Fire and Ashes (5 page)

From the mid 1990s, long before the men in black came calling—I began spending more time in Canada, teaching in Banff so my children could have a summer horseback riding and rafting in the Rocky Mountains, taking Zsuzsanna across the country by car so she could experience the big-sky country of the Prairies for herself, giving the Massey Lectures on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In these lectures, called “The Rights Revolution,” I tried to define Canada’s political uniqueness: the fact that we didn’t have capital punishment or a right to bear arms; that we believed in group rights to protect the French language and aboriginal title to land; the fact that we believed a woman’s right to choose should prevail; the fact that a bilingual national experiment, always under stress, forced us constantly, as a condition of survival, to try to understand each other and reach common ground.
⁹
Americans could afford red state/blue state partisanship; we couldn’t. Compromise was built into our way of doing politics. Or so I thought.

I’d been a happy cosmopolitan all my life, but I’d become aware that the price of expatriation was rising. When you live in other people’s countries, you eventually bang up against glass doors and cordoned-off areas reserved for insiders. You realize you understand only what the insiders say, not what they really mean. I felt I was welcome everywhere but belonged nowhere. Besides, expatriation is a form of free-riding on other people’s politics, just as cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those with passports from somewhere else. Mine was from Canada. It was time to go home.

It took a year, between October 2004 and December 2005, to engineer my return. During that time, the team that the men in black had promised began to take shape. I didn’t choose them. They chose me. I flew back to Toronto and found myself being grilled by tough political professionals who wanted to figure out whether, as they
say, I had ‘legs.’ Young law students—like Sachin Aggarwal and Milton Chan—quizzed me on my position on gay marriage (I was for) before signing on. I had lunches with Liberal grandees such as Senator David Smith and former premier David Peterson, and with Liberal fundraisers like Elvio DelZotto. Thick briefing books on public policy issues—health care, energy, jobs—began to arrive in the mail, prepared by young policy thinkers like Alex Mazer, Sujit Choudhry and Michael Pal. I devoured the briefs and felt a growing excitement at the idea that I might be able to do something about the problems my young researchers were laying in front of me: the income inequality that was shocking for a country that liked to think of itself as egalitarian; the weakening of our manufacturing base; the absence of a national energy strategy for a country that was a globally important producer of energy; the increasing alienation between voters and the political system; and the traditional issues of national unity—the divide between Francophones and Anglophones, and the emerging divide between the big cities and the remote and rural regions of a vast country. I studied all these problems and came away thinking that since I had studied them, I must know something about them. I hadn’t yet realized that political knowledge is something quite different: knowing an issue in your guts, not just in your head, and knowing which cause must become your battle cry.

In March of 2005, the Liberal Party held its biannual policy convention in Ottawa, and our team persuaded the party president, Mike Eizenga, to invite me to give the keynote speech to several thousand delegates. I’d never spoken in front of so many people before. I began by telling them: “In the United States, where I work, liberals are in the wilderness. In Canada, liberals are in government. Down there, being a liberal is a burden. Up here, it’s a badge of honour.”

The serried ranks of delegates stretched out in front of me gave me a round of applause for that, and warmed by their reaction I spelled out what liberalism meant to me. When my mother offered someone a liberal portion of pie, I told the delegates, it was always a generous slice. Liberalism, I said, should never lose its association with generosity: of heart, of spirit, of imagination, of vision. I concluded with this:

When the speech ended, I was surrounded by clamouring delegates, hands reaching out to me, cellphone cameras flashing and the press waiting to interview me, among them an old friend, Graham Fraser. He whispered, “Good speech,” and then realizing I really was about to take the plunge gave me the commiserating look old friends give you when they know they can’t stop you doing something foolish.

The day after the speech the prime minister, Paul Martin, asked to see me. I spent an hour in his office while his assistant, Jim Pimblett—later to become mine too—perched in an alcove like a beady-eyed marmoset, never taking his gaze off me. The prime minister sounded me out about Canadian–American relations, but he was really trying to see what I was made of. He was gracious, but he could not have been pleased with my speech or with its reception. I was too obviously a rival. Later, I was given to understand by his people that they would
not help me find a seat to enter Parliament. I would have to fight my way into the party on my own.

After meeting with the prime minister and then with Marc Lalonde, one of Pierre Trudeau’s closest advisors, who pronounced himself happy with my political progress, the die was cast. I would leave Harvard at Christmas, take a job at the University of Toronto and make a gradual entry into Canadian politics.

Once the decision had been taken, Zsuzsanna and I had dinner in a restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown with Bob Rae, my college roommate, his wife, Arlene, and one of their daughters. Bob had been in Canadian politics all his adult life, first as a federal member of Parliament for the New Democratic Party and then, between 1990 and 1995, as the first NDP premier of the province of Ontario. His defeat in 1995 had been brutal, but he had got over it and was making a good living as a lawyer in Toronto. When I told him I was going into politics, he exploded. I hadn’t earned the right. He had put in the years and who did I think I was? I was taken aback. He wasn’t in our party, so what gave him the right to tell me I couldn’t fight for a seat as a Liberal? I didn’t say any of this, but I should have had it out with him. In retrospect, his furious reaction was a crucial moment. I hadn’t understood that my old friend’s political ambitions were far from over and that he was contemplating a switch to our party. I misjudged him as he misjudged me, and we both assumed, wrongly, that old friendship would enable us to work out our rivalry. After all, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had met in a London restaurant in the early 1990s and agreed that Blair, not Brown, would contest the Labour leadership. Had Rae and I made such a pact, our political careers might have ended differently, but who’s to say that one of us would really have deferred to the other? Frankly, I don’t believe competing ambitions can ever be reconciled, even between friends.

The die may have been cast and the decision made, but it did not stop both Zsuzsanna and me from many longing backward glances at the life we were leaving behind. But we felt the undertow of adventure sweeping us on, and late that summer, Zsuzsanna turned to me and said with a smile, “What do we have to lose?”

We had no idea.

I
’
D ASSUMED, IN MY INNOCENCE
,
that my return to Canada would be a leisurely stroll back home, first teaching at the university and then making my move into politics. Suddenly, events, not my own calculations, took charge. In late November 2005, the Liberal government of Paul Martin lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, and the prime minister called a general election for January 23, 2006. If I was going to enter politics, this had to be the moment.

When I taught politics, I loved teaching students Machiavelli’s
The Prince
. They found his cynicism thrilling and contemporary, but they had wondered what to make of that chapter about the goddess Fortuna. In chapter 25, composed in 1513, right after Machiavelli had been thrown out of Florentine politics, tortured and sent back to his estates in disgrace, he wrote—from bitter experience—that the goddess Fortuna rules politics. Fortuna is a fickle woman, he infamously said, who must be courted, wooed and won. The language Machiavelli uses is famously offensive to modern ears: “it is better to be headstrong than cautious for Fortune is a lady. It is necessary, if you want to master her, to beat and strike her. And one sees she more often submits to those who act boldly than to those who proceed in a calculating fashion. Moreover, since she is a lady, she smiles on the young, for they are less cautious, more ruthless and overcome her with boldness.”
¹

Once you set aside his metaphors, Machiavelli’s insight endures. Politics plays itself out beneath the gaze of a fickle goddess. Practical politics is no science, but rather the ceaseless attempt of wily humans to adapt to what Fortuna throws in their paths. Its basic skills can be learned but they cannot be taught. While a painter’s medium is paint, a politician’s medium is time: he must adapt, ceaselessly, to its sudden, unexpected and brutal changes. An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician’s interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea’s time has come. When we call politics the art of the possible, we mean the art of knowing what is possible
here and now
. The possible includes the potential. Where an average politician sees only a closed room, a visionary one sees the hidden door at the back that leads to a new opportunity. What we call luck in politics is actually a gift for timing, for knowing when to strike and when to bide your time and wait for a better opportunity. When politicians blame their fate on bad luck, they are actually blaming their timing. Only fools believe they can control it. It is simple prudence to be modest about what you can actually control in a political career. Harold Macmillan, a British prime minister of the early 1960s, was asked what was the most difficult aspect of doing his job. “Events, dear boy, events,” the old master is supposed to have replied.
²
A wise politician understands that all you can do is exploit events to your advantage. While politicians are always condemned for opportunism, being a skillful opportunist is the essence of the political art. A poor opportunist in politics is simply someone who looks, all too obviously, like he is
exploiting
an opportunity. A skillful opportunist is someone who persuades the public that he has
created
the opportunity.

The timing of my entry into politics was not of my choosing, but I thought, as one does, that I could turn circumstances to my own
advantage. I had taught Machiavelli, but I had not understood him. I thought I could master time, only to discover that it would master me.

Over many months, my Toronto team and I had been courting a distinguished member of Parliament, Jean Augustine, hoping to persuade her to resign, after close to thirteen years on the job, and let me stand for nomination in her place. In late November, she announced she wouldn’t run again and lent her support for my candidacy to replace her in Parliament. I taught my last class in Wiener Auditorium at the Kennedy School, posed for a photograph with the students and took a flight to Toronto with Zsuzsanna for what we thought would be a routine nomination as Liberal candidate for the riding of Etobicoke–Lakeshore, a district of about a hundred and twenty-five thousand people in the western suburbs of the city.

The scene of my political initiation was a hotel with a Wagnerian name, the Valhalla Inn, a seventies-style banquet hall and airport hotel just off the highway between downtown Toronto and Pearson International Airport. Now it has been flattened to make way for condos, and when I pass the spot these days I sometimes wonder whether it ever existed.

As the airport limo drew up in front of the Valhalla Inn on that cold December night in 2005, the parking lot, the entrance and the lobby were filled with several hundred demonstrators chanting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and holding placards that read “Iggy go home.” I’d thought I
was
home. Some of the demonstrators were wearing George Bush masks and were denouncing me for supporting the invasion of Iraq. Others, in bright orange Guantanamo jumpsuits, were there to condemn me as an apologist for torture, on the basis of a drastic misreading of a book of mine called
The Lesser Evil.
³
Most vociferous of all were a crowd of Ukrainian Canadians who came to abuse me for being a Russian chauvinist on the basis of my father’s origins and what again,
to put it charitably, was a misreading of a passage in
Blood and Belonging
, written thirteen years earlier. In that book, I had made some ironic remarks about Ukrainian independence conjuring up “images of embroidered peasant shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots and nasty anti-Semites.”
⁴
Nobody seemed to have read the irony in these words or the later passages that clearly supported a sovereign and independent Ukraine.
⁵
For the demonstrators crowding around our car, however, what I had said in 1993 was only a pretext. A group of Ukrainians, led by a sitting MP in the Liberal caucus, had wanted to put one of their own in the Etobicoke–Lakeshore seat and they were furious that I had frustrated their designs by making “a deal” with Jean Augustine. So they fastened on something I’d written years before to mount a last-minute battle to deny me the nomination.