One Step Closer to an Obama-Ignatieff Continent

The inside story on his unlikely victory

Somewhere, Samantha Power is smiling. Yesterday, while she was working on Obama’s State Department transition, her predecessor as the head of Harvard University’s Carr Centre for Human Rights (now run by adventurer-cum-Prospect-writer Rory Stewart), and fellow journalist-turned-academic, clinched the nomination for the Liberal Party of Canada.

Michael Ignatieff’s victory comes at a time of great turmoil in Canadian politics. Despite huge enthusiasm for Obama—over 70 per cent of Canadians supported him—the country oddly re-elected a prime minister, Stephen Harper, who in temperament, ideology and style is Obama’s antithesis. But Harper might have reason to take pause; having dismissed the coming recession during the election, he is now faced with holding together a minority government facing a crashing economy and a volatile political mess. And so enters Michael Ignatieff.  But it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

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Happy day: Ignatieff wins Canada’s liberal leadership

You did it, eh?

Not that corruption in Illinois isn’t diverting enough, but just over the border, Michael Ignatieff has all but won Canada’s liberal leadership. We’ll have another post later today from a Canadian friend of Prospect on the wider significance of all of this. But, briefly, given that their government is in the midst of an unusual constitutional crisis, it’s not impossible that he could be PM next year. This is good news. Iggy is a true public intellectual, and a serious liberal thinker. If you wants to know more—including some quite extraordinary stuff about his difficult relationship with his brother—see this long, brilliant Globe and Mail profile from last year.

Thought for the day. If Ignatieff becomes Canadian PM —which, even if not next year, he probably will soon—then the Anglo-Saxon world will be led by four morally serious, weighty liberal intellectuals: Obama, Brown, Ignatieff and Kevin Rudd. Sod Blagojevich. Isn’t that something to smile about?

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