Deborah Gyapong: The smell of sulpher and such

I like Michael Ignatieff. I think his wife is terrific, too. But alas, I don't think he is doing himself any favors lately. If I had had a chance to speak privately with him for a few minutes at the great party they threw at Stornoway for us journalistic hacks in June, this is what I would have told him:

Be yourself! If you are going to go down, you might as well go down for what you really believe in, for taking a principled stand, for using your genuine expertise in real human rights and your keen awareness of the world to position Canada for the future.

Instead, I fear the man started getting papered-over in talking points from his first political speech in Montreal years ago, which was so disappointingly Liberal boilerplate I could not believe this was the same man I admired. The talking point memos are getting glued on so thick, he's in danger of becoming a paper mache caricature of his former self. Ignatieff was/used to be centre right vis a vis the Liberal Party, putting him smack dab in the centre of Canadian politics. But whoever is advising him is making him left. Big mistake. Channeling Hugo Chavez wasn't a great idea either as Brian Lilley reports in the Sun:

Ignatieff kicked off his summer tour in Calgary by touting the Liberal’s “positive message” and then compared Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the devil, "You know you smell the whiff of sulfur coming off the guy.” In literature, the whiff of sulfur is often used to describe the devil and someone as well read as Ignatieff should know to choose his words more carefully.

Then again, perhaps Ignatieff was just channeling Venezuela’s far-left president Hugo Chavez who used similar words to describe George W. Bush during a United Nations speech; I’ll have to ask the Liberal leader.

One of the biggest shocks for Ignatieff and crew is that on this tour, which moves to Ottawa today and then boards a bus for the wilds of Eastern Ontario on Tuesday, is that the Liberal leader that will be the story but that also means being under the microscope. On Parliament Hill Ignatieff can hold court with the media most of the time simply by attacking the government and their policies, now he will have to defend and explain his own.

As the bus leaves for places St. Albert, Ont.; Batoche, Sask., or Big Pond, N.S., I wonder how the receptive the locals will be to Liberal MP Bob Rae’s statements that Canada’s foreign affairs priorities should include exporting gay marriage and abortion access around the world. Rae’s musings were reinforced by B.C. Liberal MP Hedy Fry writing to Canada’s ambassador in Poland to rake him over the coals for not flying the rainbow pride flag during Euro Pride, an event that is still controversial in Poland.

Along the way Ignatieff will also have to sell his domestic policies which have changed from putting a national day care strategy as the most important priority to putting pension reform at the top, changed from making employment insurance easier to get as the top job creation strategy to investing in skills and learning.

The entire Liberal Express tour is set up like a campaign, right down to the whistle stops at Tim Horton’s and strolls through local festivals. The question for Ignatieff’s advisors is, will he bloom under the pressure and raise his party up out of the lower that Stephane Dion poll numbers he’s currently in, or crash and burn? You should find out by the time the tour wraps up in September.

Ezra Levant takes apart Ignatieff's recent speech in China and reveals how far the Liberal Leader has slipped away from the stands he used to take publicly before entering into political life.

Michael Ignatieff used to take a tough line on China's dictatorship -- not surprising for a former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University.
In a 2005 lecture to Amnesty Ireland, Ignatieff made a short list of countries that he called human rights "outliers" and he named just three: Libya, North Korea and China. That's tantamount to calling China a rogue state.
Even after he became an MP in 2006, Ignatieff spoke sternly of China's lack of basic freedoms, telling the Georgia Strait that, if he could, he would ask the Chinese government, "Do you really want to build your prosperity on slavery?" And as recently as this year he told Calgary students that Canada must speak out against human rights violations, nomatterwherethey happen. "Just because China is big and powerful doesn't mean that Canada should back down on this issue."
This weekend the Liberal leader finally had his chance to speak truth to power on his official visit to China. But the Ignatieff who spoke to a carefully-screened group of Chinese students at Tsinghua University bore no resemblance to the Ignatieff who spent decades promotinghumanrights in speeches, books and as a professor.
In his speech, Ignatieff told his hosts, "We must be ready to speak plainly with one another about human rights." But he didn't. He made no mention of China's lack of democratic freedoms such as free elections and freedom of speech and the press, or its brutal treatment of ethnic minorities from the Tibetans to the Uyghurs. The only human rights track record he criticized was Canada's -- Ignatieff told his foreign audience that "I am not blind to the gap that exists between our ideals and reality for some of my fellow citizens."

I dunno. Seems like Ignatieff is trying out Obama's play book--launching his own great apology tour for western civilization and extrapolating the "blame Bush!" tactic.

Too bad he hasn't checked Obama's poll ratings lately.