Ignatieff's Progressive Conservatism

The values held by the Red Tories are alive and well in the leader of the Liberal party.

I can think of no better argument for being involved in politics than what I perceive to be the message of Lawrence Martin’s recent column in the Globe and Mail about the lack of clout progressives hold in the current Conservative party. According to Martin, the moderates never recovered from the disastrous 1993 election and were easily pushed out of the way when the Canadian Alliance took over the party.

But the truth regarding the “old” (I wish you would stop using that term, Lawrence) Progressive Conservatives is that I can’t think of any who have been bought, bullied, beaten, or bent into submission since 2003. They are who they are, and who they have always been. After a lifetime fighting for what they believe in, they remain true to their values. In other words, I love them, and it’s not their fault the new Conservative party is more Reform than Progressive.

It’s an unfortunate situation for the country, as we need their voices now more than ever.

The world is standing on the edge of an interminably deep crevasse at the moment. Like in the 1930s, economically, socially, morally, and politically, we are facing massive divisions in society. We’re split right down the middle on issues of race, religious beliefs, power, money, you name it.

When the Tamils reached our shores and it looked like they’d be turned away, I couldn’t help but think of the book None is Too Many. When I saw Anne Frank’s beloved tree split and broken, I couldn’t help but think of the dreadful disgrace of what is happening in Pakistan.

I remembered also a conversation I had years ago with Louise Arbour. I sell real estate, so we were celebrating the purchase of her new home in Ottawa, and somehow we got into a discussion about how we both saw the West as a gated community. Every once in a while we throw a piece of meat over the wall and think that it is sufficient, she said, but it is not, and we will come to regret our indifference to those in need. I remember her words exactly. She is one of the tiniest women I have met in physical terms. The scope of her courage and heart, however, is immense.

This is a world that badly needs more of what I believe to be the old Progressive Conservative ideals and values: compassion, courage, justice, freedom, cooperation, dialogue, fairness, and decency for everyone. Especially those less fortunate.

I’m looking for someone out there in politics-land who shares this feeling. And I don’t much care which party he or she belongs to. The Liberal party, the Conservative party, the NDP, the Greens – it doesn’t much matter. I just don’t want to see any more starving, hopeless children. I don’t want to see any more death or destruction on my watch. I’ve got enough to do just trying to survive and help people here, so I need someone who really does care and understands about what is going on offshore, as well as in Canada.

I see things in pictures. And I tell things the way my Celtic forbears and most women do – through stories. So when I saw Michael Ignatieff for the first time, it was like a snapshot. Since I was going through the same process in private as he was being forced to do in public – reinvention – I understood what he was going through. I knew that, even after he had won the leadership of the Liberal party, he was not yet ready. Not enough suffering, my Scottish mind told me. Not yet.

When he decided to do the summer tour this year accompanied by what Allan Fotheringham has dubbed “The Children’s Crusade,” a bunch of irrepressible, unimaginably bright twentysomethings, he reached another plateau. Apparently, he had decided to be himself and damn the consequences. It was at this time I began to really listen to him, and I found I liked what I heard.

I don’t know Stephen Harper. I have never had the opportunity to meet him. I’ve never met Michael Ignatieff either. But I do know that, watching him, I have come to trust him more than any other Canadian leader to take us away from the icy edge of the crevasse.

My husband, Dalton Camp, wrote these words many years ago in a book called Gentlemen, Players & Politicians:

In the bloodless wars of politics, the wounds are to pride and place. In such activity, men easily exaggerate their relevance to it. More than that, once caught up in it, the significance of politics becomes disproportionate to their lives. To many, I suspect, their importance to themselves, as to others, lies in their being politicians. One would wish it to be the other way round – that their importance as politicians lies in men being themselves, true to their best impulse and finest ideals, less concerned with the victory of a party as they are more concerned with the survival of their own personality and nature.

But party politics feeds and flourishes upon the blood of sublimation. Every man must serve another’s larger cause, giving or lending himself in whole or in part to another judgement, a further condition, a greater good, a lesser will, a common motive and purpose, and these replace his own criteria, the immediacy of his own conscience, until his own moral nature becomes a mere accessory to the cause, which is no more his than his neighbour’s, but the product of some ill-defined greater good and lesser evil.

In the trackless wastes of politics, men lose their purpose, and the stars by which they once steered vanish in the bottomless sky of other men’s aspirations. They wander like nomads, from oasis to oasis, quenching their thirst from the wells of power and warming themselves by the abandoned fires of those who have come and gone before.

There’s a man out there who has created a deep pool of experience from which we can all draw, through a lifetime spent teaching, observing, and living in the world. He has come home to us and this summer, he has travelled this country talking to whoever will listen. He’s said he has a big red tent in which we can all meet to talk about what we can do for each other and the planet. And under which there is shelter from the storm.

His name is Michael Ignatieff. It just happens he’s a Liberal. I feel he’s being true to himself and by being true to himself, he assures me that he will be true to the people of this country. I am comfortable with the way he thinks, his intelligence, the way he speaks to us and with us across the country, across party lines, in both official languages. I think he’d make a good prime minister. That’s just my opinion.

There’ll be people in the old Progressive Conservative party who’ll say: “Oh my god, she’s gone and turned Grit.” Well, you know what? It’s not about that. It’s about finding the person who best demonstrates the empathy and skills necessary to improve this country and the world beyond it, who best exemplifies those values once embodied by the Progressive Conservatives. That person, I believe, is Michael Ignatieff.