The Liberal Party has just released a new video (below) featuring leader Michael Ignatieff, talking about himself, his relationship to his wife Zsuzsanna Zsohar, his parents, and his broad vision of what a federal government ought to do. There's the odd gentle barb, as well, about Stephen Harper and Jack Layton.
Some quick quotes from the 3:23-long English-language version:
“I've been a war correspondent .. I've lived the life almost like a small businessperson — living paycheque to paycheque. I'm proud that I've made it work.”
“[Zsohar] understands why I'm doing this. We're doing this together.”
“I'm not a career politician. Mr. Harper's done nothing else. Jack Layton has been a career politician all his life.”
As he travels on board the Liberal Express bus that visited nearly 150 communities over the summer, he says, “It's a great relief to be out of Ottawa. Journalists feed on politicians. Politicians feed on journalists and they send out the same cynical message that it's a game, that it's a close game and you don't get to play. The Canadian people want in.”
“If you're looking for a career standard politician, don't come to me. Come to the other guy.”
Nice, very nice, but he is full of it…
Michael Ignatieff says in this promo:
“I’ve never admired my father more than when he looked after my mom. But it kind of killed him, basically. It was just too tough. I just don’t want people to go through what my family went through, I don’t want them to go through it alone, and feel alone.”
Is he saying the Canadian healthcare system failed him and his family? Of course, he might be saying just that, because that family crisis unfolded during the Mulroney years, I believe.
But Mr. Ignatieff seems to have indulged in a bit of revisionism.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0013010
“The lyrical first-person account [1993 novel Scar Tissue] of a son caring for a mother grappling with neurological breakdown mirrored his own mother's descent into Alzheimer's. …
Not all family members shared critics' admiration for the book. Some expressed anger that privacy had been breached, a sentiment voiced about family stories published in Granta. There was distaste that the fiction veiled the fact it was not Ignatieff but his younger brother, Andrew, who cared for his mother in Toronto, sacrificing his work in international development to do so.”
The same observation is echoed in the Michael Valpy (Globe & Mail) profile of Michael Ignatieff here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article841745.ece (page 11)
I would not ordinarily point to politicians’ family affairs, because they’re people too, and IMO a politician’s family should not be subjected to partisan public scrutiny.
But Mr. Ignatieff is using his own family’s struggles with Alzheimer to sell his “kinder, gentler” party platform, with its re-packaged homecare plan. And Mr. Ignatieff appears to be doing it with quite a few inaccuracies and/or misrepresentation.
He doesn't say “If you're looking for a career politician, don't come to me. Come to the other guy.” He says “”If you're looking for a standard politician, don't come to me. Come to the other guy.”