How many bad days can Michael Ignatieff have in a row?

The votes are in and the conclusion is that the four federal byelections held Monday are definitely …. over.

Phew. So much punditry devoted to so little. Other than polls taken when no election is in sight, byelections may be the most over-analyzed events in federal politics.

Reuters opens its coverage of the results with this:

Canada’s ruling Conservative strengthened their grip on power on Monday when they unexpectedly won two extra seats in Parliament in special elections, making it even less likely they will be brought down any time soon.

Hmm, what exactly does that mean, “strengthened their grip on power”? Before the byelections, the Tories had a minority government. Now … they have a minority government! They have two more seats than before, but can still be defeated by the combined forces of the opposition. So, how is that stronger?

It must be true, though, because Bloomberg takes a similar line:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party moved closer to a majority in the country’s national legislature with two victories in local by- elections.

“Closer to a majority”. That’s like, when I wander down to the National Post cafeteria, I’m closer to Australia than I used to be. Before the byelections, the government was 12 seats short of a majority. Now, excitingly, they’re 10 seats short. Wow, that means… they’re still … short of a majority. And unless there’s another general election, it will stay that way. So nothing has changed. Wow!

The Globe and Mail, not surprisingly, doesn’t buy this thesis. Everything that happens in Ottawa is significant, if you’re the Globe and Mail. Daniel Leblanc writes that the government’s pick-up of a Quebec seat from the Bloc was a “shocker”.

While a by-election is just that, the upset suggests Quebec will be the scene of interesting races in the next general election, and that even the safest Bloc seat can be in play. For Gilles Duceppe, the result provides the biggest challenge since he briefly quit as Bloc Leader to run for the leadership of the Parti Québécois in 2007.

That’s a good theory, except that Tory fortunes in Quebec tend to bounce around like a kid on a pogo stick — up, down, up, down, and no one ever seems to know where they’ll head next. They were fine until the middle of the last election, when an ill-advised Harper remark on culture sent them plunging. Then the coalition came along and Harper’s attack on the Bloc was seen as self-immolation, ending any hope of a comeback. Yet now the government steals a seat from Gilles Duceppe, and suddenly nothing’s safe.

CBC’s Kady O’Malley as usual manages to be entertaining without having to decide who won, grading each race on a smugness scale:

The Conservatives are allowed to be entirely smug over Montmagny–L’Islet–Kamouraska–Rivière-du-Loup. As to the riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, they are granted a limited licence to gloat quietly, at least in public, since really, it would have been a very bad sign if they hadn’t managed to win that seat back. Port Coquitlam is, however, declared a smugness-free zone, since they got smoked by the NDP by any metric one cares to employ.

As with most commentators, she concludes that Michael Ignatieff clearly had the worst day, since “the Liberals have failed to meet the minimum qualifications for any smugness licence.”

Mr. Ignatieff seemed just as confused about the importance of the results as anyone. “The by-election results last night show that we have a lot of work ahead of us,” he eventually said in a statement. “Canadians want an alternative to the Harper Conservatives. Our job in the months ahead is to earn the confidence and support of Canadians.”

Canadians “want an alternative to the Harper Conservatives”? So they show it by electing more Conservatives? Odd people, these Canadians.

Kelly McParland
National Post

Read it here.

Let’s play pretend.

You are the leader of the opposition, and you dearly want to become prime minister.

The country is facing a budget deficit somewhere north of $50 billion. You have promised to eliminate it. You have also promised no new taxes (sort of) and no cuts to any important program. (No instance of unimportant program has ever been identified by a governing party in Ottawa.)

Someone asks you a hypothetical question. If you were prime minister, which would you commit to first:

1. $175 million for a new hockey arena in Quebec, so it can try to attract an NHL hockey team

2. $20 billion, roughly, for a high-speed train from Quebec City to Windsor.

The correct answer is: “As prime minister my first priority would be to eliminate the deficit and return the country to a sound financial footing, and big new spending projects would have to wait.”

Michael Ignatieff’s answer: The choo-choo. “But I’d really like there to be a hockey team in Quebec City, that’s for sure.”

National Post

Read it here.

Time for Ignatieff to take a chance:

It is true in politics, no less than in physics, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Michael Ignatieff, as is well known, has seen his popularity nosedive in recent weeks, when it seemed he could not put a foot right. Very well: if he is smart, he can turn that to his advantage, using the very speed of his decline to propel his rebound. Reculer pour mieux sauter and all that. There is a script for this. If listening to his advisers, playing it safe, taking no stands, guarding every word has brought him to this humiliating low, then the way is open for one of those Hollywood moments, where the candidate rips up the speech that has been prepared for him and speaks from the heart—when he sheds the ingratiating poses of “politics as usual” in favour of his authentic self. Of course, it helps if that is, in fact, what the candidate is up to.

It is tempting to believe that the public does not want this—that we would sooner our politicians lie to us, dope us with half truths, preferring the comforting haze of denial to the harsh light of reality. But in fact the voters show every sign of craving the opposite, if only it were offered to them. Whenever and wherever they catch the slightest whiff of authenticity in a candidate, they practically rush the barriers, at least until the inevitable disappointment, either because the candidate proves not so authentic as it appeared, or because authenticity, all too often, comes bundled with incompetence.

So, assuming the Liberal leader has any interest in this strategy, he will have both to break the mould of politics-as-usual in fact, and to persuade the public of this reality. He will have to stake out a bold position on an issue of importance other politicians would prefer to avoid, in a way that inspires confidence that he will stick to it under fire.

There is an issue that presents itself, as others have noted, as an opportunity for Ignatieff to show some backbone, and that is the deficit. Certainly it’s an important issue: the greatest proximate threat to our standard of living, particularly in light of the approaching “geezer boom,” with the explosion of social costs, notably for health care, it will bring. And it is one on which current political discourse remains frozen in denial. We are sliding back into the habits of mind that produced the long string of deficits of the 1980s and 1990s, where budgets always balance in the future but never today, and any unpleasant gaps are made to disappear with endless, endless growth.

Read the rest here.

In Ottawa on Monday, I kept getting asked—including by three stray passersby on Wellington Street—what Beatles song Michael Ignatieff should sing. Oh, come on, you don’t really need a professional for this, do you? Help! Yesterday (All my troubles seemed so far away). The Fool On The Hill. Hello, Goodbye. Get Back (to Harvard and a little light BBC hosting) . . .

I wasn’t really in the mood to pile on Iggy, poor chap. I was in town to testify to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Human Rights about the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s assault on individual liberty and freedom of expression. And, mainly because I’ve been yakking about this subject for a couple of years now and have pretty much exhausted my stock of free-speech quotations from Milton to Salman Rushdie, just for variety’s sake I decided to cite Michael Ignatieff to the committee. I was talking about the assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch that, Canada’s constitution notwithstanding, there is “no hierarchy of rights,” only a “matrix” in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish group rights and collective rights. And I responded with a blast of Professor Ignatieff:

“Collective rights without individual ones end up in tyranny. Moreover, rights inflation—the tendency to define anything desirable as a right—ends up eroding the legitimacy of a defensible core of rights . . . The right to freedom of speech is not, as the Marxist tradition maintained, a lapidary bourgeois luxury, but the precondition for having any other rights at all.”

Bingo! In my battles with the “human rights” enforcers, I am an Ignatieffite—okay, that’s a bit unwieldy, but I’m certainly an Iggybopper. As I told the Select Committee, I support the Ignatieff position—on freedom of speech, on individual vs. collective rights, and on the way “rights inflation” damages the core of real rights.

Until a recent mid-life career change, Ignatieff used to say stuff like that all the time. Now, not so much. At least not to the point of joining his fellow Liberal Keith Martin in calling for the repeal of Section 13, the appallingly drafted “hate speech” law even more appallingly interpreted by the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. But throughout the ’80s and ’90s you could switch on the BBC almost any night of the week and find a dark-shirted tie-less Ignatieff deep in furrowed-brow conversation about freedom of speech with some novelist or philosopher. I well remember him discussing a play he found morally repellent, but declaring nevertheless: “Nothing should be beyond speaking about.”

Read the rest of this article here.

Second, Bill Bellieveau’s article: Polls aside, Ignatieff might yet emerge:

With polls showing Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals continuing to lose ground to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, national media pundits are beginning to speculate that Ignatieff’s tenure as leader of the Federal Liberal Party could be short-lived.

At first blush, it might be easy to agree with them when you consider numbers like 40 per cent Conservative and 28 per cent Liberal, but I would caution them to temper their prognosis for a while.

The other night, I was traveling to Ottawa reading my collection of newspapers and magazines. A couple of articles in Maclean’s Magazine caught my eye but more importantly, they caused me to reexamine the Ignatieff situation.

The articles had a number of interesting messages: one that Ignatieff has yet to reveal himself, two that he has something to say and three that Harper is not the man that he has been fabricating over the last few months.

I recall years ago when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was at the peak of his popularity.

There were reasons why so many Canadians fell in love with him: he was a new and refreshing character. He slid down banisters, dated movie stars and wore a red rose in his lapel.

Trudeau helped shape Canada with his vision of a unified, bilingual, multicultural “just society.”

After calling an election just three weeks after he became Liberal leader, he promised to stem the rise of Quebec separatism and turn Canada into a unified nation. On the eve of the election, he ignored threats of separatist violence and attended Montreal’s St-Jean-Baptiste parade. When officials fled as rioters hurled rocks and other debris, Trudeau refused to back down. That was major.

Trudeau wasn’t intimidated by people and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind or offer an opinion that was unpopular or in opposition to conventional thinking.

That brings me back to Michael Ignatieff. As the MacLean’s article correctly points out, Ignatieff used to speak his mind. His Harvard lectures and BBC interviews revealed a human rights advocate that has been silenced by political ambition.

He once said the right to freedom of speech is the pre-condition for all other rights. His position on freedom of speech, on individual versus collective rights and his view that “rights inflation” damages the foundation of basic rights are most timely.

They were repeated recently to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice and Rights, not by Ignatieff but by someone who agrees with him. They were delivered in response to an assertion by Chief Censor Jennifer Lynch who had said earlier that Canada’s constitution, notwithstanding “there is no hierarchy of rights,” only a matrix in which “freedom of expression” has to be “balanced” by modish (trendy or current) group rights and collective rights.

Read the rest of this article here.

Michael Ignatieff sings: Where are his handlers?!

Hey, because it is such an amazing performance, take a few minutes to watch the full length video of Stephen Harper’s performance at the NAC Gala last week:

watch?v=_3v6CWoQBnY&feature=player_embedded#at=20

The one thing Michael Ignatieff could not afford to do is try to mimic this performance.  In any way.  At all.

So what does Michael Ignatieff do? He sings.  Badly:

watch?v=Kl-epJKaXes&feature=player_embedded

Oh, that is painful to listen to.  The cheap attempt at a political point at the end fell as flat as his attempt to hit a note.

I bet he was goaded into it by a reporter’s question, but so what?  He should just stand his ground and say that Stephen Harper’s performance is of no interest to him as it pertains to the job as Leader of the Opposition.  It was fun to watch, and that’s all that he’s going to say.

Sure the reporters would be disappointed, but then it would put some cold water on this hot story, at least when he was around.

And the Liberals desperately needed for this story to die away.

But instead Michael Ignatieff gets drawn into it, and worse, makes Stephen Harper’s great performance look even better!

Singing.  Off key with no music.  In a room full of skeptical reporters looking for a reason to make you look bad.  And with bloggers only too happy to help!

Is the Rosedale Gang just that clueless?

H/T: Plattytalk

Again, you can read the original article here.

From the Libertas Post blog:

An unwilling defence of Warren Kinsella

I truly dislike Warren Kinsella, Michael Ignatieff’s head war-room strategist. Perhaps it has something to do with his willingness to bully people and try to strong-arm them with the authority of his position within the Liberal Party. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he seems to have a fetish for alienating people and launching frivolous lawsuits.

But no matter how much I may dislike Warren Kinsella, blogger Skippy Stalin dislikes him even more:

“For my foreign readers, I should point out that Warren Kinsella is a self-promoting huckster with an animus for the truth and a talent for creating enemies in places that he doesn’t have to, especially online.

Warren never seemed to learn the only serious lesson of political professionals, that they’re better off being neither seen nor heard. If you’re a hack who’s looking for a book deal and face-time on TV, you do what Warren, Karl Rove and James Carville do.

To be fair, Rove and Carville have done something Kinsella hasn’t, which is win a serious election, although, they weren’t the elections you would think. Carville got Bob Casey, Sr. elected governor of Pennsylvania when most people thought doing so actually defied the laws of physics. Rove brought Bush the Younger up from a 24 point deficit to beat the popular Texas governor Ann Richards in 1994. Most presidential elections are won or lost a year before election day. If the incumbent party is above or below 50% approval the preceding November, you pretty much know which way the general election will go.

Warren just sat around like a moron and watched Kim Campbell, Stockwell Day and John Tory lose. That’s pretty much what I did in all three of those elections, but Kinsella found people dumb enough to pay him to do it. That actually looks like great work, if you can get it. Besides, it gives him time to update his dopey blog and Google his own name relentlessly.”

However, in reply to a recent poll on Bourque, which voted Warren Kinsella as the greatest liability to Michael Ignatieff’s campaign, Skippy finds himself mounting a grudging defence ( all swear-words bleeped due to my own hand):

“The fact is that you can’t blame Warren Kinsella for the disaster that is the is the Liberal Party. S**t, he won’t won’t confirm or deny that he even voted for the Liberals in the last three elections. And he’s only just above the office janitor in the office hierarchy, so he doesn’t matter.

Rocco Rossi made the party a s**tload of money that no one expected him to, so he can’t be blamed for anything. He might be the only pro in that shop. And you could put everybody else in the poll who isn’t Ian Davey on milk cartons and their own families probably wouldn’t recognize them.

Of course Kinsella is going to lead that poll. He’s the only one anyone voting has ever even heard of before. Warren’s the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with the biggest t*ts who refuses to wear a bra. Most people who aren’t students of football are going to notice that before they ask themselves whether or not the quarterback sucks.

The only name that wasn’t in the Borque poll was the one that maters the most: Michael Ignatieff. The “Inside Baseball” amateurs at Borque are missing a very important point: Even if Iggy is being failed by his motley crew, he hired them in the first place and refuses to fire any of them.

Ignatieff is the actual candidate, the leader and the guy who’s supposed to be making the decisions. The fact that Warren’s allowed to even keep a blog, let alone maintain it from the Office of Leader of the Opposition* tells me that he has no control over his own volunteers, let alone the party.”

Again, you can read it here.

Skippy’s right of course. Warren is just the most publicly-known name on the poll, who turned into the scape-goat this time around. The fact that he’s angered so many people over his years in the game probably didn’t help matters either.

Thing is, Michael Ignatieff is to blame for his own problems. He surrounded himself with the wrong people at the wrong times, and took the wrong advice. He stepped into his position without having to fight for it, and he let his own people push him around. He flip-flopped on issue after issue, from EI reform to a harmonised sales tax to calling an election. And whatever strategy he may have had, it has only served to make the CPC stronger.

Michael Ignatieff blew it. This was his summer to score a helluva lot of points, and he didn’t. And not only did he not make headway, he actually lost it.

And you can’t blame Warren Kinsella for that, no matter how scummy the guy might be.