http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01ignatieff.html?emc=eta1
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: February 01, 2009
TORONTO
IN the last few years, Michael Ignatieff's friends in the United States and England began receiving self-deprecating e-mail messages from him lamenting how dull and low-profile his life had suddenly become. He had spent most of the preceding four decades making a name for himself in both countries - writing essays on the world's war zones for The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books; writing novels and screenplays; enjoying popularity as a television-show host in Britain and a regular at the Groucho Club; and teaching at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Now, he joked, he was stuck in the pedestrian life of a freshman civil servant - in Canada no less. Mr. Ignatieff shocked friends and colleagues three years ago by chucking the life of the mind for the hurly-burly of politics and returning, after a long exile, to his native country to win a seat in Parliament. And if he was bored, it wasn't for long. Last December, after a tumultuous fortnight of machinations in parliament, Mr. Ignatieff, 61, became the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, which has been called Canada's "natural ruling party" and has been in power for much of the last century. Should his party win control of the government, something it came close to doing last week and still hopes to in the coming months, he would become the next prime minister of Canada. Among the circles in which Mr. Ignatieff once traveled, there might be a sense that anybody capable of writing a novel ("Scar Tissue") that becomes short-listed for the Booker Prize - anybody, for that matter, who had the writer Martin Amis and Michael Palin of Monty Python as guests at his wedding - could figure out a way to jump the queue of Canadian politics.
James Morton
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4 comments:
So Ignatieff is bored and wants the fast track to the PM's office. Ya, that makes me have more respect for the guy. What the hell are we doing?
His experience and accomplishments may be his greatest strength, but they are also his greatest weakness.
He has, for the last three decades or so, seen the world through a very rarefied perspective, one having more in common with the American-English elite than of any particularly Canadian sentiment or value.
We say evidence of this early on when Ignatieff, almost alone among Canadian Liberals, supported the Iraq war. Support for the war was a view current in his literary and academic circles, but roundly, and rightly, rejected by the Canadian public.
We have yet to see the side of Ignatieff that makes him anything other than a Harvard conservative, nothing that marks him as supporting the distinctly Canadian values of support for the weak and equality of opportunity.
Indeed, the very way he felt comfortable 'jumping the queue' - not to mention assuming the leadership without so much as a vote - suggests the opposite, that he views privilege as a right.
I agree with Anxious Liberal.
The New York Times neglected to do much research into this man's character and personal history.
Please take the time to read another article from Canada's prestigious Globe&Mail.Note also reader's comments from Canadians on that site.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/home
This man left Canada 30 years ago for the UK and USA and now wants to be PM? scary thought!!
A MUST-READ FOR ALL CANADIANS
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060825.wxboat26/BNStory/National/home
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