Ignatieff's Patriotism

Michael Ignatieff's recent book tour on behalf of True Patriot Love was, unavoidably, a political event as well. The eloquence and articulacy with which Ignatieff evokes the intertwined histories of Canada and his maternal ancestors would suffice to quell any reasonable doubts his years abroad might have created about his attachment to this country. If he were not succeeding on this front, I doubt the Conservatives (faster than you can chant 'Joe McCarthy') would have trotted out the 'just visiting' ads denigrating his patriotism and depicting him as driven solely by ego and vanity.

Even if the attack were less dishonest and demagogic than it is, it would still be an exercise of stupefying irrelevance to an electorate that seems, rightly, more interested in such matters as the present economic situation and the plans for dealing with it of the various parties than in precisely what percentage of Michael Ignatieff's time on earth has been spent in other countries. In light of their economic record, it's understandable that the Conservatives would prefer to change the subject. Their leading figures are also keenly aware that, as Stephen Harper's long-time adviser Tom Flanagan has lamented, Canada is the only major democracy where the Party of the Right does not enjoy an inbuilt advantage as the 'patriotic party.'

In their zeal to redress this vulnerability, Harper and his colleagues display an indifference to occasion as well as a failure to think through the drawbacks for themselves of ginning up such a debate. There is at the very least the appearance of inconsistency in banging the patriotic drum when you are as openly disdainful of central national institutions as Mr. Harper has been on occasion. If the 'autonomists' who seek de facto independence for Quebec are ill-positioned to lecture others about their attachment to Canada, so is an unrepentant signatory to the 'firewall letter' which conceded so much of substance to Alberta separatism while eschewing the formality. Nor is Ignatieff the first politician with a healthy element of ambition in his makeup;you don't become a party leader without it, whether you are Liberal or Conservative. But the charge that nothing else is present in Ignatieff's case comes with ill grace from a leader who shows as much alacrity as Mr. Harper in abandoning principles and changing policies when this is the price of achieving or retaining power.

And of course the Conservative bill of particulars rests on distortion of Ignatieff's record where it is not provably spurious. Even when based in Britain or the United States, he frequently returned to Canada, ruminated and opined on Canadian concerns and figures (look at his 1980s articles for Saturday Night on Pierre Trudeau and Charles Taylor, and in the New Republic about Marshall McLuhan, for instance)and analysed events elsewhere with an unmistakably Canadian sensibility. The archetypal Canadian experience of accommodating multiple ethnocultural identities within one community is clearly a major influence on Ignatieff's analyses of nationalism as a scholar and war correspondent. Indeed, the arc of his public life is most persuasively understood as a series of excursions into concerns at the heart of the Canadian condition, with which he could reckon definitively only by coming home. Recognition of this was not Ignatieff's alone; his speech to the 2005 Liberal convention convinced many that his knowledge of the wider world had shaped a uniquely fresh perspective on the Canadian situation, and led them to see him as a potentially inspiring leader of both party and country.

It was not that long ago that Conservatives urged Canadians to embrace global markets, confident in our ability to compete beyond our own borders. Yet Stephen Harper contradicts this healthy optimism about our capacities by presenting Ignatieff's record of success at institutions like the BBC and Harvard not as an exemplary success story but as the abandonment of Canadian roots. In this new variant of conservatism, it seems, you must choose between your Canadian identity and achievement elsewhere. While they attack him, Ignatieff rightly observed, the Conservatives also insult the many Canadians who in any given year are living and working abroad. Just how many consecutive days, I wonder, can you be outside Canada before your affection for it falls into question? Are there special exemptions for our foreign service officers or the soldiers the Conservatives seem to think they alone among parties respect? These are the absurd calculations in which you are soon entangled once you reduce patriotism to a question of mailing address rather than of heart and mind. "The world needs more Canada", said one of the more successful ad campaigns of recent years. But if we are to take Mr. Harper at his word, any Canadians with something to share should get it done with and hurry home before their welcome expires.

And there's a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in the sneers at Ignatieff as an "elitist" or an "academic";at what sad moment in recent Canadian politics did a well-stocked and disciplined mind become an object of reproach? I doubt it was an accident that one of the very few of Stockwell Day's innumerable gaffes that was actually feigned saw him refer in Parliament to Ignatieff not as the Member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, or even for London or Cambridge, Mass., but as "the Member for Harvard." A hard-earned association with a great university is just a cheap punch-line for a Conservative Party whose stance towards the realms of art and intellect often seems like a variant of "let's beat up the kid with the glasses." Extensive travel and considerable learning are, to be sure, neither guarantees nor prerequisites of patriotism; but it is the most insular know-nothingism to imply that they're somehow incompatible with it.

The Conservative web site that says of Ignatieff "it's all about him" also recycles his observation that if his electors chose to reject him "I hope Harvard will let me back." Hell, if I were giving up the leadership of a research centre at the Kennedy School for something as chancy as a political career, I'd hope like Hell Harvard would take me back if it didn't work out, as would anyone with a groat's worth of sense. Overlooked in the chortling of the superannuated frat-boys running the Conservative ad campaign is the fact that for all the potential rewards Ignatieff courted in changing careers, there were risks and sacrifices as well. And there is an element of perversity in suspecting that because his presence here is the result of conscious choice and not geographical happenstance it is somehow discreditable.

Precisely because he has spent so much of his adult life elsewhere, it must have been an act of will for Ignatieff to nourish ties to Canada beyond nostalgia for the setting of youthful happiness. In its depth of understanding for the history and culture of this country, Ignatieff's patriotism is an achievement, not simple habit or sentiment. And like any praiseworthy attribute it is all the more admirable insofar as it is rooted in effort rather than that fortune which owes nothing to merit or dessert.

It would be a degrading diversion from more pressing matters for the leaders of our two major parties to fall into a protracted squabble over which has a stronger attachment to Canada. But it is not inappropriate to note how each man's version of patriotism is reflected in his rhetoric or program. A nation, Ernest Renan wrote, is a group of people who have done great things together and wish to do more. As his recent book shows, Ignatieff is taken by the unfinished nature of Canada and thus the possibility of great projects yet to be commenced. If the recent attacks on Ignatieff are indicative, Stephen Harper sees a smaller Canada, timid, inward-looking, defensive. This Canada excludes those whose horizons don't dovetail with its borders, and its people find in the achievements abroad of their countrymen only fodder for resentment. I have no trouble deciding which Canada I prefer, and still think enough of the Canadian public to believe a majority of it would agree.