Authors: Michael Ignatieff
There too at Canada House in the middle of the war, my father met my mother, Alison Grant. She was a niece of Vincent Massey: Massey’s wife, Alice Parkin, was her aunt. My mother had come to London in 1938, aged twenty-two, to attend the Royal College of Art and was working in MI5, British military intelligence, as a typist and secretary.
My mother’s people were just as ambitious and public-spirited as the Ignatieffs. George Parkin, my great-grandfather, was a New Brunswick schoolteacher who managed, by sheer force of personality and cultivation of the powerful, to make himself the founding secretary of the Rhodes Trust, the organization that administers the Rhodes Scholarships in Oxford. Another great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, had been expedition secretary to the railway survey party, led by the engineer Sandford Fleming, that went west in the summer of 1872 to reconnoiter the Yellowhead route through the Rockies to the Pacific.
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From the high summer heat of July to the early snows of October they travelled by canoe, train, steamer, horseback and Red River cart from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They were the first Canadians to take the measure of the land that had been brought together as a country five years before. When my great-grandfather came home from the journey, he wrote
Ocean to Ocean
, one of the first narratives of the grandeur of the land and its future prospects. If you grew up, as I did, with
Ocean to Ocean
on the bookshelves, you felt you belonged to a family that had been nation-builders.
The Grant side of the family had their stories about prime ministers too. John A. Macdonald—the Conservative chieftain who held the country together with bribery, threats and raw political skill till his death in 1891—was the member of Parliament for Kingston, where my
great-grandfather presided as principal of Queen’s University. My great-grandfather, known around Kingston as Geordie Grant, had serious moral qualms about Macdonald’s methods—extorting cash for his party, for example, from the railroad builders—and he did not hesitate to make his scruples known. The two men met near the end of their lives at a function in Kingston, where Sir John A. approached my great-grandfather and in a joshing manner asked him, “Geordie, why were you never a friend of mine?” “I’ve been your friend, Sir John,” my great-grandfather tartly replied, “when you were right.” “I have no use for friends like that!”
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the old lion replied.
These stories are what kept me to the sticking place when times were difficult. Politics was the big arena, the place where you lived a life of significance, where you measured up to the family imperatives. It was in the blood. I wanted it for them and so I wanted it for me.
Let me confess right now that all this is still the wrong answer to the question of why you should go into politics. You can’t lead a political life to live up to your parents. It’s also a political error. Any sense of entitlement that you might take from your past is absolutely fatal in politics. The best thing about democracy is—or should be—that you have to earn everything, one vote at a time. I knew enough not to feel entitled. I knew I had to earn it. But the fact that I come from a family with a calling for public life played powerfully in my mind as I considered whether to accept the offer from the men who had come to dinner that October night.
While my mother worked in M15 she roomed at 54A Walton Street in South Kensington with a tart, diminutive Winnipeg native named Kay Moore, later Gimpel. Between late 1942 and early 1943, they gave a home and a bed to Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, two Canadians who had joined SOE, the Special Operations Executive, in order to parachute into France and join up with Resistance units
combatting the German occupation forces. My mother grew close to Frank—how close I’ll never know—in the few months before June 1943, when he left one night to parachute into the dark to a landing spot in the Loire Valley south of Paris. Almost as soon as the pair of Canadians landed, they were betrayed and handed over to the Gestapo, who sent them to a concentration camp. For two years, my mother and Kay waited for word. Special Operations Executive asked them to concoct personal messages that only Frank and John would understand—such as “the samovar is boiling at 54A”—to see if they would reply on their wireless telegraph, but the replies that came back didn’t seem to be coming from them. The Germans in fact were playing radio games to mislead the SOE into believing the men were still functioning as agents. Both women began to fear the worst, but it was only in the spring of 1945, when Buchenwald was liberated, that Kay and Alison learned that the two Canadians had been executed there, after torture, months before, in September 1944.
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In April 1945, my mother wrote a letter to Frank’s brother Jack, in which I hear—as sons rarely do—the authentic sound of my mother’s young hopes and dreams:
I do know that [Frank] was happy in England—his time was very full, and consequently to those of us who were drawn into that circle of unbounded affection, love, and happiness, which he created, the loss cannot be counted.
He bound the household together with his humour, his embracing interest and love of mankind. He set a standard we try to follow. I also know that nothing would have stopped him going—nothing anyone could say or do. He knew clearly and definitely to the day of his departure—he must go. His death is not only a personal loss to a few like myself who know his place will never
be filled. His brand of courage—his courage coupled with his imagination—are not only needed in war, but needed so badly when the war is over, needed by everyone.
But his life wasn’t wasted. I feel, as so many of his friends have here said to me, he left us his spirit and faith and uncompromising belief in what was right. That is the legacy he left us. He showed us a way of life and I for one won’t forget it ever.
In the fall of 1945, my mother came home from the war and married my father. While she almost never talked about Frank, he was a presence in our home throughout my growing up. It happened that during the 1950s, our house in suburban Ottawa was just a block away from Frank’s brother, Jack, and his family. Frank was theirs more than ours, but our house cherished the memory too.
After the war, my mother and father rose through the ranks of the Canadian Foreign Service, and my brother and I grew up in postings overseas: Washington, Belgrade, London, Paris, Geneva and back home in Ottawa. My father worked for several prime ministers, but one of them, Lester Pearson, was always just Mike to him. When I was a child in Ottawa in the 1950s, I once watched Mr. Pearson play baseball at the picnic for the Department of External Affairs, where my father worked and where Mr. Pearson was the minister. It was at a school baseball diamond in the suburbs and Mr. Pearson was at bat, in shirtsleeves and a tie. He bunted and beat out the throw to first base and turned around, foot on the bag, rewarding his employees, all loyally cheering, with a beaming smile.
After the Arab-Israeli war of 1956, my father worked on the team that developed the peacekeeping force for Suez, an effort that won Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. In the Arab-Israeli War a decade later, Pearson was prime minister and my father held Canada’s
seat on the United Nations Security Council. He was one of the drafters of Resolution 242, which remains, to this day, a basis for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
My father was a pallbearer at Pearson’s funeral in January 1973 and bore him to his resting place in Wakefield, Quebec. Just before I entered politics, I went up and paid my respects at his grave. Pearson is buried beside two public servants and close friends—Norman Robertson and Hume Wrong. Pearson, Robertson and Wrong were the epitome of a great age in Canadian government and public service. They wore sober suits and bow ties, crackled with an intimidating intelligence and wore their staffs down with a ferocious work ethic; they were internationally minded, honest as the day was long, small-c conservative in matters financial, liberal in their politics and, in a quiet Canadian way, fiercely patriotic. Theirs was the world I believed in, the example I grew up wanting to emulate. As I said, you want the things you want in life for the people who made you who you are. It never occurred to me, when I returned home and entered politics, that their liberal world and the Canada they had made had long since vanished.
The men my father idealized were people who took for granted that government could do great things. After the 1956 uprising against Communist rule in Budapest, my father helped Jack Pickersgill, then minister of immigration, to get thousands of Hungarians out of refugee camps and settled into a new life in Canada. It was a dramatic gesture by a confident country and my father was proud that he had helped so many people to freedom. The same expansive ambition was at work everywhere in the politics of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the era when liberal governments in Europe and North America rebuilt their societies and laid the foundation for thirty years of prosperity. In the United States, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and the national space program, while Democratic governors in California
built the California public university system, a model for higher education the world over. In Canada, a Liberal government built national highway systems and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and found the money to establish new university campuses and national research institutes like the Chalk River nuclear facility, which made Canada a world leader in the production of medical isotopes. The idea was that imaginative government could bind a country together. As soon as I was old enough to join the conversation around the family dinner table, I shared in the idea—or the illusion—that good government—run by people like my dad—was the ultimate solution to any national problem.
My father loved government but he steered clear of party politics, and the stories he told laid bare the difference between the instincts of politicians and of civil servants like himself. He told me about taking notes at a meeting in 1944 between Prime Minister Mackenzie King and a deputation of women—Daughters of the Empire—who were concerned about the impact of pornography (Betty Grable pinups and stronger stuff) on the morale of Canadian troops, then fighting their way through Holland into Germany. About a dozen women took their places in King’s office and each proceeded to tell him about the terrible effects of pornography. King listened patiently, then stood and went to each and shook their hands gravely, repeating that he had rarely been privileged to have such an important meeting. When the women had been ushered out and silence descended in the prime minister’s office, my father cleared his throat and asked Mr. King what actions he wished to authorize. “Get back to work,” the PM growled, and waved him out. My father marvelled at King’s mastery of dissimulation. It seemed to be the essence of the political life, but my father wanted no part of it.
When I eventually became leader of the Opposition in 2009, it turned out that the office I occupied, the wood-panelled one on the
third floor corner of the Parliament Buildings, was the one that had been used by Prime Minister King during World War II. When I sat in the big chair, I would think of my father sixty-five years earlier, hunched over in the corner seat, taking notes on a pad on his knees. The long, panelled room next door to that office was where King’s war cabinet had met. Over the door of the cabinet room were two inscriptions: “Fear God” and “Honour the King.” Whenever I entered that room, I felt the institutional history calling on us to rise to the occasion.
When I was eighteen, I won an extemporary public-speaking contest for the province of Ontario, and a Toronto newspaper, the
Globe and Mail
, interviewed me and took a picture of me holding the trophy. The reporter asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I said, without pausing for thought, “I want to be prime minister.”
Looking back now, I see myself as a child, perhaps an orphan, of the sixties, formed by a politics that now seems only a distant memory. I was fourteen when John F. Kennedy took the oath of office that shining day in January 1961, and I remember watching as the young president stepped forward to shield the page from the sunlight as the aging poet, Robert Frost, stumbled over the reading of his inaugural poem. Later, my schoolfellows and I imitated Jack Kennedy’s Boston accent and took to copying one of his characteristic gestures, the way he held his left hand in his jacket pocket, with the thumb protruding over the seam. I can still remember where I was on the stairwell in Upper Canada College when a friend behind me tapped my shoulder and whispered, “I just heard on the radio. The president has been shot.”
I was part of the generation whose dream of politics was shaped by the fallen president. The ardour I felt within, I detected in my friends. When I met Bob Rae, the brightest friend I had at the University of Toronto, I noticed that we had more in common than just the fact that his father, Saul, and mine had been friendly rivals at the same
university thirty years before. I noticed that when he stood on a student platform, waiting to speak, he held his left hand in his pocket, with his thumb down the seam.
We both entered the University of Toronto just as the demonstrations and teach-ins against the Vietnam War were sweeping through American campuses and beginning to sweep north into Canadian ones as well. With friends like Jeff Rose and Bob Rae, I threw myself into anti-Vietnam politics, helping to organize a teach-in on the war and later taking part in the sit-ins against the presence on campus of recruiters from Dow, the manufacturer of napalm. I also campaigned for the Liberal Party in the autumn election in 1965, going door to door for a fine MP, Marvin Gelber, who was seeking re-election against a formidable opponent, David Lewis, the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party, the social democrats to the left of the Liberals. It was my first election, and I loved the atmosphere of campaign rooms and zone houses and canvassing teams. We campaigned hard but our man lost, and so my first experience of Liberal politics was defeat.