Fire and Ashes (10 page)

My campaign agenda had activist ideas on every subject: a plan for high-speed rail to link the Quebec City–Windsor corridor, where
60 percent of our population lives; a plan to help aboriginal reserves that were ready to leave the degrading tutelage of the Indian Act and create a new relationship of independence as equal citizens; a plan to revitalize federal investment in science and technology to offset the long-standing weakness of our private sector in investing in research and development. We wanted a national energy strategy to strengthen east–west energy corridors in electricity, natural gas and petroleum and to offset the predominantly north–south flow of our electricity grid and natural gas lines. My vision of how to get this done was not command and control from our capital, but partnership with provinces and the private sector, with the prime minister’s role being to map out a strategy, figure out where common priorities lay and then insert the crowbar of political will at the right leverage points to get it done.

The cynics will say that big thinking is a typical delusion of intellectuals foolish enough to try their luck in politics. This fails to appreciate the decisive role that ideas can play in defining a candidate, and in bringing people over to your side. Politicians must have special gifts for knowing when an idea’s time has come and for dramatizing those ideas so that citizens are gripped by the vision. When we released “An Agenda for Nation Building,” we had our fair share of catcalls from the press and rival candidates, but I could tell from the way young people came to talk to me after meetings, with well-thumbed copies of our little red book in their hands, that we were striking a chord.

Thanks to these ideas and an energetic cross-country campaign, I had made the running in the race so far. Now my rivals were waiting for me to stumble.

In July 2006, war erupted in Lebanon, and by early August, all of the candidates for the leadership were being judged by how well we positioned ourselves in relation to the unfolding crisis. It is worth pausing to reflect on how peculiar this was. None of us could have had
any conceivable impact on the outcomes in the Middle East. We were in opposition rather than government. At most, the issue of the war offered opportunities to appeal for votes in the Jewish community and the Lebanese and Muslim communities across the nation. However real the suffering was in Lebanon itself, it was deeply unreal as a political issue in a Canadian leadership contest. But politics is like that. Issues arise over which a politician has no actual control but which come to define whether he is up to the job.

When understood politically, the war in Lebanon was an opportunity to position myself. Positioning is not the same as taking a position. It is not about addressing the substance of an issue or producing a policy that responds to the complexity of the situation. No actual expertise is necessary in order to position effectively. Positioning is about placing yourself on a political spectrum, differentiating yourself from your opponent without alienating too many people in the process. To position yourself is to align your public stance to the constituency you wish to win over. You have to be strategic, meaning that you don’t have to say what you think but you must say what you intend. If you position successfully, you win support without appearing to cut your cloth to suit your audience. If your positioning fails, you will be seen to be pandering.

To put it plainly, my positioning on the Lebanon war was a disaster. In an unguarded moment, I told an interviewer that I wasn’t losing sleep over casualties in Hezbollah-held areas in Lebanon. I meant that Hezbollah had begun the war and had to accept the consequences, but my words were quickly parsed as cold-blooded indifference to civilian suffering. This did not go down well in Montreal, where there is a strong Lebanese presence. Days later, in a television appearance on Quebec’s most watched program,
Tout le monde en parle
(
Everybody’s Talking About It
), trying to repair the damage done by my previous
remark, I said that Israeli forces may have committed a “war crime” in their attack on a place called Qana. Once my words were translated and circulated in the English press across the country, all hell broke loose. What I meant was that the Israel Defense Forces, in a legitimate response to Hezbollah attacks, had engaged in indiscriminate use of force against a target that housed civilians. At Harvard I had taught the Geneva Conventions and I knew the distinction between a war crime and a crime against humanity. I didn’t believe the Israel Defense Forces had been slaughtering civilians. I believed they had used excessive and indiscriminate force. What Jewish community supporters heard, however, was that I was accusing Israel of behaving like the Nazis.

It’s not what you mean. It’s what they hear. I would not retract, because Human Rights Watch had confirmed the use of indiscriminate force, but I did reaffirm my lifelong commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself. Nothing I said dug me out of my hole. With a couple of ill-chosen sentences, I had managed the almost impossible feat of alienating Jewish, Muslim and Lebanese groups alike. I was aghast at the media storm that ensued, the anger and disillusionment from Jewish supporters and the way the controversy stopped our campaign in its tracks. The incident revealed the strange fact that the most divisive issues in the domestic politics of multicultural societies turn out to be international ones, in countries far away. Distant conflicts make communities circle their wagons, and a politician’s reactions are closely parsed for magic words of reassurance. Your job as a politician is to position yourself as the master of balanced understanding. I failed on all counts. After the furor over the Lebanese war died down, Ian Davey told me politicians have nine lives. Over Qana, I consumed eight of them.

It’s worth pausing here to reflect on what the incident reveals about the use of language in politics. If you’ve spent your life as a writer,
journalist and teacher, nothing prepares you for the use of language once you enter the political arena. It is unlike any word game you have ever played. You may fancy yourself as a communicator, but the first time you step up on a political platform, you can have the weird feeling that you have walked into Woody Allen’s film
Bananas
, in that sequence where the guerilla leader changes the official language of his Latin American country to Swedish. You leave a charitable realm where people cut you some slack, finish your sentences and accept that you didn’t quite mean what you said. You enter a world of lunatic literal-mindedness where only the words that come out of your mouth actually count. You also leave the world where people forgive and forget, where people let bygones be bygones. You enter the eternal present, where every syllable you’ve ever uttered, every tweet, Facebook post, newspaper article or cringe-inducing photograph remains in cyberspace forever for your enemies to use against you. If you find yourself explaining yourself at a press conference, you have already lost half the battle. In the case of the Qana incident, I had the absurd feeling that the missing context for my remarks was actually my whole life. Did nobody know that I had taught and lived in Israel and written the biography of Isaiah Berlin, a committed Zionist?
⁵
How could anyone have supposed that I was anything but a critical friend of Israel? But this was not the point. I had failed to understand how communities listen when they feel they are under attack. Isaiah Berlin and I used to talk about this. He would say, in jest, that the only real political question, when he was growing up in Jewish north London in the 1920s, was, “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” This is how language in politics is actually heard, not just by Jews, but also by any community that seeks recognition from a politician. The Sikhs wanted to know how I stood on the suppression of Sikh rights in India; the Tamils wanted to know how I stood on the brutal civil war tearing Sri Lanka apart;
Iranians wanted to know my position on the brutal theocracy in Iran. For the Jewish community, the bottom line had to be unequivocal support for Israel’s right to defend itself. I had no trouble whatever with this, but I questioned whether a democratic state’s legitimate rights entitled it to violate the laws of war. This shouldn’t have been the issue. Why should a politician take it upon himself to rule on an embattled state’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions? It was not my job. What the Jewish community heard in my comment on Qana was that I was questioning their right to defend themselves. No matter what I did after that, I could not recover the confidence of the community leadership. When Stephen Harper aligned Canada with the most intransigent of Israeli positions, I couldn’t rally support among those members of the Jewish community who believed Israel’s best guarantee of its security lay in a two-state solution. I had lost my standing, my ability to get a hearing.

In politics, as in life, the challenge is how you learn from your mistakes. Later on, after the controversy had died down, I gave a speech at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto where I drew the lessons I had learned:

What you learn from your mistakes is that politics is a game with words, but it isn’t Scrabble. No one who enters the political arena for the first time is ever prepared for its adversarial quality. Every word you utter becomes an opportunity for your opponents to counterattack. Inevitably you take it personally, and that is your first mistake. You have to learn what the lifers, wise with years of experience, have long since understood: it’s never personal; it’s strictly business.

As the leadership campaign approached its finale, the public debates among the candidates curdled into bitterness and acrimony. I remember one of the final debates, in Montreal in late November 2006, when one of my rivals, Bob Rae, repeated the old charge that I had some explaining to do on the issue of torture. If not, he implied, I could not be a reliable defender of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I was angry that a friend would repeat such a tired canard, and afterward, as we passed in the hall, he looked at me and shrugged. “It’s politics,” he said. He was right, of course. In politics, there is no such thing as good or bad faith.

You can try complaining about the bad faith of an opponent to the press, but they aren’t the referees. They’ve come to watch the fight and they want a good one. As one of them said to me, “Our job is to
watch the battle and then come down on the field and shoot the wounded.” Once you’ve been shot at, you handle all your interactions with the media with utmost care. You become strategic. You become as careful as your appearance, every hair in place, tie well knotted, suit immaculate, armoured for the day of battle. In entering politics you have to surrender spontaneity and one of life’s pleasures—saying the first thing that comes into your head. If you are to survive, you have to fit a filter between your brain and your mouth. When words are weapons and can be turned against you, freely expressing yourself is a luxury you can’t afford. Your language, like your personality, becomes guarded. You can still have fun. Indeed you must have fun, since everyone likes a happy warrior, but every happy warrior is a watchful one.

Obviously, a straight answer to a straight question is a good idea, and when citizens put a question to you, such candour becomes an obligation. They elect you, after all. The rules are different with the press. In the strange kabuki play of a press conference or interview, candour is a temptation best avoided. Be candid if you can, be strategic if you must. All truth is good, the African proverb goes, but not all truth is good to say. You try never to lie, but you don’t have to answer the question you’re asked, only the question you want to answer.

As you submit to the compromises demanded by public life, your public self begins to alter the person inside. Within a year of entering politics, I had the disoriented feeling of having been taken over by a doppelgänger, a strange new persona I could barely recognize when I looked at myself in the mirror. I wore Harry Rosen suits—and Harry himself had chalked the trousers—and my ties were carefully matched to my shirts. I had never been so well-dressed in my life and had never felt so hollow. Looking back now, I would say that some sense of hollowness, some sense of a divide between the face you present to the
world and the face you reserve for the mirror, is a sign of sound mental health. It’s when you no longer notice that the public self has taken over the private self that trouble starts. When you forget that you have a private realm that you want to keep separate from the public gaze, you’ll soon surrender your whole life to politics. You become your smile, the fixed rictus of geniality that politics demands of you. What that happens, you’ve lost yourself.

As November turned to December 2006, with the convention upon us, all the advice from the team was to play it safe, to cut down unforced errors, keep within the tramlines and never go off script. This may have been prudent advice, but it had the effect of draining me of conviction. I could feel myself becoming less inspiring as every night went by. All actors, and all good politicians, have the particular brand of stamina known as “keeping it fresh.” They keep finding a way to renew the role. Showtime for me—the round of delegate meetings and fundraisers—became a circus act more threadbare with every repetition. As the convention finale approached and our team, now numbering in the hundreds, was engaged in frantic last-minute phoning to line up delegate support, I found myself wondering what political life was doing to me. I had made myself into a politician, and I didn’t much like what I was becoming.