Ignatieff the Expatriate – or Aristocrat?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A few weeks ago, the Conservatives launched television attack ads on Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, emphasizing that he worked outside of Canada as an academic and journalist for 34 years and only returned home because he wants to be prime minister.

Ignatieff responded with his own videotape, accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of smearing all “new Canadians born outside this country” and “Canadians who live and work overseas.”

About two million Canadians live and work outside the country at any given time. Millions more are recent immigrants and new citizens. Are they, he asks, less Canadian because of it? “I don’t think so but the Conservatives do.”

The Conservatives were quite successful in their personal attacks on Ignatieff’s predecessor, Stéphane Dion. But the current ads won’t work. Indeed, they may even help the Liberals.

A Harris/Decima poll released at the end of May found that 30 per cent of respondents reported a negative effect on their attitude toward Ignatieff as a result of the Conservative ads. But over half of the respondents said the ads had a negative effect on their feelings about Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Tories.

According to Harris/Decima Senior Vice-President Jeff Walker; “there is evidence that these ads are having a negative affect on Mr. Ignatieff, but an even greater negative affect on Prime Minister Harper.”

Here’s why Ignatieff is winning this battle. Canada’s sense of nationhood is more cosmopolitan than that of countries like the United States. There is little of the xenophobic nationalism one sometimes finds in older, more ethnically homogenous nation-states.

Immigrants by definition won’t be upset that Ignatieff worked abroad; many Québécois don’t care about Canada as such at all, and so won’t be outraged; and as for our intelligentsia, a considerable number would drool at the prospect of being in the “big time” in America or Britain.

If the Tories really want to go “populist,” they should probably more strongly emphasize Ignatieff’s aristocratic lineage: his paternal grandfather was Count Pavel Ignatiev, Minister of Education to Russian Tsar Nicholas II; his maternal great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, was the 19th century principal of Queen’s University. He is, at least by Canadian standards, a “blueblood.”

Also, more important than the issue of his having lived outside Canada is the fact that he was associated with “elite” institutions such as Harvard University and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

What if, for instance, during those 34 years he had merely taught at a state school in Little Rock, Ark., or was a broadcaster on some television station in the English midlands city of Leeds? That probably wouldn’t “offend” the people Stephen Harper is trying to reach.

So if the Conservatives want to play this game, they should drop the expatriate line of attack and paint Ignatieff as some kind of patrician. It’s a slim reed, but it’s all they’ve got right now.