Fire and Ashes (7 page)

In the middle of the election campaign came a thunderclap. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties, announced an investigation into whether the Liberal minister of finance had leaked market-shifting information to brokers and investors in the stock market. The accusation was absurd and the police eventually acquitted him of all blame, but once the police stepped into the election campaign and announced their investigation, an unprecedented interference in a national election, our lead in the national polls evaporated.

Ten days before election day, the “data monkeys” came to me with long faces, saying we were running behind. The Conservative Party was beginning to surge. So confident had they become that Stephen Harper, the leader of the party, came to the big Ukrainian cathedral in the riding and called on the assembled crowd to “send Ignatieff back to Harvard.” We summoned an army of canvassers and I knocked on doors from eleven in the morning until nine thirty at night, while my wife manned the phones at the constituency office and cooked meals to keep us going. On the final weekend of the campaign, the Liberal
Ukrainian faction disgruntled at my candidacy walked into the Conservative headquarters in the riding and switched their support to my opponent, whereupon the New Democratic national leader, Jack Layton, sent out thousands of robo-calls baldly announcing that our campaign was disintegrating and that all progressive voters should come over to them. All in all, it was a wild end to the campaign.

On election night, January 23, 2006, against expectations and thanks largely to the influx of nearly five hundred canvassers, we won handily in Etobicoke–Lakeshore. I had learned the simplest lesson in politics: show them you want it. We showed them, and the people gave me their support. It is a strange, ennobling experience to be given such a vote of confidence and trust from thousands of fellow citizens. Up to that moment, I had spoken only on behalf of myself. I had been responsible only for my family and myself. Now I had to speak for strangers and be responsible to them.

In the packed basement of the Hollywood, a local discotheque and dance bar, with television cables laid across the floors and the lights glaring, I thanked these perfect strangers, my fellow citizens and also the hundreds of volunteers who had made victory possible. Zsuzsanna had copied out a Hungarian poem for me to read if I won, and I liked the sober and simple message it sent. Ian Davey, one of the men in black, whispered, “Lose the poem”: I read it anyway, József Attila’s final lines of “By the Danube”:

It was an odd thing to read out in that noisy basement discotheque, packed with waving supporters and journalists, and almost certain to confirm the impression that I was an intellectual landed from outer space, but I didn’t mind. “Putting order in our common affairs” became one of the ways I used to define my vocation in politics in the years ahead.

Barely an hour later, still in the basement of the Hollywood, we all watched as the polls closed and the voters across the country gave Stephen Harper and the Conservatives a narrow victory. They had a plurality of seats and votes, but not enough to command a majority in the House of Commons. Just as I was adjusting to this reversal of fortune, and realizing that my political career would actually begin on the opposition benches of Parliament, Prime Minister Martin appeared on television to concede defeat and announce that he was resigning as party leader. A leadership campaign for his successor would begin immediately. The camera crews and journalists who had come to see whether the “parachute candidate” could land safely were now crowding around asking me whether I would be a candidate in the race. If so, the journalists implied, I would be the front-runner. In a blaze of camera lights, Fortuna had taken charge of my life.

I barely remember the weeks that followed, apart from coming up to Parliament for the first time, attending the first meeting of the Liberal caucus and listening while departing and defeated MPs spoke to their caucus colleagues for the last time. We who had survived should have listened more carefully to those defeated colleagues. We thought the Conservative victory was temporary. We, the natural governing party, would be back soon. We kept reassuring ourselves
with the idea that we had been sent to “the penalty box.” Defeat was merely a time out. That was my first lesson in the encapsulating effect of illusion in politics, how everyone ends up saying the same thing, even though it happens to be wrong. Our defeated colleagues, some in tears as they remembered their time in office, seemed to know better. They were saying, “You may not realize it now, but you are headed off into the wilderness.” Little did we know how far ahead the desert sands of opposition stretched out in front of us.

In the weeks before the new Parliament was convened into session and I had to take my seat for the first time, the men in black reappeared and we met to figure out how to run a national campaign for leadership. We had assumed the race would be years ahead, and now it was right in front of us, with a national convention designated for Montreal in December. There would be forty-five hundred delegates, elected in the 308 ridings across the county, and they would choose the next party leader at the Montreal convention in a secret ballot. We did not know it then, of course, but this would prove the last time in our politics that a leader would be actually selected at a delegated convention like this. It promised to be a raucous and hotly contested affair, and we had to get ready. Volunteers were signing up for the fight, and money—we would need millions—was beginning to come in. This was no time for me to play Hamlet. Was I in?

Nothing had turned out as we had expected, but Zsuzsanna and I both understood that we had come back for this and that, despite my lack of political experience, we might never have a better opportunity. So we were in. Truth be told, I felt like a trainee skier starting a descent at the top of a black diamond run. I could hear the ice beneath my skis and I could feel the downward momentum of acceleration. But I told myself I had taken the chair to the top of the hill. Now I had to get myself safely down.

Eight weeks after winning my first election as a member of Parliament, having only just sworn my oath as an MP, I announced my candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Ahead of me stretched nine months of a transcontinental leadership race that would take me to every part of the country, and to places inside me I had not known existed.

THE SHEER PHYSICAL CHALLENGE
of a national leadership campaign in a country our size began to sink in. We are, after all, the largest democracy by size in the world, a vast country of six time zones, five regions and two official languages. The leader of the party was to be chosen in December in Montreal by delegates nominated by about sixty thousand members in each of the 308 ridings, spread across five thousand kilometres of the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from north of the Arctic Circle to the American border. To win the leadership, I would have to win over a majority of these delegates, whether they lived on aboriginal reserves up north, in fishing out-ports down east or in fancy apartment towers on the west coast. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres and thousands of handshakes, parleys, late-night negotiations, deal-making meetings and fundraising rallies lay ahead.

In the weeks that followed my own announcement, twelve candidates entered the race, experienced men and women who had held elective office and served as ministers in government. All of them knew more about politics than I did. It was a strong field and it included Ken Dryden, the former goaltender of the Montreal Canadiens; Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker who had bested separatist nationalists in debate in the 1990s; and last but not least, my childhood friend Bob Rae,
who had left the New Democratic Party and joined the Liberals in order to contest the leadership.

I thought I had the edge on Bob, since I had won a seat in Parliament and he had not run in the election. My convention speech the year before had put me in front of thousands of delegates, and the media were giving me a lot of space, intrigued by the story of my homecoming. Senator David Smith worked the caucus with consummate skill, and a lot of seasoned politicians signed on to my candidacy because they thought I could win. These endorsements created a paradox. I was the outsider’s outsider and yet here I was, within weeks of entering the race, becoming the Establishment candidate. This created tensions within my own team. The young people who ran my campaign wanted to turn the party upside down. The political professionals who lined up behind me mostly wanted to keep the party the way it was.

The minute you enter a political arena, your opponents begin defining you, and if you don’t fight them off, you can lose control of your candidacy. I was now saddled with the label of Establishment candidate and opponents outside the party set about defining me as a George Bush apologist. When I appeared at the University of Ottawa to give a speech early in my leadership campaign, a huge crowd turned out, and right in the middle of my talk, three hooded figures, made up to look like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, stood up and remained silently standing throughout my speech. I did my liberal best with the situation, telling the crowd that the protesters were welcome, but with the national media watching, it was obvious that the student opposition outside the party was having some success in defining me as an apologist for everything—like torture and abuse of detainees—that I abhorred as much as they did.

As we tried to make sense of these pressures and counter-pressures and the deluge of media coverage, my team and I did grasp that media attention does not win you convention delegates. You earn support
one handshake at a time. If you don’t show up where the people live, you won’t get their vote. In my case, showing up and demonstrating that I could earn support the hard way was especially important if we were to lay to rest the image of the elitist and entitled dilettante.

So we hit the road. For nine months, like all the other candidates in the race, Zsuzsanna and I, together with our assistant Marc Chalifoux, lived on airplanes and in airports. We took the large planes that get you there fast and the small four-seaters, flown by my friend Jeff Kehoe, that get you there slowly at two thousand feet above the lonesome expanse of prairie and forest, the isolated farmhouses with a single porch light on, the vast dark expanses where you look out the window and the sheer immensity of your country begins to dawn on you. We fell asleep in hotels with low-ceilinged, ill-lit corridors and ruined trays of food outside the doors; we lived on Tim Hortons steeped tea, yogurt and biscuits; we kept all hours and found ourselves able to sleep standing up or sitting down, especially in deserted airport lounges late at night. We did so many miles on back roads in the car borrowed from Marc’s parents, who ran a dairy farm, that he said we should title our memoirs
The Buick Regal Years
.

Once you enter politics, you are always on show. You never jump a queue, you never get impatient with a driver or a waitress or a check-in clerk. You never lose your temper. You never fail to light up when someone comes over for a picture or an autograph. You surrender the entirety of your private life for the duration. People are watching.

Many successful people, contemplating entry into politics, disdain the endless meet-and-greet, the forced bonhomie of life under the public gaze, as beneath their dignity, but they are wrong. The grind of politics, the endless travel, the meetings, the impossible schedule, the constant being on show are all in search of an authority that can be acquired in no other way. You have to learn the country.

What a good politician comes to know about a country can’t be found in a briefing book. What he knows is the way the people shape place and place shapes the people. Few forms of political expertise matter so much as local knowledge: the details of the local political lore, the names of the dignitaries and power-brokers—mayors, high school coaches, police chiefs, major employers—who must always be named from the platform. Great politicians have to be masters of the local. They have to at least remember every place they ever set foot in. Wherever they are, they have to give the impression of being at home. When they ask someone in a crowd where they hail from, they should be able to produce a story that neatly connects them to that voter with the jolt of human recognition. A French expression of praise for a politician is that he is
“un homme de terrain.”
There is no exact equivalent in English but there should be. It means he knows the terrain, has his feet planted on the ground, knows where his people come from. I knew many
hommes
—and
femmes—du terrain
in politics. I can remember flying with a member of Parliament into his constituency on the east coast and watching him staring intently down at the farms we passed on our approach to the landing strip. “That one is for us,” he said, pointing to one house. Then, waving at another one next door, he said with a grimace, “That so-and-so wouldn’t vote for you if you got down on your knees and begged.” He knew his terrain, house by house, farm by farm, back road by back road, with the unsentimental eye of a farmer appraising a herd.

As long as democracy demands this local knowledge of a politician, as long as it makes this the criterion of credibility and trust, the country should be all right. As soon as democracy loses its connection to place, as soon as the location of politics is no longer the union hall, the living room, the restaurant and the local bar and becomes only the television screen and the website, we’ll be in trouble. We’ll be entirely in the
hands of image-makers and spin doctors and the fantasies they purvey. Politics will be a spectacle dictated from the metropolis, not a reality lived in the small towns and remote communities that are as much part of the country as the big cities. For all the talk about the Internet as the enabler of democracy, the Internet could cause us to lose the aspect of politics that makes it truly democratic: the physical contact between voters and politicians. YouTube videos and ads are no substitute for an encounter between real flesh-and-blood human beings. If the Internet takes over politics, there will be no reality check, no moment left when a voter gets the chance to look at a politician in the flesh and make the decision to trust or not to trust, to believe or not to believe. Politics has to stay corporeal because trust is corporeal.