POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Yes, indeed, Jeffrey Simpson, but I think the problem goes deeper than that.
Ignatieff was parachuted into his seat.
Ignatieff was parachuted into the party leadership, and indeed over the heads of better men than himself.
He is an “insiders’ leader,” a backroom boy, not a people’s leader, and I think the public “gets” it.
No man who genuinely respects democratic principles could have accepted those terms of having a political career in this era. It might have been acceptable in the 1950s, but it is not today.
The trouble is Ignatieff's whole background is replete with such contradictions in ethics and principles.
He was always touted as an academic who represented human values, but the reality was glaringly at odds with that claim.
I cannot imagine one of our great humanitarian writers - say a Graham Greene - ever doing what Ignatieff did in supporting torture and Nazi-like invasion of a country, an act which ended in a million deaths and a couple of million refugees.
I heard Ignatieff interviewed on several occasions years ago, saying things which were totally at odds, at least to my sensitivities, with strong humanitarian values.
He virtually worships American power and influence in the world. He actually warned Canadians against opposing American excesses, and, as we all know, he so identified with that imperial power that he went around there bragging of being an American.
He actually competed in his first bid for leadership by attacking the party’s achievements, providing Harper with film clips to use against Liberals.
Now, of course, other past statements of his own are used against the party.
Ignatieff is a disaster. The faster he steps down, the better.
Sadly for my country, Harper is an equally unfit man to represent Canada.
A political nightmare, surely.
