the summit where world leaders unwound their stimulus packages and where Mr. Harper led the chorus calling on Western publics to embrace the new politics of fiscal austerity. It was also a summit in which his government was guilty of unconscionable waste of public money as well as a security operation that violated the basic civil liberties of Canadian protesters. We uncovered millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money wasted in the G20 expenditure, some of it sprayed into Conservative ridings so far away from the summit that it had no conceivable justification. Gerard Kennedy, another of our critics, laid bare how the money from the stimulus budget we had voted in 2009 was shovelled into Conservative ridings, once again for purely partisan political purposes. In other words, we did our jobs as an opposition and the government’s sole response was delay, denial and dissimulation. Democracy can’t function if the prime minister and the government withhold critical information about expenditures from Parliament. Eventually, the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled the government in contempt for failing to deliver documents relating to G20 expenditure.2 The Conservatives’ contempt citation was unprecedented in the history of Canadian parliamentary government.

  We waged a similar struggle to force the government to release information relating to the transfer of detainees by Canadian forces to the Afghan security and intelligence services. Our Afghan allies were notorious for torturing prisoners. Knowingly transferring detainees to torture is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. For months Ujjal Dosanjh, Bob Rae and I pressed the government to enforce detainee transfer agreements to preserve the honour of our soldiers and the safety of detainees. The government concocted dubious arguments from national security to deny us any access to the documents we needed, and when we offered compromises, they concocted new fables. On this issue too, the Speaker, Peter Milliken, eventually ruled in our favour and found the government in contempt, forcing it to deliver papers to a special parliamentary committee.

  You would have thought that contempt of Parliament and contempt for democracy would be issues that would arouse the patriotic ire of citizens beyond the precincts of the chamber. You would be wrong. When I tried to make the parlous state of our democracy and the rancid partisanship of the government a major issue, most Canadians appeared to shrug. I learned that most voters have relatively little knowledge of the parliamentary system, small patience with allegations of democratic abuse and almost complete lack of interest in proposals for reform. The government understood this better than we did and played shamelessly to the public’s cynicism about Parliament by dismissing all our charges as mere partisan bickering.

  There was one moment in my time in Parliament, however, that suggested to me that the public’s disconnection from the House of Commons was not the whole story, and that there was also a deep yearning to see it restored to its proper place as the people’s house. The occasion was the solemn apology offered in the House by the government to victims of Canada’s aboriginal residential schools. These schools, opened in the late nineteenth century to assimilate Indian children, were run on contract by Catholic and Protestant churches, and to their shame, children were sexually and physically abused, beaten and scarred for life by their experiences. The schools were all closed by the 1980s, but at every visit to an aboriginal community, we felt the weight of the traumatic memories they had left in their wake. When Zsuzsanna and I visited the Stó:lō nation, a BC Indian community on the banks of the Fraser River, one of the elders told us, in a halting voice, about her experience of the residential schools and concluded, with a sad shrug, “How can you expect any of us to send our children away for education?” Successive governments, including our own, had tried to overcome this legacy. It is to the prime minister’s credit that he hammered out a financial settlement to the residential schools claims and arranged for a ceremony of apology in the House of Commons in June 2008. Representatives from the aboriginal peoples took their seats in the main aisle of the House of Commons and the galleries were packed with people from aboriginal communities across the country, many of them in the ceremonial dress of their tribe. Solemn speeches were given by the prime minister and by the aboriginal leaders on the floor of the House, but I don’t remember them well. Wha
t I recall vividly were the people in the gallery, leaning forward, the intensity of their attention investing the occasion with resonance and emotion. Afterward, when the ceremony concluded, aboriginal families streamed out across the lawns of Parliament and I talked with them, sat in their circles on the grass and listened as they talked about what the event in Parliament had meant to them: recognition and the promise of a new beginning. There was something moving—and also poignant—about the seriousness with which we took the occasion, especially since aboriginal Canadians have been deeply ambivalent about their political membership in our country. They were not accorded the vote in federal elections until 1960, and to this day they vote more frequently in their tribal elections than in national ones. Yet here they were in huge numbers, affirming their desire to have their historical sufferings recognized in Parliament. Those of us who worked in the House had become so habituated to the partisan bloodletting in the place that it came as a surprise to see Canadians reminding us what our Parliament was supposed to be for. The final irony of that day of apology is worth remembering as well. Since that June day in 2008, with its promises of renewal, precious little has happened. Aboriginal Canadians—and Canadians in general—are still waiting for their politicians to live up to the promise of that moment.

  Apart from this one moment, when we came together to remember and rededicate ourselves, a widening gulf separates citizens and politicians. The gulf is over the issue of partisanship. From a politician’s point of view, partisanship is the essence of politics. You join a team, choose your leader, issue a platform and then march forth to do battle with the other side. Partisanship means putting party line first and personal judgment second. Loyalty is the moral core of partisanship, the value that trumps all others.3 Once you become a partisan, you enter an information bubble of political positioning. You abjure the other side, do not keep company with them, and define them as everything you oppose. Partisanship defines the world you take as normal. As I’ve said, I had no friends on the other side during my time in politics. We never ate, drank or talked with people on the government benches. If you were found talking to someone on the other side while walking on the treadmill in the parliamentary gym, for example, rumours would start that you were thinking of crossing the aisle. In retrospect, this seems crazy. Had Liberals fraternized with New Democrats in our minority parliaments, coalition might have been less of a leap into the dark, but at the time, I felt uncomfortable about fraternizing with adversaries. In former times, so the old hands would tell me, members from opposing parties would dine or drink together when sessions ran late, and these rituals of conviviality reinforced the rules of civility inside the chamber. Nowadays, partisanship has degenerated from the rough-and-tumble jousting of former days to really venomous character assassination. From a politician’s point of view, partisanship is not some excess or disorder of politics. “Differentiation” is the nature of the business. The people deserve a choice and it is the job of a politician to present that choice in clear and necessarily stark terms. Dramatizing the choice, presenting it in shades of black and white, is essential if you hope to rouse voters from their state of grey on grey. If a politician fails to be partisan, fails to stick up for his team’s ideas and starts freelancing his own line, he’s not a politician, he is a fool.

  When seen from the outside, however, partisanship is what poisons politics for the public. The bitter exchanges seem to have nothing to do with them or their interests. For many voters, partisan politics is a hypocritical show conducted for the exclusive benefit of the political class. It was striking, at ribbon-cuttings, dedications and other public events, how we politicians introduced our colleagues so fulsomely, effectively turning these gatherings into a High Mass of self-congratulation. When plaques were unveiled or foundation stones were laid, we politicians jostled to be in the shot and made sure our pictures made the local papers. These are the sorry scenes that lead voters to shake their heads and conclude: “They’re only in it for themselves.”

  Voters also tell you that they hate the partisanship because it’s so insincere. They can’t believe what politicians say because politicians don’t appear to believe it themselves. Certainly, the voters are not wrong about this. Partisanship puts a premium on loyalty over honesty, repeating party mantras at the expense of sticking up for what you believe. Every politician who has ever lived has had to sell some snake oil. For those who believe the essence of the political vocation is to speak truth to power, hypocrisy is morally repellent. But it is often necessary. In the best lecture ever given about politics, “Politics as a Vocation,” delivered in 1919 by the German sociologist Max Weber, he said those who choose truth over loyalty are practising “an ethic of ultimate ends.”4 There will always be those who set their compass by such an ethic, but their careers in politics are likely to be short. Against an ethic of ultimate ends, Weber posited “an ethic of responsibility” that focuses duty on the question To whom am I responsible? If the answer is the voters, you can’t accomplish anything for them if you value your conscience more highly than you value their interests.

  Many of the voters I met, especially young ones, believed that politics ought to be true to the ethic of ultimate ends. I came to believe that my own conscience mattered, but party unity mattered more if we were to get power. Without power, we could do nothing. But there was a clear limit to what power could demand of you. You couldn’t afford to forget what the truth actually was, and if you did, you risked becoming a hack. Most politicians don’t knowingly turn themselves into hacks. You try to hold on to to your true shape as best you can, but there’s no possibility of keeping it altogether in the compromises politics forces upon you. My staff and I constantly debated, for example, whether we should take the “high road” or the “low road” in replying to the constant adversarial barrage from the other side, and sometimes, truth be told, we let ourselves get down in the mud with our opponents. Needless to say, when we did, we came up looking as soiled as our adversaries.

  All the same, the cynical charge, so often made against politicians, that they invariably choose expediency over principle, is simply untrue. I took positions as leader of the party that I thought were right even though they cost us votes. It was right to come out against the export of asbestos, since its uncontrolled use can be lethal, even though the position cost us seats in towns that mined it, like Asbestos, Quebec. It was right to defend gun control against Conservative attempts to dismantle it, though our position cost us seats in northern and remote communities. When I persuaded my good friend Larry Bagnell, member of Parliament for the Yukon, to vote in favour of gun control, there were tears in his eyes when he rose in the chamber to cast his vote; he knew full well that his vote might cost him his seat. And, in the event, it did. It was right for our party to refuse to vote for more mandatory minimum sentences and more prisons; on crime issues, we chose the politics of evidence ahead of the politics of fear. But it cost us votes. So if partisanship is the essence of politics, partisan interest did not always prevail. Indeed, if it had, we might have been more successful.

  I learned that you can’t take refuge in moral purity if you want to achieve anything, but equally, if you sacrifice all principle, you lose the reason you went into politics in the first place. These are the essential dilemmas of political life, but they are what make politics exciting. You can’t achieve anything unless you put yourself in harm’s way. Sometimes, I felt that voters’ impatience (especially among younger voters) with the necessary compromises of political life was a little easy and their disgust with politicians an excuse to justify their own failure to step up and get involved.

  A further dilemma that voters often failed to understand is that politicians who actually want to win power have to face both ways at once. To solidify their base, they have to be partisans. Red meat must be thrown to the hounds. At the same time, the politician has to reach beyond the partisan corral to those floating voters who want to be spoken to, not spoken for. A good politician has
to be simultaneously in the battle and above the fray. A great old Scottish politician once put it this way: “A man who can’t ride two bloody horses at once has no right to a job in the bloody circus.”5