What is the matter with Michael Ignatieff that this is so? What’s missing from the portrait? Why, with so fresh and unspotted a leader, do the Liberals lack energy, borrow what little drama they possess from the tired, sham outrages of Question Period? It’s difficult to pinpoint. It’s not because of the “just-visiting” ads. They speak more to the narrowness of his opponents than to the flaws of their target. Nor has he been seriously spattered by cherry-picked quotations from some of his writings – his musings on the torture debate, for example – or his inclination toward the first person plural, the “we” in his writings, while tenured in America. They’re predictable “hit points” but they don’t really resonate. It isn’t any perceptible difficulties (I leave the spat over Quebec nominations out of the mix for now) with his caucus.

Manner is one part of the answer. He is cocky and uncertain almost simultaneously, aggressive and challenging one moment, hesitant and even confusing in his message the next. That message, what there is of it, is a muddle. He casts the word “vision” around like it’s a talisman, but speaks in the mushy platitudes of a high school valedictorian. He seems stranded between the two models of successful Liberal leadership, caught between the saloon and the salon. He cannot, by nature, mimic Jean Chrétien’s carefully crafted populist style. Neither does he have the electricity and presence of Pierre Trudeau. Mr. Trudeau’s braininess was sexy, Mr. Ignatieff’s you merely gather from the résumé.

Mr. Trudeau wowed on contact. You’re supposed to be impressed by Mr. Ignatieff. That dreadful feeble Ignatieff-before-the-trees ad, with its anodyne “we can do better” slogan, is breathtakingly pointless. It radiates the very absence of message or point that presumably it was constructed to dispel. And here we come to the centre of what’s the matter.

What has he to say to Canadians? Why did he come home? How is a Canada with Michael Ignatieff as its leader a better, different Canada than one without him? What’s special, distinct and intrinsic to his personality and style that adds something to the country he proposes to lead? Mr. Ignatieff has not only not answered these most basic questions. He signals by style and statement that he hasn’t worked out the answers for himself, not to speak of his fellow citizens.

Rex Murphy, September 28, 2009

In this critique of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, Rex Murphy has identified the essence of what the Liberal Party in Canada has come to represent over the last few decades. They are a party without a clear vision for Canada, as I have written before. When in opposition they seem to have a grasp on what they don’t want to do: they would scrap the GST; they would withdraw from the free trade deal; etc. But when in power they promptly do the opposite. Perhaps then Ignatieff is the perfect leader for the Liberals. As his record indicates his is “flexible” in his ideology, ready to reverse his position as soon as it appears it might score some political points. And perhaps the Liberal Party is exactly where it belongs – sitting in the opposition benches – as it appears all they are capable of is opposing.