Opinion: Why Ignatieff Should Not be Liberal Leader

Michael Ignatieff is one of the ten people running for the Liberal leadership and one of the better known. He is higher then most people in the polls especially seeing as most candidates are either obscure, wrapped in scandal, or simply not a good candidate for political leadership. Ignatieff is also a renowned writer and former Harvard human rights professor. However, this human rights professor seems to care little about human rights and should not be leader of the Liberals or even worse Canada.

Usually political leaders are someone who know the culture of the country and lived there most of their life (either from being born or immigrating). Ignatieff seems to have neither. Any candidate for Canadian leadership should be bilingual because, it is a bilingual country. Our current Prime Minister is even from out West yet, learned French because, without it you exclude a sizable section of the population concentrated in Quebec and New Brunswick. Ignatieff and the majority of the other contenders need to seriously brush up on their French.

There is also the question of residency. Ignatieff has not lived in Canada that long. He may have been born and raised in Canada, but basically for the significant part of the rest of his life he lived in the United States teaching at Harvard. He was parachuted into a riding despite a local candidate and a significant Ukrainian population. Many Ukrainian-Canadians have opposed him for passages in his book Blood and Belonging as being prejudiced against Ukrainians. His riding that he was parachuted into has a significant Ukrainian-Canadian population, but regardless he won the seat and now is consistently referred to as the rookie MP.

This rookie MP and former human rights professor seems to not care about certain human rights and, is a pro-war advocate. When Ignatieff was still at Harvard in the lead up to the Iraq war he was strongly in favour of it. He said he supported it due to the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein, but by that time Saddam had stopped his vast murders and, there were much more awful conflicts such as the genocide in Darfur that nothing was being done about. Now by most accounts Iraq is in worse condition then under Saddam and the United States also uses torture. But, even at a time when he was referring to himself as an American [1] he was chastising Canada on not joining the war. At his March 30th, 2006 speech at the University of Ottawa he tried to defend that position saying that at the time he supported it to uphold human rights, but now he is a MP and has to think of his constituents.

Yet, when it came to a vote on the extension of the Afghanistan occupation until 2009 on May 17th, 2006 he voted in favour. He and a small number of Liberal MPs propped up the Harper government's position despite most Canadians being against the continuation of troops in Afghanistan [2]. Harper even crossed the floor in order to shake Ignatieff's hand after the vote.

The most biggest controversy surrounding Ignatieff however, is his position on torture. Ignatieff says that he is against torture, but is for coercive interrogation. He states in a 2004 New York Times article " Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress. What crosses the line into the impermissible would be any physical coercion or abuse, any involuntary use of drugs or serums, any withholding of necessary medicines or basic food, water and essential rest."[3] The keeping of prisoners in hoods, with sleep deprivation, and stress position are forms of torture just not in the conventional sense. Those techniques do result in lasting mental and physical harm. His campaigners try to convince people of otherwise yet, his position is shown well enough.

Someone who has not lived in Canada for the majority of their life, are lacking French, write prejudiced passages, chastises Canada on not joining an illegal war, proports the continuation of the Afghanistan occupation and, condones coercive interrogation is not who should be leading Canada. Ignatieff may be able to win over certain votes, but he is an American by his own acknowledgement. Canada should be run by a Canadian who protects what the majority of Canadians believe in equality and, peaceful not aggressive foreign policy.