The other day, we got a good laugh from a Susan Delacourt column in the Toronto Star. She was comparing former federal liberal leader Michael Ignatieff to conservative leader Erin O’Toole. I could never imagine two guys so different.
I first met Michael when he was in his early 20s and was curious about the political scene. He had been working with the Globe and Mail while getting an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. I admired his intellect and curiosity and gave him a free pass into many liberal party meetings. And maybe part of it was knowing that his father George Ignatieff had been a good friend of the previous liberal prime minister Lester Pearson.
It was almost 40 years later that the highly regarded professor Michael Ignatieff returned to Toronto. He was already leader of the liberal party when he and I met again at a garden party before his first and only general election attempt as party leader.
We managed to piss off a sizeable number of our fellow liberals as Michael and I stood off in a corner of the garden deep in conversation. It was a conversation that I reported to nobody at the time. It included the realization that Michael was way out of his depth in the party leadership. At that stage, I could hardly advise him to run for the nearest exit.
But to compare liberal Michael Ignatieff to conservative Erin O’Toole is a mistake of large proportion. Michael was a tool for power by some liberals who were using him. O’Toole drove his own manure spreader through the two conservative leadership campaigns it took for him to win. Ignatieff is a liberal intellectual, who temporarily replaced another liberal intellectual Stéphane Dion. O’Toole is a conservative ideologue with visions of power who replaced another conservative ideologue, ‘Chuckles’ Scheer.
The only way that Ignatieff and O’Toole are similar is that neither understands the demands of political leadership.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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