I'm still digesting Michael Valpy's conversation with Michael Ignatieff from this weekend's Globe.
Iggy on the imagined community of Canada:What we know is only a fragment of what is there. We have to imagine the expanse we have not seen. We have to imagine the ties that bind us to our fellow citizens, many of whom may not even speak the same language. ...
We engage in this act of imagination because we need to. The lives we live alone do not make sense to us unless we share some public dimension with others. We need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live.
How does this observation square with Ignatieff's statement that freedom trumps community in market societies? Badly, I think.
I read Ignatieff's meaning to be that the lynchpin of our relationship with others is an exchange built more on the individual's subjective imagining of the other than the shock and humility of engagement with the other's authentic life. An atomized society in which citizens have nothing in common but their need to imagine - without any commonalities regarding the capacity or content of their imaginings.
Fine, you say. Cogito ergo sum. Yet we know that for Ignatieff freedom in the market economy trumps all else. So the freedom to imagine a community precludes any need to subsume freedom to that community: the nation becomes whatever the market economy will bear. The imagination becomes a commodity, and the saleability, self-interest, and self-promotion of an imagined community becomes paramount to success. Chilly, indeed.
I think Ignatieff's obsessive examination and rexamintion of his own family mythology speaks not only to his own fraught attraction to the worst excesses of the Canadian post-colonial inferiority complex, but to his awareness that this complex provides a cagey marketing opportunity. The Ignatieff brand is built on personality: on his intellectual and personal forbearers and on his own genius for cooly revelatory self-analysis in books like The Russian Album and Scar Tissue. Yet this reconstitution of the past is highly selective: a repackaging of Candian history to support the claims of Ignatieff as Canada's "Imaginer-In-Chief."
Ignatieff wants Canadians to see him "as a patriot, someone who is anchored in the country and whose investment in the country is more than a personal matter, more than just a matter of my personal career...a four-generation project." Methinks the fellow doth protest too much.
20 April 2009
The Idea of North
Cold Snap
As part of the weekend Globe and Mail's Iggypalooza, Michael Valpy speaks with the Prime-Minister-in waiting.
Money quote, at least for me:...he [George Grant, Canadian philosopher and Ignatieff's uncle] thought capitalism is godless, materialistic and morally relativist. It's not my problem. It never was my problem. I don't mean to dismiss that lightly. But this is where we had substantial arguments when I was young and he was older and wiser.
Pardon me if I find this view unimpressive, unpersuasive, and uninformed to boot.
I like market society because I like its freedoms, and freedom is a very chilly thing. It doesn't give you a metaphysics. It doesn't give you a community. But it gives you freedom. And then you have to decide which of these values in life you want.
He longed, I think, for community. Community mattered maybe more to him than freedom. Freedom matters more to me than anything else.
07 December 2008
28 November 2008
King-Byng v2.0: Black Friday?
In a crisis, you are always in danger of, to use an apt BBC term, "being overtaken by events."
The Conservatives have blinked. Except they haven't. The pundits are furious. The Opposition parties have snapped. Or have regained a sense of purpose. Or something.
Remember that roulette ball? It's up in the air at the moment, and no one knows where it's going to land. My bet is on a number Stephen Harper likes - but hope springs eternal in the human breast.
27 November 2008
More on King-Byng v2.0
Aldous, this is certainly is a cunning move - "crafty" and "diabolical" are synonyms being tossed about by the commentariat - but there's an old adage that might also apply to Stephen Harper: he's so sharp he's liable to cut himself.
I can't think that internal polling is anything but rosy for the Tories, given their incumbency and the weakness of the Liberals. Still, this imbroglio brings to mind a line from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: Ulysses, after bemoaning the disorder among the Greek champions, declaims that "to end a tale of length / Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength."
If October's election is rerun with all its variables unchanged, the Conservatives will win a majority. However, a number of things have changed in the last six weeks (really, has it been that long?): the severity of the economic crisis, the government's own stance on deficit spending, the field of Liberal leadership candidates (considerably smaller than it was on October 15th) and most importantly, the sense of anxiety in the Canadian public, and the sense of urgency, if press reports are to be believed, within the opposition parties themselves. The Conservatives may be overconfident: only a third of the country voted for the turkeys the last time around.
Crisis has a funny way of concentrating the mind. If the Liberals immediately replace Dion (Pat Martin's report of Jean Chretien attempting to broker a deal between the leadership candidates is intriguing) and the New Democrats rediscover their progressive cojones, a coalition might have a fighting chance. If Paul Wells is right and the NDP, like the Liberals, are broke, then there might be a lot of motivation for cooperation. If there's an election? Look for a formal coalition betweent the NDP and Liberals, and plenty of rhetoric about national unity in the face of catastrophe. Oh, and an awful lot of kind words for Jean Charest.
Or, Harper could back down. His game plan was supposed to be not just incrementalist, but soporific - he has tried to convince Canadians of his and his party's moderation, despite various nasty smells (Chuck Cadman, Zaccardelli, lazy artists, etc etc) dispelled as much as possible by a compliant media. But this maneuvre stinks so badly that it's hard to ignore. Much rests on each party's assessment of risk versus opportunity in this situation. The key question, of course, is how public opinion is shaped in terms of apportioning blame. I have to say that, based on the last two elections, I'm not optimistic on that score. But on the other hand, a roulette wheel on a cruise ship in these stormy waters isn't always going to land in the black.
Finally, Aldous, I commend you for getting through a post on this subject without swearing. Happy Thanksgiving - let's hope there's no war between India and Pakistan!
King-Byng v2.0 Update
Following Luke's post yesterday, early indications are that the opposition parties will vote the "fiscal update" down, sending Parliament either towards dissolution or towards some sort of governing coalition/liberal minority government (with emphasis on minority).
Press reaction? Perhaps the Globe could be beginning to regret its ridiculous decision to endorse the Tories in October. Even Canwest/National Post is ambivalent; some columnists are taken aback (and here) while another loves it. Andrew Coyne is very happy... no surprise there.
My two cents: I don't have much grasp on the tactics at play here, but for what it's worth here's my take. This is a cunning move for Harper, but one that would come back to haunt him if indeed the opposition parties stiffen up and reject the measure. That leads me to suspect that the Tories have internal polling numbers that show that they are again in a position to win a majority, and some sort of strategy in their back pockets to put the blame for another election squarely on the shoulders of the Liberals. If they didn't think that they would come off well in an election, they would not be making this gamble. As one Post column points out, the Conservatives are only seeing upside right now. But if the motion is defeated and the opposition parties can govern together for a few months or half a year, it could turn out to be a bad mistake.
I also can't let this go without venting about how utterly wretched this plan is. $30-million to provide well over the majority of the major parties' revenues? That's peanuts, and even if the Tories were being sincere about this simple fiscal prudence, their obsession with balanced budgets at a time of deepening recession is highly troubling.
We get party politics on the cheap in Canada. Tying party finances at least partially to their electoral success ensures that funding is related at least loosely to what counts for merit in representative democratic politics: popularity. A party's funding, and therefore its electoral fortunes, should not depend solely on its fundraising capability, since this depends on a whole lot of factors completely unrelated to ideas, policies, or governing competence.
Payback's a Bitch
I wonder if Jean Chretien ever imagined this would happen?
Prediction: if this oh-so-tactically brilliant ball of s**t passes the House, someone, in one of the four opposition parties, is going to bring up uniting the left. I hope the country's non-Conservatives take it seriously.
Because if this maneuvre is a taste of what's to come thanks to a recession and a Conservative government, there's not going to be much of Canada left to govern by the time someone in the Liberal party - or heaven forbid, the NDP - manages to get a clue.
The Liberals are finding out that payback's a bitch. I sure hope Stephen Harper's next in line.
18 October 2007
Why Dion Has Problems
1. His deputy's inability to avoid looking evil and treacherous.
2. Belinda's frown says that all is not well.
3. That jacket, tie, and shirt color combination, which has me wondering whether Stephan needs part of John Manley's $1400 per diem. I mean, I know Luke said the Liberals were having money problems, but I didn't think they were that bad.
Wow, Canadian politics is fun!
16 October 2007
At Issue
Allen Gregg is terrible...
...and so is Andrew Coyne.
Frankly, the CBC's At Issue panel is...well...terrible.
Pairing a former Conservative strategist and an avowadly neoliberal newspaper columnist with a reasonable, but fairly centrist, journalist (Chantal Hebert) is not representative of the breadth of Canada's political public opinion. Full stop.
Stephan Dion, bring down the government. Let's hit the hustings: I've had enough of this shit.
13 October 2007
Come on, Dion
Bring down the government over climate change. Make the campaign about it. Al Gore has your back.
I mean - really - can the Conservatives expect to win a majority by running against our strongest sentiments and fears? Perhaps by taking advantage of Liberal weaknesses in Quebec they will pull off another minority, but Dion should be able to rake them over the coals on climate change if he can pull the party together.
18 September 2007
Spin That
So, the Liberals lost Outremont. Okay, I promised myself when I started writing this post that I would try to avoid engaging in any political spin at all, but I already have in that first sentence. So to neutralize things, I should also add that the Bloquistes lost Roberval—Lac-St. Jean and the Tories lost in St-Hyacinthe—Bagot. And to quickly come back to polemics: does anybody care about these godforsaken backwaters?
Speaking more generally, should anybody care about these Quebec by-elections at all? (My answer, in my best David Brent: obviously not).
