Trudeau and Ignatieff.

This appeared last week courtesy of

cyberpresse.ca

Justin Trudeau s’en prend à Ignatieff
Presse Canadienne
Montréal

Justin Trudeau estime que Michael Ignatieff manque de la «sagesse nécessaire» pour succéder à Paul Martin à la tête du Parti libéral du Canada (PLC).
Dans une entrevue diffusée lundi à l'émission Dominique Poirier en direct, sur les ondes de RDI, le fils aîné du défunt premier ministre Pierre-Eliott Trudeau dresse un portrait peu flatteur de M. Ignatieff. «(..) Ignatieff, il est un peu partout, il se contredit, il n'a pas la clarté que mon père a pu avoir», déclare Justin Trudeau, qui

In Linda Diebel's feature on Michael Ignatieff in today's Toronto Star, there was more than a passing reference to the candidate and his comparison with Trudeau. Diebel puts an end to the comparisons once and for all as she describes how the Harvard University Professor was wooed home by Ian Davey who later introduced him to senior Senator David Smith. Together the two along with Igntieff's agent Michael Levine, agreed he "...would make a great Prime Minister."

Diebel writes: "To some extent, all political leaders are inventions, creations of their handlers" York University political economist James Laxer wrote recently on his blog. "The Ignatieff case takes this to the point of absurdity."

This is a far cry from Trudeau's motivation and early days as a Liberal minister. On the Trudeau alliance with his partners in crime Gerard Pelletier and Jean Marchand, Lester Pearson - who in a sense recruited the men from Quebec to shore up his support there - wrote "These were the sort of men I was looking for; men of quality and standing in Quebec, men who inspired both some admiration and some fear."


Next Face found a rather obscure reference to Ignatieff while reading Trudeau's Memoirs this summer while on vacation in Florida.

Next to this photograph is the following caption :

"Amid unusually comfortable surroundings at the London School of Economics I chatted with Michael Ignatieff, son of the distinguished Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff."





It is the only Ignatieff reference in the book. Like a riddle taunting us in DaVinci Code style, Trudeau leaves us this image in his Memoirs on page 41 alongside some other obviously meaningful pictures of himself with his son Sasha and his friend Gerard Pelletier. Would Trudeau have agreed with Justin's characterization of the Liberal leadership candidate?

What would Trudeau have made of Ignatieff's Quebec nation concept?

What we do know is that in 1993 Pierre Trudeau wrote:
"...I never denied the existence of the French-Canadian nation; nor do I deny the aboriginals led today by Ovid Mercredi the status of nation in the sociological sense. What I rejected well before the advent of neo-nationalism of the 1960's and reject still today is the doctrine that claims that every sociological nation must have political sovereignty and independence. If we were to promote the political independence of every sociological nation around the world, the planet would soon be torn by countless conflicts among ethnic and linguistic groups, each demanding sovereignty from the country in which it constitutes a minority."