Tag: michael ignatieff

Narnia found!

Michael Ignatieff recently filmed some relatively bland ads where he told us that Canada needs to reach out India and China and make the new green jobs of tomorrow. The ads were largely panned as too light and I speculate that they served to re-introduce the Liberal leader through a softer lens rather than allow the Tories to solely define Ignatieff as “Just Visiting”. Andrew Coyne joked that the ads looked like they were filmed in Narnia, and I was only too happy to take the meme and run with it.

Today, I’m pleased to report that Narnia has been located! The ads were shot at Cherry Beach in… wait for it… downtown Toronto. As critics rip into Michael Ignatieff for taking his advice from a tight circle of downtown Toronto Liberal advisers, as the Liberal leader appears out of touch with Quebec (let alone the rest of Canada), and as the Liberal Party is lovingly dubbed the Liberal Party of Toronto by both its detractors and realist supporters, Michael Ignatieff shoots his definition ad in downtown Toronto.


Michael Ignatieff in Narnia? Algonquin park? The hundred-acre wood?


Michael Ignatieff’s new favourite park. Cherry Beach in downtown Toronto.

Michael Ignatieff once famously said “The only thing I missed about Canada was Algonquin Park”, it appears that Ignatieff doesn’t miss it too much these days as he couldn’t be bothered to drive more than 3km from the airport, or 15 minutes from Rosedale or Yorkville.

Michael Ignatieff tells us that we need to reach out to India and China, while he himself is loathe to reach out past his Toronto bunker. Ignatieff tells us that we need to create green jobs as he lectures us from a park located on an man-made island peninsula in Toronto.

Just where does Ignatieff stand on the HST? Or on anything?

A week ago, I wrote about BC Liberal party MP Ujjal Dosanjh’s characterization of the BC HST as the “Harper Sales Tax”. I pointed out that it was quite a stretch for the former NDP Premier of that province, given that the party he formerly led in that province put the blame squarely on the provincial policy writers — the BC Liberal government.

Dosanjh responded to my comments explaining that the BC Liberals and federal Liberals are two different parties and suggested I was trying to link the two, but yet he’s the one who went out of his way to shift his scorn from those Liberals to the Conservatives in Ottawa. Politics is local and Dosanjh — scraping by with a narrow victory in 2008 by 22 votes — is tapping into a hotly debated populist issue in that province. But is this wise for him?

Despite this, does he have a point? While Dosanjh acts as an apologist for Liberal premier Gordon Campbell, essentially decrying that “Harper made him do it”, tax harmonization was suggested and incentivized at the federal level. However, if harmonization is unpopular in BC, voters are likely to blame those that signed off of on the policy and implemented it into law — ie. the jurisdictional authority — the BC Liberal government. And while we awkwardly parse how related or non-related these Liberals are to those Liberals and which Liberals like taxes and which ones don’t, the overall story then evolved.

Dosanjh’s words rang a bit more hollow this week when Ontario finance minister Dwight Duncan — a Liberal himself — said that Michael Ignatieff had approved of the HST and would help Ontario along its path to harmonization should he become Prime Minister. These Liberals, as Mr. Dosanjh will undoubtedly note, are very much related to their federal Liberal cousins.

Yesterday, Ignatieff’s finance critic John McCallum cited a “miscommunication” when it came to his leader’s position on the HST, while today Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty said that Ignatieff gave him the “clearest of impressions” that he would support the tax.

These days it seems difficult to nail Michael Ignatieff down on any controversial issue. His position on a number of issues from Iraq, to George W Bush, to coercive interrogation, to a Liberal-NDP coalition, to harmonization have evolved drastically over time. By refusing to settle on any particularly substantive issue, Ignatieff is trying to give the impression that he supports your point of view on public policy (whatever it may be). A cynical observer might suggest that this strategy may work for the disengaged soft Liberal supporter.

However, as anyone that runs a focus group will tell you, on the issue of taxes Liberals have always had an wide credibility gap to bridge. Now that two Liberal provincial governments are implementing a harmonized sales tax while the federal Liberal leader seems to at best support it or at worse waffle on it, Liberals — of varied associations — are finding the gap becoming a gulf. For Ujjal Dosanjh, whose riding lists crime as the other top-of-mind issue — another focus group nightmare for the Liberals — perhaps its time to focus on new messaging.