Michael Ignatieff was the keynote speaker yesterday for the opening session of the biennial policy convention of the Liberal Party of Canada. Yesterday, some media reports suggested Ignatieff would make a great Liberal leader and a great Prime Minister. Ignatieff, after his speech, rejected those ideas, saying he has the best job in the world at one of the best schools in the world.
His speech, though, was a remarkable political document. Even convention-hardened media cynics said his was the kind of speech not heard since the days of Pierre Trudeau.
I’ve copied Ignatieff’s speech below. It was delivered slightly differently. He missplaced a page of his speech and realized that in mid-delivery but recovered nicely and paraphrased enough of it until he got back on track.
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Michael Ignatieff
Carr Professor of Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
“Liberal Values in the 21st century”
Address to the Biennial Policy Conference
Liberal Party of Canada
Ottawa
March 3, 2005
Chers amis, bonsoir. Il me fait grand plaisir d'être parmi vous.
In the United States, where I work, liberals are in the wilderness. In Canada, liberals are in government. Down there, being a liberal is a burden. Up here, it's a badge of honour. No wonder I'm happy to be home.
I have been a liberal all my life. In 1968, I was a delegate at the convention here in Ottawa that chose Pierre Trudeau as our leader. In the June election, I was a national Liberal organizer and campaigned coast to coast watching a great man becoming a great politician. If you weren't there, all I can say is-in the words of the poet-
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
And to be young was very heaven
Today, the Prime Minister's leadership has given us sound public finance, enviable economic growth and the capacity to fund the social programs that make us a decent society. Still, it's a nervous time in the party. Running a minority government is tough. The competition is at our heels. A policy conference is a moment to center ourselves and renew the convictions that made us the governing party of the 20th century and will make us the governing party in the 21st.
As you begin your conference, I'm not here to tell you something new. I'm here to remind you of something you've always known: the fundamentals of Liberal belief. I'm not going to talk about programs and policies. We talk too much about them, frankly, and not enough about the fundamentals.
As I see it, the Liberal party has three essential purposes:
” To protect and enhance our national unity
” To preserve and defend our national sovereignty
” To advance the cause of social justice.
Je voudrais parler de la base morale de notre action politique : l'unité nationale d'abord; la souveraineté canadienne ensuite; et enfin, la justice sociale pour tous nos citoyens.
Unity, sovereignty, justice: the three fundamentals. Everything else is detail.
Other parties represent regional grievances and interests. Other parties represent sectional or class interests. Our party represents the nation, ocean to ocean. We are more than a machine for winning elections. We are the governing party of our people. We are the coalition-between regions, languages, peoples-that holds our nation together.
Our core commitment is to stand by the common standards and national programs that make us one nation.
We don't defend federal power for its own sake. We all know that Canada is too big to be run from Ottawa. I certainly learned that when I lived for two years in BC. We Liberals stand for a strong federal government-not to feed the Ottawa bureaucracy, not to dominate the regions-but to defend the indivisibility of Canadian citizenship.
That means that each Canadian citizen, wherever she may come from, wherever he may live, has the same rights, responsibilities and entitlements.
Common citizenship means national programs, standards, rights and responsibilities that define us as Canadians and maintain our distinctiveness as a free people.
Other parties will claim they want a strong Canada too. Certainly Liberals have no monopoly on patriotism. What makes us distinctive is that we have known the responsibility of office.
We know that to govern is to choose.
We understand that no party can endure in office if it pretends to be all things to all people.
Liberals know that there are times-and these try our souls as a people and as a party-when politics means saying a clear NO and a clear YES.
NON a la division nationale
NON au chantage nationaliste, aux jeux mesquins du Bloc Québécois
NON aux fausses utopies indépendantistes
NON au séparatisme
A JAMAIS NON.
MAIS OUI au renouveau du fédéralisme
OUI a la mise a jour des nos institutions nationales
OUI au Canada.
Our party has never regarded Quebec as the problem because we know Quebeckers have always been part of the solution. From the days of Baldwin and Lafontaine, MacDonald and Cartier, the partnership of two peoples has held our country together. Oui, nous avons connu des moments difficiles, mais nous avons surmonté ces moments ensemble, et nous les surmonterons toujours.
Today, the party and the government face new challenges to the national unity of
Canada. These come from provinces wanting to use resource wealth exclusively for the benefit of their own people. Atlantic provinces should be able to use their new wealth to overcome economic deficits, but we must take care not to weaken our federal union. Any national government worthy of the name must ensure that new resource wealth strengthens, not weakens our federation.
Provinces in the rest of Canada are beginning to ask why they should keep paying out to help less prosperous ones. They want to reduce their transfer payments, essentially keeping their wealth to themselves. The Liberal answer to these demands is that without burden-sharing and resource-sharing, there cannot be equality of Canadian citizenship.
Provinces are now complaining about a fiscal imbalance between a cash-rich federal government and cash-strapped provincial governments. Let's address that imbalance, but not by weakening federal authority or diluting national standards of common citizenship.
As federal Liberals, we say YES to strong provinces. But we say NO to a balkanized Canada, un chacun pour soi Canada, in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
We stand for One country, Not ten.
Un seul pays et non dix entités rivales.
Liberals also understand the relationship between unity and justice. We cannot have a country at peace with itself, if justice has not been done to aboriginal peoples, if acknowledgement has not been made of the tragedy that has haunted our national experience together. Our nation has understood that we cannot have second-class citizens in our midst. We cannot have pride and self-reliance if peoples are dependent for their survival on government handouts.
The country has embarked on an experiment in aboriginal self-government-which the rest of the world is watching. In this experiment, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples have said NO to paternalism and dependency. YES to self-reliance and self-government.
Our unity matters not just to Canadians, but to the wor
ld. Seen from afar, we are a noble experiment: whether peoples speaking different languages, divided into five regions can survive and prosper as a united country. If we fail, the future of the multi-lingual, multicultural state in the modern world will be grim indeed. So we cannot fail, and we will not fail.
Dans un monde ravagé par la haine et la violence, nous sommes un exemple de paix où coexiste pacifiquement une diversité culturelle et linguistique. Pour des nations divisées par l'intolérance, le Canada reste un rayon d'espoir.
We must remain a light unto the nations.
South of us, they talk about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They want to export freedom and democracy to the world. Canadians tend to be skeptical about such dreams. But we have a dream too. We are the people of “peace, order and good government.” From Sri Lanka to Iraq, from South Africa to Ukraine, we can help promote democratic federalism for multi-ethnic, multi-lingual states. Exporting peace, order and good government' should the core of a disciplined foreign policy that concentrates on what we do best and shares the Canadian dream with the rest of the world.
Divided, we cannot fulfill our dream. Fragmented, we cannot defend our sovereignty. United, we remain a beacon to the world.
As Canadians, we face a geo-political reality unlike any other country. The greatest challenge to our sovereignty comes not from our enemies, but from our best friend. Canadian-American relations are the central issue of Canadian politics in the next generation.
Here too, Canadian Liberals need to understand when to say NO, and when to say Yes.
Liberals have always said No to anti-Americanism. Leave that to the NDP. Anti-Americanism is an electoral ghetto. Leave them to wither inside it .
At the same time, Liberals have always said NO to continentalism. Leave other parties to sing “When Irish eyes are smiling” with US Presidents.
Liberals have always charted a different course. We are reliable neighbors, good friends, but firm defenders of our sovereignty.
Being anti-American is a lousy way to be a proud Canadian. A superiority complex towards our neighbor is as foolish as an inferiority complex. Our identity is perfectly secure and it is rooted in our institutions: Parliamentary government, la langue et la culture française, our aboriginal heritage, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We have always done things differently here. We always will.
We have never been afraid to chart our own course in world affairs: in the first half of the last century, fighting for European freedom in two World Wars before the Americans joined in; in the second half, recognizing Cuba and China, supporting the International Criminal Court and promoting the Land Mines Treaty. Our neighbor has respected us when we said NO, because they know that when we do say YES, our word is our bond.
They respect us — and we respect ourselves — when we back commitments with capabilities, rhetoric with resources. Liberals know that we cannot defend the sovereignty of our nation with sermons. We cannot hand our own defense to any one else. We must have our own military, our own intelligence gathering capacity, our own immigration and border controls, our own control of our air space. Sovereignty costs money. Liberals are willing to pay that price.
Our independence depends on our being a credible partner in the struggle to keep North America safe from terrorist attack. Like it or not, we are next door to the primary target of global terrorism. We need to invest to ensure we are never a terrorist transit point or a terrorist haven.
That means building up our anti-terrorist forces and the combat capability of our military.
People sometimes ask me why a human rights teacher is such an adamant defender of a robust military for Canada. In the failed and failing states of our world, the most urgent human need-the central unmet human right-is security. People at the mercy of tyrants and gunmen need protection, first of all. To protect them, we have to have the capacity to fire back. We do not want to repeat Rwanda, when a brave Canadian soldier, Romeo Dallaire, was sent out on a UN mission to protect civilians, without the arms, equipment and troops to stop the slaughter in front of his eyes. We owe this to our men and women in uniform. We owe this to our moral commitment to be citizens of the world.
A Liberal government knows it has to balance principled commitments to be a good citizen abroad, with defense of its citizens at home.
The government has recently announced its decision about Ballistic Missile Defense. The decision will be popular in the party. But we need clarity in our national defense policy. We need to balance a principled opposition to the weaponization of space — in the future — with an equally principled commitment to participate in North American defense — right now. We do not want our decisions to fracture the command system of North American defense,- and we do not want a principled decision to result in us having less control over our national sovereignty. We must not walk away from the table. We must be there, at the table, defending what only we can defend.
Let's be clear about something else: this is not a debate between patriots and continentalists, between anti-Americans and pro-Americans. Liberals do not make their policy choices into a referendum on anyone's patriotism still less their internationalism. The issue is how best to defend the sovereignty of our country.
Unity and Sovereignty are the core Liberal values. They are also hard masters. They require us to make hard choices. Our party has never ducked hard choices.
Finally, chers amis, we are a party of social justice. As the Prime Minister has said, we want to build ” a society based on equality not on privilege, on duty not on entitlement.” Liberals understand that you can't have a united country unless you have a just society, and a just society is an equal one.
For Liberals gay marriage is an equality issue. The government's position gets the balance right. We will not compel religious communities to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs, but we will not deny marriage rights to Canadians on grounds of sexual orientation. What counts for Liberals is not orientation. What matters is conduct and character.
We believe the party itself is an instrument of social justice, for channeling commitments to equality from the grass roots to the Cabinet room. Judging from the draft resolutions at this convention, it's clear how much you care about justice.
For farmers and rural communities struggling with depopulation and border competition.
For poor families struggling to make ends meet in our inner cities.
For seniors fighting to maintain their standard of living after a life-time of contribution to the country.
These claims are overdue. We need to meet them. But we can only meet them if our economy is competitive and efficient, if our levels of taxation are sensible and the government that doesn't spend more than Canadians earn. Liberalism is a politics of competence. The government has been a competent manager, and because it has been competent, it can afford to be just.
Liberalism is also a politics of honesty. Being honest means looking ourselves in the mirror and asking tough questions. Can we really say the prosperity of the last thirty years has been equally shared? We know it hasn't. We know there are more than a million children living in poverty in Ca
nada. We know that these children come from the families of recent immigrants, minorities and aboriginal peoples. A Liberal doesn't turn away from these facts. Liberals face them and do something about them. The government's commitments to early childhood education amount to a decision to give all Canadian children an equal start in life.
On education, I think we should go further. I've been a teacher all my life, and I come from a line of school-teachers on my mother's side. I love the classroom and I know that education changes lives. So just as Prime Minister Pearson used federal power to create a national health system for all Canadians, so we, in the next generation, need to use federal power to invest in education – especially post-secondary education – and set the standards nationally that we need in order to make education an engine of mobility for our people and an engine of productivity for our economy. Let's not get tangled up in federal-provincial battles over jurisdiction. Let's work together to make Canadians the best educated, most literate, numerate, skilled people in the world. Pour réaliser ce rêve, nous devons créer ensemble des critères nationaux d'excellence qui nous unissent et qui organisent nos efforts en commun.
Liberals don't think a government program is the solution to every injustice in our society. We think that injustice can only be remedied when individuals take responsibility for themselves. We know that individuals need programs that help them bear the burden of losing a job, losing their health, losing their way. We believe in a market economy, but we don't believe in the law of the jungle.
Finally, my friends, chers amis, there is one liberal value we must not forget. When my mother passed the pie over the table, she told us to have a 'liberal' helping. Liberal meant generous.
When my Russian ancestors arrived in Montreal in 1928, they didn't have much of anything, apart from what most immigrants have the courage to try a new life and the hope that their new country would take them in. My Russian family found a home- un pays d'asile, un foyer nouveau au Québec. Ils parlaient le français et ils furent bien accueillis par les Québécois. Ils ont passes le reste de leur vie au Québec. Now they are all there, my Russian grandparents, my father, my mother, my uncles and aunts, all together in a cemetery on a hillside overlooking the St. Francis river. Ask what Canada means to me and I think of that graveyard and the generosity of strangers who became friends.
Generosity is more than a welcome to strangers. It is an attitude towards ourselves. It means trusting each other, helping without counting the cost, taking risks together. Generosity means keeping our heart open to others, dreaming together that we could be better than we are. That's how this country has always been. This party's job is to keep it that way.
Generosity
Unity
Sovereignty
Justice
And the courage to choose, the will to govern.
These are the beacons of a liberal politics. I've had my chance tonight to light up these beacons for you. Tomorrow-and the rest of the convention-belongs to you. You've been listening to me. Tomorrow, I'm sure, the leadership and the country will be listening to you. Thanks for your attention.
I've posted on the implications of Ignatieff's speech here:
http://www.thepolitic.com/archives/2005/03/05/liberals-blairite-shift/
– Tom