The first round ballots are in and it’s beginning to look very much as if Michael Ignatieff will be chosen leader of the Liberal Party of Canada at their convention in December, and would then be a very good bet to be the next Prime Minister of Canada. Ignatieff would be a most interesting opponent in any bilateral discussions with the US at a time in which the two countries are drifting apart faster than the Greenland icebergs are racing away from their former home. The alienation of its neighbours could be one of the more long-lasting results of the increasingly incomprehensible actions of a government in Washington that seems intent on separating itself from the rules of behaviour adhered to by its (former?) allies. Ignatieff would surely be the most experienced and knowledgeable expert on global affairs – he ran the appropriate institute at Harvard before making a run at Canadian politics – to be in a position to do something about it. And his discussion with Bush and his extraordinarily lightweight advisors might be a painful revelation about why North America can no longer be understood – as Europeans tend to do – as one big place called Amerika.
In order for that to happen, some very Canadian obstacles will have to be overcome. Hockey has popped up, as it always seems to do, in the strangest places. The Toronto Globe and Mail, which had run a very flattering lengthy piece on Ignatieff, ran a much less effusive piece on his main rival and former roommate at the U. of Toronto, Rhodes scholar Bob Rae, who is certainly no dummy, but hardly looks like a jock. He came in a miserable third in the Ontario delegation voting, no doubt because he had once been the socialist premier of Ontario when it got into serious financial problems. The article was highlighted by a photo of a comic-looking Rae in full hockey regalia skating for the Ontario legiskater team. The hockey photos of candidate Ken Dryden, who is given only an outside chance of being prime minister but a very good chance of being Minister of Sports, do not look comical. In fact in the week before the vote, the Montreal Canadiens announced that Dryden’s jersey, along with Quebec icon Serge Savard’s, would be retired and raised to the rafters of the coliseum in Montreal. Guess who gets the Quebec hockey vote. Ignatieff’s announcement that he enjoyed nothing more than having a beer and watching Hockey Night in Canada was met with some skepticism. And to top it off, Belinda Stronach, a top candidate who decided not to run, was identified in a divorce suit by the wife of Maple Leaf tough guy Ti Domi as the other woman who led poor Ti astray. Since Belinda had been married to Norwegian gold-medal speed-skater Olof Johann Koss, she might have given Dryden a run for his money as most experienced candidate on the ice.