Stop Making Us Feel Sorry for Ex-Harvard Professors

This Christmas op-ed writers clearly did not get a new punching bag to replace Michael Ignatieff.

Far be it from us in The Mark Newsroom to defend Michael Ignatieff because, well, who exactly he is or what he stands for remains anyone’s guess. But it seems like whenever there’s a slow news day, the default setting for many op-ed writers is “get Iggy.” Take this editorial in the Ottawa Sun, which asserts the “stupidity” of Ignatieff all but promising to trigger an election this spring. While Ignatieff “spent his holidays with spacey fireside chats again pondering the early triggering of a truly unwanted federal election,” says the Sun, “many of his caucus members were undoubtedly making New Year's resolutions to have him dumped.” Well actually, according to a December Angus Reid poll, 49 per cent of Canadians want this “truly unwanted election” and only 34 per cent don’t think it’s a good idea. If they’re going to make a living bashing the oft-hapless Liberal leader, the Sun editors should at least acknowledge the rare occasions on which he gets something right, which he appears dangerously close to doing at the moment.

The National Post’s Adrian McNair spreads his net a little wider and casts aspersions on all the opposition parties for repeatedly hammering the government over Afghanistan in 2010 instead of issues like the economy and health care, which polls show are Canadians’ primary concerns. It’s a fair point, but McNair gives curiously little weight to the fact that the Conservatives were so harried by questions over the Afghan detainee issue that they decided to prorogue Parliament last year. And what McNair means by this sentence, we in the Newsroom cannot figure out: “At a time we should be united in helping Afghans … the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois have instead focused on using the mission as a tool to attack the Conservatives.” Didn’t the Liberals just join forces with the Conservatives to extend the Afghan mission? And as far as we can tell, the NDP was against the war from the beginning, and to suggest an unshifting nine-year policy is somehow a partisan ploy is cynical in the extreme.