But on the road to Montreal, it was Michael Ignatieff who was the centre of the play and, like Hamlet, a presence even when offstage. His ideas were publicly challenged, his commitment questioned, his citizenship in doubt, his Liberalism mocked. Like Hamlet, Ignatieff was given to grand speeches, was at times contradictory, a prince who wondered if he was a man of words or a man of action. He was the early choice of 30 percent of the delegates. “He’s lov’d of the distracted multitude,” the king said of Hamlet, “who like not in their judgment, but their eyes.” Ignatieff had all the qualities that make a prince attractive: he is articulate, with a certain loftiness, and a sense of political destiny that occasionally, and cautiously, evoked Trudeau. Ignatieff had lived in a dozen places, a citizen of the world, self-contained, but he was now, he said, looking for home. “O God,” Hamlet laments, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” And Guildenstern answers, “Which dreams indeed are ambition.”
“I don’t think Michael knows who he is,” a Rae delegate told me. If he doesn’t, it isn’t from a lack of searching. Some of his books (The Russian Album, Scar Tissue, Blood and Belonging) deal with the notion of self and sense of place. And finding Canada’s place, a staple of Liberal conventions, was voiced at the Palais in the Hamlet-like lament: who are we in the world?
“Traditional Canadian peacekeeping met its Waterloo in Rwanda,” Ignatieff had told a crowd in Saint John, New Brunswick. The truth is, we are a middle power with an underfunded military. He added an international realpolitik to the softer Liberal line. “To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils,” he had written in the New York Times Magazine, engaging the issue of terrorism as a public intellectual and finding relatively few voices willing to join the debate. On the Stop Iggy website, disgruntled Liberals warned that Ignatieff would “destroy much of what constitutes the core of Liberal Party policy for the last century” though it could be argued that Liberal success rests in the absence of a core, in the Mackenzie King-like ability to co-opt and adapt and float toward a shifting centre.
Ignatieff’s occupation of the north foyer was Roman in its pomp and in its numbers. Phalanxes of supporters milled at the base of the long escalators, signs at the ready. Down the escalators, in waves, came supporters in different-coloured T-shirts—green, sienna, pink, and red—followed finally by Michael, descending to the masses, waving and smiling as they chanted, “Mi-chael! Mi-chael!”
Ignatieff’s muscular Liberalism was refuted by Dion and criticized by Bob Rae as “Harper lite.” Former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy obliquely accused Ignatieff of being an apologist for the Bush administration and its “borrowed and failed ideologies.” Ideology itself was in bad favour. In an interview Rae said, “I don’t think the country can afford to have deeply ideological parties. I find that ideology is usually a pretty lousy foundation for governing.” He criticized Harper for having the most ideological government in the country’s history, a divisive and Darwinian administration that ate the poor. Rae advocated openness and flexibility. Instead of ideology, then, a narrative.
There was much talk of narrative in the Liberal camp. They had paid one of Bill Clinton’s main strategists, James Carville, a rumoured $50,000 to come to Toronto and confirm to 1,200 Liberals that voters don’t want a litany; they want a story. In that Louisiana drawl, Carville offered George Bush’s story as example. ” ‘I was a drunk, I was transformed by the power of Jesus Christ . . . and I’m going to fight the terrorists in Iran and the homos in Hollywood.’ ” The Liberals hadn’t needed a story for some time, borne as they were by benevolent historical forces, by their populist appeal to everyman, and by the splintering of the conservative vote. But now the Conservatives had a narrative. “Mr. Harper’s narrative is a bad story for Canada,” Ignatieff said. “Beating Mr. Harper means defeating his narrative.”
The Harper narrative is a mélange of dense policy, simple gifts, and rigid ideology. There is a little of George Bush’s America (the emphasis on national security, decisiveness, secrecy, and hints of theology), a bit of Don Messer’s Jubilee (the retro sensibility of his child-care solutions, reopening the debate on same-sex marriage), as well as a reluctant Western populism.
His narrative is tightly controlled; he chooses the story and the way to tell it, and to whom it is told. And what of the narrator? Harper is a putative Westerner, his ideas and adult self formed there, though he doesn’t fit the mould of the Western politician, lacking the polished frontier presence of Peter Lougheed certainly or Don Getty’s rugged athleticism or the extended happy hour of Ralph Klein. No, Harper looks distinctly Central Canadian. He looks like the planned community of Don Mills: meticulous, efficient, and sterile. As a narrator, he is stiff and he has kept to the background, letting the story unfold in carefully presented pictures—his tough-on-crime bill delivered in the company of police officers; his clean-air act presented with mountains as backdrop; a ceremonial Last Spike given to James Pon after awarding compensation to the victims of the Chinese Head Tax. He has kept a tight lid on information coming out of his caucus and limited access to the national press, a relationship still marked by pettiness and an air of regency. His story comes out in Barthesian semiotics, a Western story of stolid morality, the new sheriff riding in to clean up the town.
In 2000, Harper wrote that Alberta and the rest of Canada were embarking on “divergent and potentially hostile paths to defining their country.” Alberta was choosing the “best of Canada’s heritage—a combination of American enterprise and individualism with the British traditions of order and co-operation,” while Canada was “content to become a second-tier socialistic country . . . led by a second-world strongman.” After Harper lost the 2004 election, elements of the story were toned down to court the soft liberal middle. The antiabortion elements and attacks on bilingualism were absent. He retooled the Alberta Advantage slogan to Advantage Canada, and the Western narrative was blown up into a national one: Canada, Harper announced, would be the Energy Nation.
So the spectre of Harper was there at the Palais des congrès. The brittle visionary, the controlling, decentralizing, hidden-agenda, End Days, strangle-Kyoto, Reform Harper hung from the ceiling as a Liberal piñata. Interim Liberal leader Bill Graham kicked it off on opening night, directing his geometrical rectitude—the squared body topped by a rectangular head—toward Harper. “I sit in the House, two sword lengths away from the prime minister, and there have been days when, if I had a sword . . . .” Harper, he said, had betrayed history and democracy and those who had invested in income trusts.
