Authors: Michael Ignatieff
MY OPPONENTS DENIED ME STANDING
in my own country, but truth be told, I made plenty of mistakes myself. Having voted for the government’s budget in January 2009, our party developed a bad case of buyers’ remorse. Having turned down a coalition with the opposition, we were now in reluctant coalition with the government. Such are the miseries that befall centrist parties when in opposition. Trying to break free in September 2009, I authorized an ill-advised attempt to move a motion of non-confidence in the House of Commons and thus bring down the Harper government. Having supported them in February, I was now trying to upend them in September. The country was in no mood for an election, and the other opposition parties, led by Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, who had previously opposed the government, now gleefully propped it up so that I would endure maximum embarrassment. Voters punish politicians who look like they’re playing games or changing their tune. I looked like both and paid the price.
In the aftermath of this debacle, I replaced my chief of staff, Ian Davey, and most of our team with party professionals more experienced in the ways of opposition. It was an ill-handled changing of the guard, and while I was certain I had to do it, it left bitterness in its wake. I was sacrificing my original leadership team to my own survival. They were paying the price for their mistakes but also for my
own. I had lost my praetorian guard and now I had no one I could be sure was watching my back. It was a lonely time: poll numbers kept plummeting, the caucus was miserable and so was I.
We had deeper problems that went beyond tactical mistakes. Once we had voted for the government’s budget, we surrendered the economy as an issue. We could claim that they wouldn’t have brought in a stimulus package without our pressure. We could say that it had been a Liberal government’s good stewardship throughout the 1990s that had saved our banking system and our public finances. But voters rarely remember what you did for them yesterday. They’re interested only in what you’ll do for them tomorrow. And there, in the domain of differentiation, we struggled. We could quarrel with the government at the margins—and we did, seeking to make the absurd regional variations of our employment insurance program an issue—but with about 90 percent of the country employed, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about the 10 percent who were struggling to find jobs. Everywhere I went, especially in the manufacturing districts of central Canada battered by slumping orders, unemployment and a high dollar, I met victims of the recession, but the story line Canadians bought was that we were in better shape than the Americans, and if so, the government deserved the credit. Just to make sure they got the credit, they plastered every construction site in the country with their Economic Action Plan signs. Re-describing reality so that voters believe your account of it is an essential gift in a successful politician. With disbelief, mixed with reluctant admiration for his skill, I watched as Prime Minister Harper re-described the world, air-brushing away the inequality and misfortune and calling the country into a tent of happy illusion. To put it another way, Mr. Harper described the country’s problems in such a way as to make himself the only solution.
Why weren’t we the solution? We were a big-government party struggling to find our way in a new era of recession and austerity. For all our credentials for sound fiscal management, we retained a reputation for high spending. This vision no longer connected with an electorate looking for relief from the economic pressures and uncertainties bearing down on their families. To address these deeper problems in our message, I convened a thinkers’ conference of several hundred prominent Canadians in Montreal, with thousands more across the country taking part through our online webcast. We opened the windows and doors of the party and we brought in thinkers and writers to tell us exactly what they thought of us in public.
1
Some of what they had to say was hard to listen to. One of our most distinguished diplomats, Robert Fowler, said that our party had lost its soul. We no longer stood for anything: years of power had corrupted us. I didn’t agree but I was glad he said it. Renewing the party’s culture meant forcing us to see ourselves through others’ eyes.
During the conference, we began to work our way toward a sharper vision of government’s essential functions in a time of austerity. I told the assembly in Montreal that there were some things government could do, some things it might do, and then a few core things it absolutely had to do. It had to protect people against systemic risks and market failure. I distinguished between personal and systemic risk. In a good society, people take risks with their lives, their incomes and their ideas, and if they succeed, good for them, and if they fail, they, not government, should shoulder the responsibility. Systemic risk was something different. This inflicted harms that went beyond any individual’s capacity to shoulder and repair. The global financial meltdown had devastated savings, pensions and jobs for millions of innocent people. Government had to be a society’s defender of last resort against a global market system that had run out of control. It
should be regulating risk in markets so that those who took them bore the consequences and weren’t allowed to impose the costs on fellow taxpayers and citizens. The second essential job of government was to guarantee a safety net, so people would feel there was granite under their feet in any economic storm to come. Government shouldn’t be there to take away personal responsibility, but it should be there to take fear out of common life—fear of income insecurity, poverty, loss and destitution. Finally, a government had to be there to fight for equality of opportunity for every citizen. In the new era of austerity, we couldn’t afford to waste a single person, and we were wasting hundreds of thousands on the unemployment lines. We needed to invest in education, training and infrastructure to get the economy moving, and we could do so without blowing the budget, since borrowing costs were low and our deficit was under control. It was an activist vision of government based on the idea that the key to our economic success, especially in a competitive global economy, lay in opening up channels of opportunity for all our people. We spent the next year taking this message out to the people, and in town halls across the country I thought we got a good reception.
Old hands in the press corps told me that being leader of the Official Opposition was the most thankless job in politics, a seemingly endless audition for the prime ministership, conducted before three hypercritical and restive audiences: the press, my own caucus and the public. With the press, I tried to play it straight, avoided creating favourites, stayed away from off-the-record briefings, and avoided any loose talk that would come back to haunt me. Most treated me fairly, though I don’t have kind words for the journalists who phoned my ex-wife in the middle of the night in London, England, to try to get her to say I was a bad husband and father. I don’t have good feelings about the ferrets dispatched to check out our modest family house in the south
of France, hoping to find a splendid chateau that would fit their narrative of the spoiled expatriate. I actively despise the sheet that ran a doctored photograph purporting to show me grinning in front of a US helicopter with a team of US Special Forces. I record these incidents only because it never pays to underestimate the amazing lack of scruple in those parts of the press that are willing to lend themselves to the attack politics of political parties. I learned to live with the constant scrutiny of my private life and managed, for the most part, to keep Zsuzsanna and my children out of the spotlight. I also learned that I lived my political life in a dual world, the real world of contact with citizens who were, by and large, civil and engaging, and the virtual world of the Internet, where anything goes. It never ceased to amaze me that the same people who would never have dared insult me to my face did not scruple to engage in the most imaginative kinds of slander in the disinhibited world of the blog and tweet. As for the media, they were obsessed, as usual, with themselves, with the threat posed by the Internet to their traditional business model, but when they did turn their attention to the opposition, they treated us more or less fairly. The daily press, the ones who stuck their microphones in your face at the end of every caucus meeting, did their jobs professionally, and I can’t recall an occasion when they mangled my words or trafficked in private gossip, but the drumbeat of lofty disdain from the columnists and pundits could get you down, especially if, as in my case, I’d been one myself and knew just how easy it was to scorn the fighter in the arena from the safety of the stands.
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.