Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Our opponents in the Conservative government had been watching all of this, none more so than the prime minister, Stephen Harper. As our leadership campaign drew to a close in late November 2006, he
suddenly decided to snatch the initiative away from us. He introduced a motion in the House of Commons recognizing that Quebeckers—not Quebec itself—constituted a nation within a united Canada.
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The Bloc Québécois separatist party howled in dismay: they would much rather have had their federalist opponents deny the national character of Quebeckers’ aspirations. Our party howled because we wanted the credit for raising the issue. But the prime minister had us where he wanted us. When the motion was called, I rose in my seat in the House and voted to acknowledge, for the first time in our parliamentary history, the national identity of one of our constituent peoples. I’d played my part in making it happen, but the prime minister, with the tactical shrewdness that was becoming a trademark, got such credit as there was to be had.
As our leadership campaign criss-crossed the country, I began to understand Canada as I had never done before. At first, the impression was of a cacophony of voices competing for recognition and acknowledgement. Common bonds of national citizenship appeared thin and attenuated. It took me a while to see my country as the site of a constant competition among groups and interests to define what the collective “we” should stand for. Of course we had moments of shared enthusiasm for the country, but moments of shared euphoria and common allegiance are actually less frequent than day-by-day conflict over shared meanings. What a person wants from his or her national community often conflicts with what others want. Every community wants recognition of its own distinctiveness but is reluctant to grant it to others. Canadian communities often give the impression of being sealed off from each other. Immigrant communities wanted more immigration and unionized workers wanted less; rich people wanted tax breaks and poor folks wanted a better deal. Gun control, of any kind, was poison in any small town or rural district, and yet it was the
key to holding the vote in a downtown core. Everywhere people wanted more federal money, but everywhere people wanted the federal government to stay out of provincial jurisdictions. The defence of the local and provincial was as strong on the island of Newfoundland or in the interior of British Columbia as it was in deepest Quebec. As these facts sunk in, I began to see our country as a political rather than a natural fact. Once you see a country as a sustained, everyday act of will, you understand why politicians matter. They bring people who want different things into the same room to figure out what we share and want to do together. Countries are “imagined communities,” and politicians are the ones who represent what we share and then figure out the compromises that enable us to live together in peace.
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Throughout that summer of my leadership campaign in 2006, I talked about the “spine of citizenship” that ought to tie us together through all our differences. The spine meant more than equality before the law and rough comparability of services across regions. It meant for government to do what it could to strengthen the common experiences, sense of shared history and common rights and responsibilities that make us into a people. It’s only when you’re in politics that you understand both the divisions of a country and the hunger for unity that transcends those differences. Politicians have to find ways to articulate what is common and then build that common life into the fabric of its institutions. I didn’t know that this was my job when I started in politics, but I soon learned.
As we travelled the country that summer, one division seemed both overpowering and, at the same time, almost completely ignored. It was the division between urban and rural, downtown and hometown, north and south, metropolitan and remote. In the downtown parts of the country, along the American border, time ran fast and jobs were mostly plentiful. In the rural, remote and northern parts—most of the
country—time ran slowly, the girl at the gas station cash register read the want ads from the big-city paper and dreamed of escape, the Internet connection was dial-up or non-existent, the roads turned to gravel on the edge of town, college was far away, and the nearest hospital was a four-hour drive. The country was divided into two kinds of places: those where you could make a living where you grew up, and those where you had to leave if you wanted to have a chance of a better life.
This seemed to be an inequality that no one was talking about—and as the campaign went on I talked about it more and more. There was nothing wrong about leaving your birthplace if you wanted to, but it didn’t seem right that so many people had no option but to leave. Government alone couldn’t stop depopulation of remote and rural regions, but surely it could do something—with investment in roads and schools and Internet connections—to enable those who wanted to stay to raise a family where they stood. Most of the resource wealth of the country, after all, was in rural, remote or northern areas. That was where the mines were, and the acres of wheat and forest, and the pumpjacks drawing out the oil and gas. Some of the most desolate places I ever visited—Indian reserves, dwindling and abandoned towns—were right on top of natural resource bounty. Surely there was a way to make some of the wealth stay where it was instead of being sucked down into the big cities. I became the unlikely candidate of the urban–rural divide, the hard geography of opportunity that keeps so many of our brightest people from moving forward unless they move away. It came to me slowly, but I became determined to fight for a country where hope is fairly distributed, where everyone gets a chance to build a life where they stand.
These are the ways that doing politics changes the kind of person you are and the beliefs you start with. A thousand meetings in out-of-the-way places, conversations with every kind of person, rich and poor, old and
young, have a sedimentation effect. You no longer remember the particulars, but layer by layer a truth settles inside you. You take the country into yourself. You learn the terrain. What begins as an adventure just for yourself becomes a journey on behalf of others. Politics slowly introduces you—sometimes the hard way—to the people you want to do politics for and the country you want to build together.
BY MIDSUMMER
2006
, I was still the front-runner in the race and I was encountering any front-runner’s standard problems. We had become the target of all the other campaigns, and rival candidates were beginning to negotiate deals with each other to stop me from winning. To meet this challenge, we had to scale up our operation and get better at bringing delegates over to our camp. Our offices outgrew a cramped space above a restaurant on Isabella Street, just off the Yonge Street strip in downtown Toronto. We moved to larger quarters nearby on Bloor Street that a property developer let us use—and we just kept growing.
I did not make the mistake of trying to run my own campaign. I was too busy travelling the country and raising money. Whenever I did show up in my headquarters and surveyed the banks of phones and the complete strangers manning them, all giving me a cheerful wave, I was amazed at the sheer size of the operation. I left management to Ian Davey and a committed team of young lawyers. They had taken leave from their day jobs and were working all God’s hours on minimum wage. I would rather have worked with them than any number of paid consultants (even if I could have afforded them, which I couldn’t). Politicians need consultants with their polls, focus groups and marketing strategies, but they shouldn’t let the paid professionals take over a campaign. Politics has to keep a large place for volunteers
who come in off the street with their own talents and dreams. Without the enthusiasm of volunteers to inspire them, politicians risk becoming the puppets of their paid strategists. Besides, volunteers have a loyalty that cannot be bought. A leader’s task in any campaign is to hold their loyalty and stay true to their expectations. My people stayed with me through thick and thin and many have become friends. None had ever run a national campaign before, and while I was out across the country, they were building a base of organizers to ensure that when the day came for each Liberal riding association to pick their delegates for the convention, they would be voting for a slate committed to me. Our young team was doing an extraordinary job, but our organization kept outgrowing our finances.
By American standards, the budget for our leadership campaign was ridiculously small, 2.3 million dollars in total. That’s why, incidentally, we drove the back roads in an old Buick Regal, why we flew commercial and slept in modest hotels and the spare rooms of supporters. That’s the Canadian way. Our democracy is relatively inexpensive. In 2011, in a country larger than the US but with only a tenth of the population, a federal election cost $291 million. In 2012, the total cost of US elections came to six billion dollars.
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We don’t just spend less, we keep it under tight control. In Canada we have put campaign finance under the supervision of an all-powerful federal agency, Elections Canada. As they do in Europe, political parties receive taxpayers’ money to run their campaigns, according to the number of votes they received at the previous election.
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Candidates get a tax-funded rebate for their election expenses and there are strictly enforced upper limits for expenditure at both the constituency and national levels. As for the leadership campaign in 2006, the maximum any donor could give me for my campaign was around thirty-three hundred dollars. No foreign donations or cash were acceptable. We had to
report each of these contributions, with the name and address of the donor, to Elections Canada. They posted those on a publicly accessible website. Only officially reported and receipted donations were entitled to tax relief. Somewhere in cyberspace you can still find the list with the names of every brave soul who ever gave me a donation in my political career. All of these rules imposed demanding reporting requirements on the campaign staff, but they liberated me as a candidate. Anyone who’s run for public office knows that moment at a fundraiser when some burly and well-heeled stranger in a suit puts his arm around you and gets his picture taken, leaving you to wonder whether you’ve just been snapped with a crook. Campaign finance rules can free you from that fear. I knew where the money was coming from and who was giving it to me, and, thanks to the donation limit, I was not beholden to any powerful donor. It also liberated the generous people who supported me. The donation limit was so low that it freed them from any suspicion that they were trying to buy influence or access. They wanted to support the political process and they liked being part of the excitement. My experience leaves me with a strong conviction that government regulation of campaign finance is essential—with strict reporting and disclosure requirements, together with an unbreakable upper limit on donations and a ban on third-party political advocacy. I’d go still further and ban political advertising outside election time, in order to put a stop to the permanent campaign that alienates voters and diverts governments from governing. I want to liberate politicians from the pressures of big money as well as the drive-by smears by third-party advocacy groups. Let them make their case by all means, but don’t let them use raw money power to bludgeon us all on the airwaves.
Money is one area of politics where American attitudes and practices—recently set out in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United
judgment—leave me baffled.
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No matter what the justices may say, money is not speech. It’s power. It astonishes me that raw financial influence on the political process has been able to wrap itself in the mantle of First Amendment rights that are supposed to protect the integrity of democratic debate. Besides, it’s not as if the American political tradition does not understand that money power can compromise the integrity of elections and corrupt the representatives of the people. Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were well versed in the classical republican political discourse on virtue and corruption that went back to the Roman republics. That discourse taught them clearly that money needs to be strictly regulated in politics lest it corrupt a free people. In an 1816 letter, Thomas Jefferson declared that he wished to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
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That process of corruption is well advanced, it seems to me, and a return to virtue is overdue, regulated, if no other solution is possible, by a strengthened federal elections commission with the power to require public disclosure of every dollar that goes into politics. America needs to return the First Amendment to its original purpose, which was to protect the integrity of democratic debate. The influence of money frustrates that constitutional goal. The Canadian model is unlikely to be the right one for the US, but the Canadian model, like the European ones, shows that you can regulate money in politics without diminishing one iota of freedom to argue and debate.
In midsummer, I took a break, disappeared with Zsuzsanna and sat down to write a policy manifesto. We were halfway through the campaign and other candidates were putting out their stalls. Ken Dryden, for example, wrote an impressive document called “Big Canada,” a strong call for a more ambitious country. Reading it, I wanted to put
my own ideas onto paper and get them into the national debate. The manifesto I wrote was nearly eight thousand words and was called “An Agenda for Nation Building.” If the Conservatives under Stephen Harper were determined to roll back the state and diminish the function of the federal government in national life, I thought liberalism should stand for the opposite: for a government that would have one central purpose—strengthening the spine of citizenship uniting all Canadians. We were so spread out across a continent, so divided by region, race, religion and language, that a central government’s mandate ought to be to guarantee equal conditions of citizenship for all. That didn’t mean big or intrusive government—since citizenship has to mean freedom—but it did mean one that would ensure, for example, that every qualified Canadian that got the grades could get post-secondary education and not be crippled by debt; that every Canadian could move from one province to another and still be able to count on roughly the same quality of social services, employment insurance and health care. Our party, together with the New Democrats, had created a publicly funded health-care system. We had both fought to make sure that health care didn’t depend on what was in your wallet. Now the battle had to focus on ensuring that access didn’t depend on your postal code. Rural, remote and northern Canada had just as much right to good health care as the big cities. The purpose of national standards in health care and common approaches to our problems was to ensure that we were more than ten provinces and three territories strung out like birds on the wire of the forty-ninth parallel, our border with the US. We were one country, and we’d always understood that imaginative national government played a central role in binding us together as a people.