I know. The whole Ignatieff/Québec nation debate is getting tiresome, but it won't go away. Andrew Coyne is continuing to bang away, and there are still interesting points being made. The latest is that Stéphane Dion has come up with a "compromise resolution" to avoid this whole thing boiling over on national television at the convention in two weeks.
Of all the big policy debates in the last couple of years, whether it be nationalized daycare, the Iraq war or anything else, I cannot ever recall seeing such unanimity in the media and amongst pundits about the complete wrongheadedness of an idea. Aside from a few fancophone Québecers like André Pratte and some Québec Liberals like Marc Garneau and Denis Coderre, I detect virtually no support for the concept of constitutionally entrenching nationhood for Québec anywhere in the country -- at least not at this time.
The most interesting aspect of this debate has been the damage -- perhaps fatal -- it has inflicted upon Ignatieff's candidacy, complete with a crypto-mocking cover story in the latest Maclean's. The damage done to his bid has been for two reasons: one, as noted above, the idea is just plain disliked.
But two, as a prominent Québec political scientist sagaciously pointed out when I ran into him in the library last week, it is the fact that Ignatieff proposed it that is the real problem. It would be one thing for someone who had fought the battles of Meech and Charlottetown and the last five election campaigns with the Liberals to propose a complete break with their constitutional position since the Trudeau era. But it's entirely another thing for an outsider who has lived abroad for 30 years to prance in and call for such a radical shift. Ignatieff has no battle scars from past constitutional fights; who is he to come and tell the Liberal Party to unceremoniously drop its heritage and do things his way?
With only two weeks to go until the vote, and with Ignatieff having been completely bereft of any momentum for at least 3 months, it now looks like his leadership bid -- along with his big constitutional idea -- are toast.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 1:38 PM
