Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff

Author:Michael Ignatieff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345813282
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-09-24T07:00:00+00:00

In September 2008, after two and a half years in power, Mr. Harper decided that his attack ads against our leader had softened up the electoral terrain sufficiently to allow him to call an election in search of a majority government. This is a prime minister’s prerogative, but in doing so, he reneged on his own promise to give Canada fixed election dates. In the campaign, we tried to paint the prime minister as a US right-wing ideologue. The real truth is that he is a transactional opportunist with no fixed compass other than the pursuit of power. In his campaign ads, he transformed his image from ruthlessly combative leader to a gentle, sweater-wearing hockey dad smiling beside the family fireplace.

The election coincided with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the meltdown of insurance giant ICG and the worldwide destruction of savings, pensions and investments. Lonesome voices had been warning about the sub-prime bubble and the unsustainable ascent of housing prices, but no one was listening. The crisis caught the entire political class of the globe—us included—by surprise. We had been fighting our political games in capitals around the world, jockeying for power, and meanwhile, the dashboard of the global economy had been flashing red.

In the face of the sudden global crisis, the prime minister’s political instincts deserted him and he misplayed his reaction, notoriously suggesting, as stock markets tumbled, that now was a good time to pick up some bargain investments. Unfortunately, we didn’t have anything much more coherent to say ourselves. We ran on a carbon tax, which, in the context of a sudden meltdown in financial markets, was good policy but bad politics. During my campaign for re-election in my own district, I received an education from the voters in the politics of climate change. One woman, backing her car out of her driveway, stopped, rolled down her window and said, “I have to pick up my kid at hockey practice every Wednesday at five. There isn’t any public transport out here in the suburbs, so all you Liberals are doing is jacking up the price of my gas.” She was locked into a high-carbon lifestyle and she couldn’t substitute a low-carbon solution, and she knew that even if you promised her public transit it would take years to arrive at the bottom of her street. Encounters like this are what make democracy a continual education for any politician. This woman helped me understand that carbon taxes will become politically palatable only when we solve our citizens’ substitution problems and make it efficient for them to shift to low-carbon solutions. On election day in October 2008, anxious and bewildered voters split their vote. They weren’t convinced by the carbon tax and reduced us from 103 to 77 seats. They increased the Conservative seat total from 124 to 143 but denied the prime minister his majority, believing that he had mishandled the unfolding global financial crisis. Voters gave Jack Layton’s New Democrats on the left eight more seats. The centre of Canadian politics was fragmenting in the face of the oncoming financial storm.

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