Ignatieff sets sights on Ottawa
BY MICHAEL VALPY
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2005 UPDATED AT 5:06 AM EDT
FROM WEDNESDAY'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Celebrity intellectual Michael Ignatieff is coming home to Canada with his eyes fixed on 24 Sussex Dr.
The 58-year-old author, broadcaster and director of Harvard University's prestigious Carr Center for Human Rights Policy is on the edge of announcing his decision to run for Parliament for the Liberals in the next election.
He has met regularly with an informal group of influential Liberals in Toronto and elsewhere over recent months to discuss his political future.
He has painstakingly - almost stealthily - laid the foundations for his return to Canada after an absence of more than three decades.
He has been negotiating with the CBC to produce a four-part TV documentary series and companion book, reportedly exploring an academic appointment at the University of Toronto, circulating word of his availability to address influential Canadian audiences and quietly looking for Toronto accommodation.
His greatest coup, according to a knowledgeable party source, was finessing an invitation from the Prime Minister's Office to give the keynote address at last March's Liberal Party policy convention, an occasion he used to deliver a bare-naked political speech that negatively compared aspects of Mr. Martin's prime-ministership to the glorious national vision of Pierre Trudeau.
"It's very close to the stage that he will do it [seek a Liberal nomination]," said a leading member of the group with whom Mr. Ignatieff has been consulting. "It's close, but it's not definitive."
To those Liberals urging him to enter political life, Mr. Ignatieff is seen as both a philosopher-king in Mr. Trudeau's iconic mould and someone who would generate excitement around progressive ideas in a party seen as having become lacklustre, drifting and visionless under Mr. Martin.
(He also will encounter uneasiness in the party, especially in its pink Trudeauesque wing, over his support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq - he argues that the Iraqis deserved freedom from Saddam Hussein - and there is no consensus on whether he sits on the left or the right of the party on social and fiscal issues.)
But because he - and those Liberals around him - inevitably will be seen as a threat to Mr. Martin's leadership, the work of greasing the path for Mr. Ignatieff's glide into Liberal politics is being done clandestinely and very, very nervously.
"Insurrection? It's not that, and it can't be that," said an Ignatieff supporter who, like others, agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. "It's not about royal jelly. It's about focusing on the short term of getting him back to Canada and getting him into Parliament.
"And if people are being identified [with Mr. Ignatieff] in a covert way, it's because we don't want the thing to go off the rails. It's a difficult time for Liberals, Liberals like myself."
It's also evident that the Ignatieff crusade is one of the worst-kept secrets in national political circles. Mr. Ignatieff, reported yesterday to be in either France or Iran, could not be reached for comment.
He is said to have looked for a constituency in Nova Scotia - the home of his maternal family, among them great-grandfather George Monro Grant, principal of Queen's University, and his uncle, Lament for a Nation philosopher George Parkin Grant - and Toronto, where he was born and grew up and where his father George Ignatieff, one of Canada's outstanding Cold War diplomats, served as provost of the University of Toronto's Trinity College and university chancellor.
Rumours that he will run either in the U of T's Trinity-Spadina riding or in adjacent Toronto-Centre Rosedale are undermined by the fact that the two Liberals who now hold the constituencies - Trinity-Spadina's Tony Ianno, Minister of State for Families and Caregivers, and Rosedale's Bill Graham, Minister of Defence - have been renominated for the next election and intend to be candidates.
The Liberals indeed hold every seat in Toronto except one - New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton's - and 90 per cent have been renominated.
Still, a senior Liberal with extensive election campaign experience did not rule out Mr. Ignatieff winning a nomination. "There could be two or three [sitting Toronto MPs] who have reached a maximum situation regarding their pensions and could be scratching their heads about running again."
The CBC documentary series and book Mr. Ignatieff plans to do is on George Monro Grant, who travelled across Canada in 1872 with the engineer-in-chief of the proposed transcontinental railway, Sir Sandford Fleming, and wrote a journal in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville on the country's future.
"He is kind of keeping his options open on Harvard," a Liberal supporter said. But according to another source, Mr. Ignatieff already has arranged a leave of absence from Harvard's Carr Center to do the Grant project - a leave of absence that could conveniently envelope the next election campaign.
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