Skewed News

At first the situation was merely pathetic. Canada re-elected Stephen Harper while America was in the process of electing Barack Obama. That was bad enough.

Now it’s getting worse. First came the coalition fiasco — all of which could have been averted had the NDP explicitly offered the possibility of a coalition during the election campaign. Then the Liberals chose the most conservative of leadership candidates, Michael Ignatieff, mostly through attrition and a lack of viable alternatives.

Ignatieff is doing nothing to counter the NDP’s charge that he is basically in support of Stephen Harper’s government. He insisted on no modifications to Harper’s budget. He caved and gave the budget speedy passage when Harper turned up the heat. He supports the Conservatives on the same kind of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug crimes that state after state in the USA is getting rid of as fast as possible, even though it isn’t a confidence measure.

Governments get defeated, not elected, the cynics say, and Ignatieff is a cynic’s cynic.

Last week, Ignatieff sided with the Harperites against British MP George Galloway, whom the government has barred from entering Canada on account of his support for Hamas and Palestine. Although Ignatieff does not support barring Galloway’s entry to Canada, he was just as definitive in condemning him.

“I have never in a long life of listening to George Galloway heard a single sentence out of his mouth that I believed,” said Ignatieff, which points to a glaring difference between the two men. Ignatieff supported the US invasion of Iraq and Galloway was one of its most vocal and prominent critics. The Liberal leader is obviously trying to win back some voters, mostly but by no means exclusively Jewish, that support Harper’s and immigration minister Jason Kenney’s aggressively pro-Israel stance.

Last week, Kenney cut funding, mostly used for immigrant settlement services, to the Canadian Arab Federation. Its president called Kenney and other politicians “professional whores” for their support of Israel. This verbal excess provided Kenney with ample pretext for cutting the funds and playing the pro-Israel card again.

Some say Michael Ignatieff has done so little to develop a personal identity of his own around issues because he expects Harper’s popularity to fall on its own due to hard times. He doesn’t want to create any targets, like his predecessor’s carbon tax, on which he can be attacked. Governments get defeated, not elected, the cynics say, and Ignatieff is a cynic’s cynic.

Some might say Michael Ignatieff’s strategy recalls Dick Morris’ advice to Bill Clinton to “hug the enemy.” Clinton hugged the enemy so hard that he adopted a great many of the disastrous Republican policies that led to today’s big crash.

Last week Harper gave a startlingly partisan speech to the recently-founded Manning Institute for Democracy, Harper slagged Barack Obama’s stimulus plan for taxing the rich and the “toxic coalition brew of Liberals, socialists and separatists.” He also said the global economic crash was the result of people not being conservative enough.

“We are in a global recession principally — and we have to face this — because a lot of people on Wall Street, because of a lot of people in the private sector more generally — homeowners or consumers — pushed or bought into a very unconservative idea: that they could live beyond their means. Regulators may have failed to prevent it, but in the end it was a failure of the private sector to live according to the values we as conservatives know to be true.”

This week Harper is going after the gun registry, which cost the Liberals so much support in rural areas and the West.

Where will Michael Ignatieff go next? At a time when Canadians need inspiration, his current direction is not promising. Even if trends continued and he won a minority government, the policy differences from the current one could be slight.

Ish Theilheimer has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since founding it in September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.