Michael Ignatieff, Romeo Dallaire, Stephen Lewis, and the Making(s) of a Canadian Global Conscience

In a review of Vaclav Havel’s Disturbing the Peace written in 1990, Michael Ignatieff endorses its translator’s, Paul Wilson’s, asseveration: ‘Disturbing the Peace should put an end to any astonishment that an innocent and bookish playwright could have become such an astonishingly skilful politician.’ This confidence in bookish politicians, as Ignatieff’s resounding defeat in the elections showed, was not shared by the Canadian electorate fed on a media diet of Stephen Harper’s apparent piano-playing skills pitted against Ignatieff’s charming, if patrician, ineptitude where flipping pancakes was concerned. I was disappointed in Ignatieff’s campaign, too, and disillusioned by what I perceived to be his betrayal of the moral high ground his reflections on ‘the needs of strangers’ had always occupied when he (reluctantly) assented to the necessity of what he called ‘empire lite’ in restoring order to ‘failed states’ and (again, reluctantly?) tempered his stringent comments on Israel’s failure to comply with the laws of war in the attack on Qana.

As recent political events have unfolded, among them the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s naming of Stephen Harper as its World Statesman of the Year for his work as a ‘champion of democracy, freedom and human rights,’¹ the spectacle of Mitt Romney’s aides congratulating the United Kingdom and United States on ‘shared Anglo-Saxon heritage’ and of Romney himself celebrating Israel’s cultural advancement which puts to shame Palestine’s, Obama’s stealthy and successful operation that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden but raised renewed questions about intervention in sovereign states perceived to be sheltering terrorists, the prolonged projected dismantling of Guantanamo, and Obama’s own veering between a principled and ineffective idealism and a politics of compromise and conciliation signifying moral defeat² and with none of the canniness of his remarkable speech on race during the first election campaign, I have been drawn to a reconsideration of Ignatieff’s career as a public intellectual. I make this move partly in the spirit of his own wary endorsement of ‘lesser evil[s]’ and partly because reading a substantial cross-section of his moral, philosophical, and political writings with renewed attention has altered some of my earlier responses based on a more cavalier and scattered attention to his corpus and television appearances and on solidarity with radical rather than liberal critiques of his work. In a political climate of moral compromise and turpitude, of blunt instruments and sordid transactions,³ I want to explore the uses of irony and complexity, both of which Ignatieff’s writings ponder and exhibit in equal measure. While I am sensible of the pleasure his elegant prose produces, I believe its clarity is equally conducive to my detachment and discernment.

The aim of this essay is to imagine a different role for Canada on the global stage by foregrounding the compelling aspects of Ignatieff’s oeuvre that continue to resonate in our historical moment, particularly his emphasis on articulating a political morality, the consequences of conduct unbecoming, if you will, rather than resting content with realpolitik, describing the conduct of business as usual in the political realm. This emphasis requires an equal consideration of two other figures on the Canadian public scene, Senator Romeo Dallaire and Stephen Lewis, each of whom understands the conduct of politics as the coming to terms with a moral obligation to humanity. Dallaire and Lewis function as counterpoints to Ignatieff in what follows; time and space do not permit me to accord their writings, speeches, foundations, and activist interventions the critical elaboration they deserve.

I argue that the appeal to moral universalism distinguishes these public figures as peculiarly Canadian. Stephen Harper is the choice of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, and even Bob Hepburn’s brief but excoriating account of the ‘sad joke on Canadians’ played by ‘Stephen Harper’s democracy award’ concludes by suggesting that ‘Harper could at least have the decency to be a bit contrite when he officially accepts it’ (2012 n.p.): decency and contrition are thus constitutive elements even of...