Fire and Ashes (2 page)

The Liberal Party was in power in Ottawa then, and I asked if the prime minister, Paul Martin, had sent them. They exchanged glances. Not exactly. The men in black, it seemed, were acting on their own initiative. They were proposing a run from outside, and their ambition, they said plainly, was to make me prime minister one day. Dan Brock said the party was “heading for a train wreck.” Without a new leader it would lose the next election. They would put together a team.
Young people would flock to our banner. They would find me a seat and help me win it at the next election, due sometime in the next two years. Would I at least consider it?

It was an astonishing proposition. I had never thought of myself as anything but Canadian, but I hadn’t lived in the country for more than thirty years. I’d been a fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, a freelance writer in Britain, and now a professor at Harvard. True, I had worked on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s campaign in 1968 and I had observed politicians all my life, but why did anyone think my political writing qualified me to become a politician? I was an intellectual, someone who lives for ideas, for the innocent and not-so-innocent pleasures of talk and argument. I’d always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics—Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico—but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn’t exactly in their league.
¹

What the men in black were proposing was incredible. I had no idea whether they could deliver any of what they promised. When the meal ended and they headed back to Toronto, I said merely that I would think about it.

Zsuzsanna and I walked silently home along the banks of the Charles River in the autumn darkness. We were happy together. I had astonishing students as well as illustrious colleagues, and we both felt at ease, if not at home, in the States. So what was it now—delayed patriotism? raw ambition? some long-suppressed longing for significance?—that seemed to be knocking me off my moorings? What didn’t well up inside me was laughter. It should have. The idea was preposterous. Who did I think I was?

Fire and Ashes
is the story of why—soon after, and against the better judgment of some good friends—I said yes to the men in black. It is
the story of a brutal initiation, followed by a climb to the summit of politics in the largest democracy by physical size in the world. I want to explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.

This is more of an analytical memoir than an exercise in autobiography. I want to use my own story to extract the wheat from the chaff, to reach for what is generic about politics as a vocation, as a way of life. I lived that life to the full, and for all its dark moments I miss it still. I knew what it was like to speak to four thousand people in a teeming hall, to hold them briefly, or so I thought, in the palm of my hand. I also knew what it was like to speak to a hostile crowd when waves of stony suspicion radiated from every face. I felt the surge of loyalty from the thousands of people who joined our cause and I experienced the sting of betrayal from a conspiratorial few. There were times when I felt I was shaping and moulding events, other times when I watched helplessly as events slipped out of my control; I knew moments of exaltation when I thought I might be able to do great things for the people, and now I live with the regret that I will never be able to do anything at all. In short, I lived the life. I paid for what I learned. I pursued the flame of power and saw hope dwindle to ashes.

Ash is a humble residue but it has its uses. My mother and father used to spade ash from their grate onto the roses against the west-facing wall of our house. My parents are long since gone, but when their roses bloom every summer I like to think it is because I still spade the ashes from the cold fire onto their roots.

The ashes of my experience, I hope, will be dug into somebody’s garden. I hope that what I learned from five years in the arena will speak to those who were once kids like me, giving little speeches to themselves as they walked to school, who dreamed of political glory
and in adulthood acted out their childhood dreams. Anyone who loves politics—as I still do—wants to encourage others to live for their dreams but also to enter the fray better prepared than I was. I want them to know—to feel—what it is like to succeed, but also to know what it is like to fail, so they will learn not to be afraid of either.

This book is in praise of politics and politicians. I came away from my experience with renewed respect for politicians as a breed and with reinvigorated faith in the good sense of citizens. If this sounds strange, or even disingenuous, coming from someone whose political career ended in failure, I would reply that failure has its privileges. I’ve earned the right to praise a life that did not go so well for me.

There is so much wrong with democratic politics today—and I will say what I think is wrong—that it is easy to forget what is right about the democratic ideal: the faith, constantly tested, that ordinary men and women can rightly choose those who govern in their name, and that those they choose can govern with justice and compassion. The challenge of writing about democratic politics is to be unsparing about its reality without abandoning faith in its ideals. I lived by that faith, and this book is a testament to the faith that abides with me still.

THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW
when you enter politics is why you’re doing it. You’d be surprised at how many people go into politics without being able to offer anyone a convincing reason why. But
why
is the first question they—voters, press and rivals—will ask you, and your success or failure turns on how you answer. The truth might be that you want to lead your country because the job comes with a plane, a house, a bureaucracy at your beck and call, and a security detail of men and women in suits with guns and earpieces. The truth may be that you long for power and enjoy the thrill of holding people’s futures in your hands. It might be that you are in search of posterity. You want to be famous, to be in the history books, to have schools named after you and your portrait hung in hallowed halls. It might be that you want to settle scores with your past. You want to revenge yourself on everyone who ever said you wouldn’t amount to anything.

You wouldn’t want to say any of this. There are few rewards for candour in politics. What you say—always—is that you want to make a difference. You believe your experience qualifies you to serve. These circumlocutions are the etiquette of democracy, the ritual salute to the sovereignty of the people. The people themselves may suspect that the difference you want to make is to your own life, not to theirs. But they want to hear you say that you are in it for them.

It’s worth considering that such dissembling may have its uses. The pretense may begin as a piece of hypocrisy and end up becoming a politician’s second nature. From pretending to serve, you may surprise yourself by actually doing so. Indeed, you have to acquire some sense of service if you are to survive at all. A politician’s job can be so thankless at times that if you don’t acquire a sense of vocation you turn yourself, by stages, without realizing it, into a hack.

When I began considering the offer from the “men in black,” I had to decide, first of all, why I wanted to be prime minister. Let there be no mistake: that was the proposition on offer. I would return home, win election as a member of Parliament, and when the time came, make my bid for power. But why did I want power in the first place? I had almost no sense of political vocation, and I certainly didn’t have a good answer to the question of why I wanted to hold high office. What drew me most was the chance to stop being a spectator. I’d been in the stands all my life, watching the game. Now, I thought, it was time to step into the arena. But this is the kind of thing you say to yourself, not to those you’re trying to win over. I was to learn this soon enough. In the summer of 2006, when I was campaigning for the leadership of my party, I appeared before the Montreal business community in the white dining room of Power Corporation. One of the business leaders asked me whether I could explain, in just a sentence or two, why I wanted to be prime minister. The question caught me by surprise. I said it was the hardest job any country has on offer. I wanted to see whether I could handle the challenge.

Nothing gets you into more trouble in politics than blurting out the truth. I can still remember the chill my answer spread over that crowd. These were business people who, being leaders themselves, weren’t interested in bankrolling my existential challenges. They were looking to support someone who would win and give them access to power.

I learned then that I had the wrong answer to the basic question of what my political life was supposed to be for. Later on, when the climb to the top ceased to be an adventure and became a struggle to survive, I learned just how important it was to have convincing answers to the question of why you were doing it all. Believe me when I tell you that this language of existential challenge is strictly for dilettantes—something I was accused of being.

I can remember a period between September and December 2009, when I was the leader of my party and made mistake after mistake, when the press was brutal and my own staff was so shell-shocked by the plummeting poll numbers that they couldn’t look me in the eye. Before the daily ordeal of Question Period (QP), down in the Commons Chamber, when I had to face a cocksure government that had me on the ropes, I would go into the washroom, look at myself in the mirror and force myself to want the job, force myself to believe I could do it, and not just throw in the towel then and there. During this period, Zsuzsanna would say to me: you don’t want this enough. But that wasn’t the problem. I no longer remembered why I had ever wanted it at all. These are the moments—and they occur in every tough job—when you’re no longer sure you’re up to it. Your every mistake seems to confirm that you aren’t. Your self-confidence is shot. All you know for certain is that you once wanted this and that you have to find that primal desire within if you hope to survive. So it had better be there.

Politics tests your capacity for self-knowledge more than any profession I know. What I learned is this: the question about why you want to be a politician is a question about whom you want it
for
. In my case, whom
did
I want it for?

At the primal level where ambition takes root in a person, you want the things you want in life for the people who made you who you are.
In my case, I wanted political success for the sake of my mother, Alison, and my father, George, because I believed they would have wanted it for me. This is a piece of projection, of course, since they were long dead by the time my political career began. I felt their influence not in any injunctions they ever uttered about the way I should live my life, but rather in the distinguished way they had lived theirs. My ambitions felt less like my own creation than a tradition inherited from them. The Ignatieffs were minor nobility in nineteenth-century Russia who rose to some prominence through service to the czar. My great-grandfather was Russian ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople and later, in 1882, minister of the interior, responsible for restoring order after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. His political career ended in failure, and he spent the last twenty years of his life on his estate in Ukraine, brooding about how intriguers at court had cost him the ear of the czar and how all his plans for Russia had ended in defeat. His son, my grandfather Paul, began his career running the family estates in Ukraine and then rose through the imperial bureaucracy to become deputy minister of agriculture and finally, in 1915, minister of education in the last government of Czar Nicholas II. The Russian Revolution swept him into exile, first in England and then in Canada. He and my grandmother, Natalie, ended their days in a small cottage in Upper Melbourne, Quebec, and are buried in the Presbyterian cemetery overlooking the St. Francis River.
¹

My father, George, was the youngest of their five sons, and the most ambitious. He was sixteen when the family, down on their luck, landed in Montreal from England. That first summer, he went out to British Columbia to work on a railway party laying track in the Kootenay Valley. He learned to drink, swear and cut timber and returned home at the end of the summer of 1928, brown, muscular and a Canadian. He enrolled at the University of Toronto, did well enough to win a Rhodes
Scholarship to Balliol College in Oxford and was there in 1939 when war was declared. He left Oxford and in early 1940 went down to London to serve with the Canadian government at Canada House in Trafalgar Square. There, at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself in a city under German bombardment, working as the personal assistant of Vincent Massey, the heir to the Massey-Harris-Ferguson farm machinery business, then serving as Canadian High Commissioner to Britain. For four years of the war, my father drafted Massey’s letters and telegrams and arranged his schedule, sometimes accompanying him to Whitehall for meetings with ministers and generals. Between the British defeat at Dunkirk, in 1940, and 1942, when American soldiers began to arrive in Britain, the Canadian Army was a vital component of the defence of the British Isles. Canada mattered. It was a dangerous but also a glorious time to begin your career as a diplomat for Canada. My father did his professional apprenticeship in the service of an extraordinary man, punctilious and pompous, more English than the English, and yet, for all that, a leader.

My father’s working colleagues at Canada House also included Lester B. Pearson, a charismatic diplomat who much later became prime minister of Canada. Many long nights in 1940 and 1941, he and my father took their turn fire-watching together on the roof of Canada House, phoning the civil defence whenever they saw an incendiary catching fire on the roofs around Trafalgar Square. There were raids so severe that they forced the two of them off the roof and into basement shelters, where they huddled in the darkness, feeling the water from ruptured pipes slowly seeping around their shoes. One Sunday morning, after a particularly intense raid, they watched from the roof as charred files from bombed government offices in Whitehall drifted through the air. Pearson said something to the effect, my father remembered, “that civilization could not stand much more of this
kind of destruction and that we would have to try to stop it.”
²
In my father’s mind, at least, Pearson’s passionate post-war support for the United Nations flowed from that moment.