The Road To Irrelevancy

Michael Ignatieff lived in Great Britain for more than 20 years, and his celebrity there reached a point where he was widely known as that “guy who used to be on the telly”. Hobnobbing with writers like Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, Michael Ignatieff became the “good-looking intellectual one”. Quite well known at the time of his residence there, his reputation preceded him to be something of a cultural polymath. So when the Liberal leader turned up in London, England, this week to give the annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture, it might have surprised him that the British have moved on:

The British press chose to respond with an echoing silence.

Only one British reporter showed up to cover the speech. Asked where his colleagues were – and whether British readers might not like to know what had happened to their favourite charismatic, war-zone-visiting intellectual – the reporter shrugged and said, “I don’t think too many people here care about Canadian politics.”

Ah, the pedestrian life of a public servant, in Canada no less.

Of interest, his visit [out of Canada, again] to Great Britain coincides with the British sudden interest in Canada, and the fiscal policies of the Liberals that wrested Canada from numerous deficits, and brought in prosperity, and “a maple leaf miracle.” Indeed, Paul Martin is described in quite rarefied terms:

So it is that the Tories are obsessing about another North American political success story, that of the Canadian Liberal Party, which swept to power in 1993 and proceeded to implement the biggest reduction in government spending in the country’s history, eliminating a crippling C$42bn (£22bn) budget deficit in just four years.

The Tories are unlikely to notice this obscure, uninteresting bit of trivia about the Liberal success story, however. Having said that, there’s due credit where it is deserved. The Liberals did engage in a little pruning of the public sector, made some fiscally conservative reviews of government excess and waste, and had no political baggage to concern themselves about because of their majority mandate. Of course, the cuts to spending came a cost to health care and the military, with the former being restored in the big spending days of the Liberal waning. And those budget surpluses are now known to have come at the cost of the Unemployment Insurance program, which diverted surpluses from 1996-2001 to pay down the federal debt.