[LINK] "Worthwhile Canadian Candidate"

[rfmcdonald]

The suggestion of Jeremy Keehn, writing in Slate, that Michael Ignatieff's lack of popularity can be traced mainly to a Canadian "tall poppy" syndrome, of a distrust of someone whose career took him outside of the country, strikes me as wrong. I disliked Ignatieff because he was a parachuted candidate, previously lacking any involvement in Canadian domestic politics and lacking any personal appeal until it was far, far too late. He lost because he deserved to lose.

I think Keehn is right about this being a secondary factor, to be sure, alongside the urban/rural polarization of the electorate, and I do like his choice of illustrative anecdote.

No one has captured the culture of suspicion toward Ignatieff types in the Canadian hinterlands quite so well as Alice Munro. In her second book, Lives of Girls and Women, her alter ego, Del, watches two aunts mock their neighbor's new husband at an introductory dinner:

"Oh, the law-yer!" cried Aunt Elspeth elegantly, and leaning across the table inquired, "Have you always—been interested—in country life?" After their marvelous courtesy to him I found this faintly chilling; it was a warning. Didn't he think he was somebody! That was their final condemnation, lightly said. He thinks he's somebody. Don't they think they're somebody. Pretensions were everywhere.

Not that they were against ability. They acknowledged it in their own family, our family. But it seemed the thing to do was keep it more or less a secret. Ambition was what they were alarmed by, for to be ambitious was to court failure and to risk making a fool of oneself.

The aunts then brag about their talented brother, who they claim could have sat in the province's Cabinet. "Didn't he get elected?" Del asks. "Don't be silly, he never ran," Aunt Elspeth replies.

Under the Conservative barrage, Ignatieff no doubt often wished he hadn't either. But there's wisdom, too, in the fears of small towns. A mistrust of ambition holds a country to one war instead of two or three; it keeps national banks from gorging on mortgage-backed securities. And it helps sort out the leaders from the carpetbaggers.

The Conservatives were smart to smear Ignatieff as the latter, but whether they were right remains to be seen. Examples of his vanity abound, to be sure—this is a man who once posed, in a raffish pink suit, for the cover of GQ's U.K. edition. And he did make a fool of himself as one of the leading thinkers to support the Iraq War. Yet his otherwise illustrious international career was grounded in the values of the country he left behind in 1969. One of the downsides to shying away from ambition is that you can also be quick to abandon your ideals—and back then, Canada prided itself on being internationally oriented, morally engaged, and spiritually generous. The international community has found Harper's Canada to have these qualities in shorter supply.

Oh well. Four more years.