MICHAEL Ignatieff is a man accustomed to speaking without having to shout. After all, he’s a Harvard professor, a BBC television commentator, a historian and political theorist, as well a Governor General’s Award-winning writer. He is used to people hanging on his every pronouncement in lecture halls and television studios without having voices competing against his. He asks questions; it is not demanded that he answer them. In his latest professional incarnation, though, these ground rules have been rewritten.

It is late November and Ignatieff has flown from Boston to Toronto for a meeting of the Liberal party’s association in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, a riding that stretches north from Lake Ontario, almost reaching the airport on the western border of the city. The crowd gathered in this hotel conference room is gathering to select a candidate to run for the seat vacated by incumbent Jean Augustine. Ignatieff, a fifty-eight-year-old who hasn’t lived in Toronto since his undergraduate days, has the nomination sewn up. The decision to secure the nomination for him was made behind closed doors, and some of the constituents of Etobicoke-Lakeshore are feeling shut out.

Questions such as “Why doesn’t he live in the riding?” soon give way to accusations dressed up as honest inquiry. How can he come out in favour of the war in Iraq? How can he endorse what he calls ‘coercion’ but others would label ‘torture?’ How can he say all those terrible things about Ukrainians?

Every grievance is aired out at eighty decibels. “Shame!” some shout. “Occupation is not liberation!” others chant. It’s hard to sort out one chorus group from another.

But what isn’t hard to sort out is the one issue that stands above the others, namely Ignatieff winning the nomination by acclamation. How was it that he knew that co-chairs of the riding association would call for “electoral urgency,” a sort of Code Blue in the world of federal campaigning? That wouldn’t be political instinct so much as telepathy. How could there suddenly be only twenty-four hours to file the paperwork to run for the Liberal nomination? You have to give caterers more notice. Ignatieff makes it clear that there’s no point in asking him how two others who wanted to file somehow had their applications thrown out on technicalities. That’s not his job.

Ignatieff, wearing his Harvard tie like Lewis MacKenzie wears his medals, does a few brief interviews with the press in damage-control mode. He tries to explain away the various protests by saying that “politics is a contact sport.”

That’s not an explanation, just a dismissal. “What starts badly usually ends up the same way,” says Ron Chyczij, head of Etobicoke-Lakeshore’s Liberal riding association. “And there could hardly be a worse way to start. Any other candidacy was pushed to the side. Members of our association were effectively disenfranchised. His candidacy – the way he was given the unopposed nomination – was an end run that offended the people he should have been able to count on most of all, the people from this community who cared most deeply for the party.”

 

A few weeks later, just seven shopping days before Christmas, Michael Ignatieff is working the friendliest of rooms, a conference room at his campaign headquarters. It’s a little down-market, a boxy building on a commercial strip. Neighbouring businesses are a pain and stress clinic and Boxed Inn, an outfit that doesn’t think outside the box so much as think of ways to get everything into cardboard containers. He had to feel more in his element in his office at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. What his campaign headquarters lacks in aesthetics, it makes up for in the beatific support of his staff.

On Ignatieff’s campaign website the event is described like this: “Michael welcomes members of the Slovenian community.” It’s less and more than that.

It’s less because Etobicoke-Lakeshore’s Slovenian community, as it turns out, is much smaller than expected. Of the twenty folks in the room, the Slovenian contingent consists of a pair of Slovenian retirees, a husband and wife, the parents of an Ignatieff campaign volunteer.

And it’s more because this is an experiment in political science, an attempt to transform a citizen into a statesman, bypassing the inconvenience of an intermediate stage, that of a working politician. Those who fast-tracked his nomination in Etobicoke-Lakeshore see him as a future leader of the party. So long as there was no loss of life, the raucous scene at the nomination wasn’t going to mess with the experiment. If you didn’t get the message, just look at the tattered wall-sized poster from Pierre Trudeau’s first campaign that hangs just inside the front door of Ignatieff’s HQ. And just look at Paul Martin’s photos beside it, practically palsied with self-doubt and fear.

This quasi-public quasi-event serves as a training session for the man whom one hyperbolic newspaper headline has heralded as “The man who can save Canadian politics.” (Message to media planner: Clip and save.) It’s not just the media buying in. Influential Liberals look at Ignatieff and don’t see what looks to the untrained eye like Sam Waterston with the sharp edges sanded off. They see the second coming of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He evokes the good old days, a time when ideas mattered, when it was the Just Society and not Just Politics. He reminds them of an era when international leaders met and Canadians knew that man was the smartest guy at the table. They see history repeating. And they see this graying boy wonder as relief from scandal and party infighting.

Snippets of Ignatieff’s ten-minute speech to the Slovenian contingent hang out there. “I am a journalist,” he says, an attempt at self-deprecation. Not a professor, not an author, not a historian, as he has described himself in his own writing, but a working stiff, an ink-strained wretch. “I make mistakes.” Away from the press, he’s decided to play it humble. The Harvard tie is back at home in the closet.

Like you’d expect of a historian, though, Ignatieff can’t help but draw on history – and like so much of his work, personal history. “My father worked for Louis St Laurent,” he says. “My father served with Mike Pearson. My father was one of Pearson’s pallbearers.” Service, loyalty, friendship – all Liberal bona fides. And it will only get better when he puts his mother’s side of the family out there, the Grant side, three generations of Canadian thinkers. His cousin George Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism remains 40 years later on the top shelf of the canon of Canadian political writing.

Better yet, he drops in an anecdote about the campaign trail, his own lament about how political theory doesn’t play on voters’ doorsteps. “One woman said, ‘Democracy … I know all about that stuff.’” The Slovenians laugh, and the campaign volunteers look relieved.

 

THE riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore seems like a place where people could disagree without being disagreeable – where you’d expect quiet, even tepid, events like the meet-and-greet for the Slovenians rather than a shitstorm such as the one that occurred on the night of the Liberal nomination.

The riding’s neighbourhoods are defined, more or less, on class and party lines as you travel north: find the hard left down by the lake in blue-collar Mimico; hit the soft political centre at the Queensway, the riding’s equatorial region; and end with the tony homes and trophy Benzes with Tory bumper stickers up by Royal York and Bloor. None of those differences in means meant mean-spiritedness.

Certainly that was the case in the previous election, when Liberal MP Jean Augustine won re-election, finishing comfortably 9,648 votes ahead of Conservative John Copobianco. “I respect Jean Augustine. She’s a good person even if we disagreed on issues,” says Copobianco, a forty-year-old public relations executive with Hill and Knowlton and a candidate once again.

If you catch Ignatieff in a private moment or even a controlled public one like his open house for Slovenian voters, you imagine him inspiring deep consideration of issues, but not personal attacks. He’s so ingratiating it almost hurts – hearing out every constituent, never raising his voice, always giving generously of his time. His is the most pleasant lectern-side manner. Maclean’s famously nominated him as the “Sexiest Cerebral Man,” a station he assumed, you’d imagine, unopposed, pending Playgirl’s “Men of Mensa.” (I’d think of Ignatieff more as centrefold material for The Walrus, but that is another matter.)

And yet, as one NDP worker told me, the campaign “seems visceral at the public events but it’s even worse down on the street.” At one of the riding’s main subway stations one frigid morning the week before Christmas, two students are thrusting pamphlets at folks at the entrance. “Stop Ignatieff,” they plead. And if you corner them, they’ll admit that they work for the riding’s NDP candidate, a twenty-three-year-old University of Toronto law student named Liam McHugh-Russell, but, in a fall-back scenario, would cheer a Conservative win. For these constituents, it’s ABMI: Anybody but Michael Ignatieff.

 

DID Michael Ignatieff not foresee that being parachuted into Etobicoke-Lakeshore might cause a backlash? He’d have to be the Absent-Minded Professor to miss that. You’d have to believe that he knew exactly what he was doing. Ignatieff did, after all, cite Machiavelli in his 2004 treatise on the morality and efficacy of torture entitled The Lesser Evil, and endorse the idea that “moral qualities we admire in private life—probity, honesty, forebearance—can be liabilities in public life.”

Understanding these rules of the “contact sport,” Ignatieff must have known what was going to happen in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. Ignatieff and his team factored in dozens of laudatory articles from friends and sympathizers in the press. (The Globe and Mail’sreference to “a philospher-king in Mr. Trudeau’s iconic mould” was understated compared to much that would come.) They had performed the Machievellian math and presumed that Ignatieff would win on a strategic vote – the riding’s equatorial zone would opt as always for the Liberals, if without enthusiasm, and the southern hemisphere would cast ballots based on Harperphobia.

Ignatieff and the team knew that there’d be some rough spots. They knew some would bristle about the notion of “a safe riding,” but it’s a fact of political life. Pierre Trudeau described the riding he first ran in, Mount Royal in 1955, as exactly that, safe. And some would object to “parachuting” candidates from far-flung places, but it’s a practice as old as the hills and good for some laughs – remember John Turner having to give up his table at Winston’s to run in a by-election in British Columbia?

And of course there would be the usual griping about yet another celebrity candidate. Then again, only those in academe and the media and other elites think Michael Ignatieff passes for a celebrity. Down in Mimico, a native son like NHL star Brendan Shanahan would be a celebrity, not a tweedy Ivy League prof. Shanahan could at least get out the vote with autographed hockey cards. Prior to this election – even during it – Ignatieff could walk through any local mall without being accosted.

They even had to presume that there’d be resentment when Ignatieff was handed the nomination after something that came across like an Order of Canada ceremony. Ignatieff and his backers knew that the philosopher-kingmakers’ hands couldn’t go unseen? The conundrum is hard to miss: On the one hand, Ignatieff quickly declares himself “not responsible [or] attached” to the slime uncovered by Judge Gomery simply by virtue of his absence, while on the other, the party’s long-entrenched power brokers handed him a riding.

 

A neophyte politician should enjoy the advantage of a clean slate. He should be able to define himself by responding to polling data, his trusted advisors, and maybe, just maybe, the little idealistic voice in his head. Not Ignatieff though. His public pronouncements were thrown back in his face from the get-go. His embattled candidacy gave the Toronto Star cause to lament about “responsible democracy [becoming] so brutish that it is now more welcoming to those who in doing little have done nothing to offend rather than those who rub raw emotions by deconstructing complex public policies.”

Ignatieff was denied a clean slate? After all, there’s barely any room left on the blackboard. A paper trail? It’s more like an intellectual’s Trans-Canada Highway. Or maybe the Autobahn would be a more fitting metaphor. After all, Ignatieff has written about some Canadian issues – Quebec principally. But he long ago decided he was of the world, not of the nation of his birth, and certainly not of the city of his birth.  

It also seems disingenuous when he describes himself as a journalist, a blatant effort to massage the truth. He could truthfully claim to be a professor, an author, a philosopher, and a political theorist. Any of those, though, would sound too elitist in the working-class riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore.

Yet when Ignatieff calls himself a journalist (and on the campaign trail opts for the double-edged pejorative “a freelance journalist”) he’s not lying out of political convenience.

Look at his writings. Consider them the required reading for this course. The upside? They offer him credibility by offering a real-life record of being in the hot zones during the most inclement political weather.

Look at Blood and Belonging, for instance, Ignatieff’s 1993 exploration of the dynamics of nationalism. It would be as dry as melba toast if it were the work of an academic who simply mediates on such themes over lunches at the faculty club. But Blood and Belonging is the product of the toughest type of fieldwork. Romeo Dallaire has slept in more hard beds over the sound of gunfire than Michael Ignatieff, but Stephen Harper hasn’t. (Crashing on the couch at Stornaway with CNN on in the background doesn’t count.) An academic would have written about war from a distance. A politician would only don a flak jacket for a possibly career-ending photo-op. Ignatieff had real cause to don one during his travels in Serbia and Croatia in the late 80s and early 90s.

And from these travels he came away with more than just stamps in his passport. He and the reader come away with a record of nationalism in our time, but moreover, an understanding of the psychological underpinnings of nationalism as identity politics.

Look at Ignatieff’s family memoir, The Russian Album, which won the Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction in 1987. It’s not a celebration of the aristocratic roots on his father’s side of the family. The Russian Album really details the folly in believing that aristocracy can serve as a shield from social catastrophe – and the radical idea that family can mean more than class when it comes to surviving the worst hardships.

It’s also anything but an introspective memoir; Ignatieff is far more concerned with family than self. And given his grandfather’s loyal service as education minister to Czar Nicholas II and his father’s service to Lester B. Pearson, it’s not a great leap for the reader (or the voter) to see Ignatieff’s candidacy as a matter of family values, if not genetic predestination. In The Russian Album, he writes of his life and work as “keeping a promise to two people I never met” – his paternal grandparents – and only the hard-hearted won’t buy it. It can’t be branded stagecraft. It did, after all, come long before his foray into Canadian party politics.

 

HIS many freelance newspaper pieces and reviews of his books aside, there’s more required reading, of course. Not by him, this time, but about him. 

Igantieff generated a career’s worth of fawning press long before his campaign in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. From the Toronto Star in 1991: “a moral philosopher, the intellectual’s Renaissance man, the thinking woman’s crumpet … a man of letters and politics, of academia and mass media …” From the Independent in the same year: “a target of professional envy … so sensitive, so intelligent, so multi-faceted and so damnably handsome to boot.”

(Okay, so the Daily Mail called him as “a classic Canadian bore.” No one’s perfect.)

In the weeks leading up to the January election, the press is no less flattering. The Toronto Star consummates its love affair with Ignatieff on almost a daily basis. “He delivered a barn-burner of a speech with national appeal,” one account notes. Another day he is the shining example of the “uber-talents” in Toronto’s field of candidates.

Ignatieff is even championed in what you’d expect to be the hostile pages of the right-leaning National Post: “We can all agree Canadian politics needs passionate and serious thinkers of Ignatieff’s calibre of all political stripes running for office.”

But while the mainstream press is onside, an organized group of ABMI constituents are distributing a photocopied pamphlet entitled From the horse’s mouth: Michael Ignatieff on Michael Ignatieff (Vol. 1, Issue 1). On the title page its raison d’etre is pithily explained. “The anti-war movement is pleased to present From the horse’s mouth, a special election publication that lets the candidates speak for themselves.” And then, with a single repeated photo of Ignatieff, in front of the Star-Spangled Banner behind him, his words are presented without comment. On torture: “The reality is torture does work … I don’t want phyiscal torture but repetitive, recursive, stress-inducing interrogation, yes, I can see us doing that.” On his support of the US going into Iraq: “On this one I was apparently on the far right of Canadian opinion.” On the UN: “The United Nations is a messy, wasteful, log-rolling organization.” On Ukraine: “My difficulty in taking Ukraine seriously goes deeper than just my cosmopolitan suspicion of nationalists everywhere. Somewhere inside I’m also what Ukrainians would call a great Russian and there is just a trace of old Russian disdain for these little Russians.”

Ignatieff will declare that From the horse’s mouth is the work of those with purely partisan interests. And he will claim, with cause, that his words are frequently taken out of context and that he is smeared. Still, in this brutish democracy what does the future hold for someone so easily smeared?

 

I have twenty minutes with Michael Ignatieff. One of his handlers holds a stopwatch.

I read a quote from a source I don’t identify: “There are no ideas, only liberal sentiments.” I instruct him: “Discuss.”

He sighs. A pregnant pause. I can hear the stopwatch ticking in the background. He goes about answering deliberately, like this Q&A is a three-hour lecture.

“I don’t think it’s true. The speaker means that there are sentiments, emotional feelings about politics. These feelings include sympathy for the poor … for the downtrodden … for immigrants off the boat … for aboriginal people. All of that sounds terribly condescending. These people don’t need sympathy. They need institutions that work for them … programs that work. The starting liberal premise is freedom—that you will make better choices than someone telling you what choices to make. But you can’t have freedom if you don’t have institutions that protect you. It’s the balance between freedom and institutions that work that is the key liberal idea. Without the spine of ideas you get sentiments. Without ideas you get sentiments that turn to mush ... condescending mush. [Those people] don’t need mush and they don’t need my sentiments. They need ideas and ideas are in short supply. Ideas without sentiment, though, are policy wonkery. What people need are ideas that make sentiment practical and that make institutions work.”

I offer bonus marks for identifying the source of the quote. I show him a list. 1: David Frum 2: Rush Limbaugh 3: Goethe 4: Brian Mulroney 5: None of the above.

Ignatieff refuses to hazard a guess. (The correct answer is 3: Goethe.)

I read another quote to him.

“I do not believe in roots … I want to be able to uproot myself when I get stuck, to start over again when it seems I must. I want to live by my wits rather than on my past.”

Michael Ignatieff recognizes it immediately. It is a closing passage from The Russian Album.  He also recognizes that this wanderlust he confesses to is something his opponents might seize on. He rarely seems very Canadian in his writings. He has also used the first person plural in stories for (his fellow) Americans about U.S. policy. His embrace of British culture is subtle but incontrovertible: In Blood and Belonging, where he calls the trunk of a car “the boot.”

Yet he won’t opt for an obvious answer. All he will offer is that these are the writings of a younger man. He vows that returning to Canada will be the final move of his peripatetic life.

“I don’t like chains,” he says, “I don’t want to put any chains on. My grandmother used to say that any Ignatieff could turn paradise into hell and hell into paradise. But [with coming back to Canada] I’m relatively unironic about [public service]. You want to put back. I’m heavily invested in Canada being a model for the world, managing all the differences.”

Over the next fifteen minutes or so Ignatieff tries to establish himself as an empathetic character. It’s baseball, not hockey, that he loves. Yes, he has moved to the the trendy Annex, a five-minute walk from the University of Toronto campus, where he plans to teach in the next academic year, and, no, he stops short of promising to move into Etobicoke-Lakeshore if he captures the riding. He refuses to lie, or even fudge, out of convenience. That, surely, can’t go unpunished.

 

MICHAEL Ignatieff is working a decidely unfriendly room. The auditorium at a middle school on Mimico Avenue, right in the middle of the old, working-class have-to-live-there-to-love-it neighbourhood. Ignatieff might think it’s a friendly room, at least if he were to only look to the front five or six rows. That’s where almost all the folks applaud when he is introduced, clapping enthusiastically, almost aerobically. But even if he couldn’t see beyond those five rows, one hundred or so supporters, he can hear something else, far from support, from hundreds of others in attendance at this all-candidates debate.

The moderator, in tones that evoke a vice-principal’s morning announcement, is able to get out “Michael” but not “Ignatieff,” not before the booing starts, not before someone shouts “Gomery,” and not before yells of “Ukraine” echo from the standing-room section in the filled-to-overflowing hall. Those are themes that inspired the placards of protesters walking out on the streets before the debates, braving a cold, hard rain.

Six days before the election, Michael Ignatieff is learning the difference between lecturing to a rapt audience pining for an A and speaking to an audience casting ballots. That explains the tense body language, the strained smile when he looks out at his supporters, the Starbucks sippers in the front seats, and the haters in the back, wearing baseball caps and shaking fists.

Maybe he doesn’t feel threatened by those flanking him at the table on the stage. Not by the Conservative candidate John Copobianco, whose connections as a PR operative for Mike Harris leave him carrying the baggage of the failed Common Sense Revolution. Not by the NDP candidate Liam McHugh who looks like he’s running for president of the student body (which he did just a few years ago). Ignatieff certainly doesn’t feel threatened intellectually. If they want to go highbrow to middlebrow or lower, he believes he will carry not just this night but also election day.

More important than knowing his strengths, Ignatieff seems to have acknowledged his weaknesses. No foreign policy off the top, no Iraq, no big-thinker themes that run through his books. His opening remarks go local. Issue one has the debate-goers worried about where they parked their cars: safety, eliminating gang crime, funding for police. Issue two they can smell walking the streets: cleaning up the environment in Lakeshore, airborne stuff, industrial waste, sewage treatment. Enthusiastic applause, some drifting to the back of the room.

It’s clear that just knowledge of local issues won’t be enough though. No, Copabianco and McHugh make claim to growing up in this neighbourhood, McHugh even to having been a student at the school hosting the debate. They know the streets, while Ignatieff needs a road map.

But as the debate unfolds there are some rocky moments for the man who would be the savior of politics in this country. Before he can save politics he must save his own political ass.

First, when challenged on the trustworthiness of the Liberals, he points to his successor, Jean Augustine, who retired if the party line is to be believed, or let the party-anointed Ignatieff play through, if you go by the optics. He says that Augustine was a wholly trustworthy MP, defender of her riding interests – and then, with one line that could have been scripted by his opponents, he notes that “she remembered people’s birthdays …” What he says after that is drowned out by heckling. “We don’t need birthday cards, we need jobs …” Ignatieff has just violated his own principle that “sentiment without ideas is mush … condescending mush.”

Then, he takes a misbegotten trek about “equality.” At the start, it seems like a winner. From an economic standpoint, Mimico Avenue is at the lower end of the scale. Ignatieff talks about the discouragement of scrambling to rent an apartment – never mind the fantasies of home ownership – when just food and bills can often overwhelm. But then, when readying to talk about those who stand to benefit most from Tory tax cuts, he notes that the tony neighbourhood at Royal York north of Bloor has “homes I’ll never be able to buy.”

The hoots come from the back of the room. It just doesn’t ring true. A politician, even aspirants on his left and right on the stage, would know how that line should be delivered: “homes only Brian Mulroney can afford” or “Belinda Stronach’s starter home.”

And after McHugh-Russell invokes the name of Pierre Trudeau, Ignatieff seizes what he thinks is an initiative. Ignatieff tries to cop the line Lloyd Bentsen made famous in his debate with Dan Quayle. “I knew Pierre Trudeau …” he begins but is drowned out by hecklers. At least it pre-empted his opponents from interjecting: “… and you’re no Pierre Trudeau.”

Ignatieff blew off an invitation to a phone-in all-candidates show on community cable nights before. While it looked like a dubious decision – especially when he headlined at a $300-a-plate fundraiser downtown the same night – it might well have been a shrewd judgment. How well could he have fared in a more free-form session?

Ignatieff’s poor performance reminded me of Frank McKenna, Canada’s ambassador to the United States doing a phone-in show on C-Span a couple of weeks before, fielding calls from American viewers irate at Canada’s less-than-headlong support of the Bush Administration. The tougher the questions, ranging from Iraq to the softwood-lumber dispute, the better the ambassador fared. Try as they might, the callers’ right-wing, Bill O’Reilly interrogation tactics couldn’t ambush him. It was an unlikely forum for politics verging on statesmanship. Yet that’s exactly what it looked like in contrast to Ignatieff’s performance in the auditorium – just about the worst time anyone could have on school property this side of Carrie.

 

MICHAEL Ignatieff is waking up beside me. Intellectual bedroom eyes? No, just tired. In other circumstances this might kill his chances for election. It should be understood, however, that he was slumped in a leather chair, having nodded off in the lobby of the Board of Trade building down the road from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Over the course of a free twenty minutes, Ignatieff displayed that specialty of students who do all-nighters and journalists who on occasion do all-nighters of a different sort. He willed himself to sleep, head resting on hand. In an amazing feat of political nonchalance, Ignatieff also manages to fall asleep in full view of everyone who was filing into the last public event before the election, a meet-the-candidates session sponsored by a local newspaper, TheEtobicoke Guardian.

Suddenly, Ignatieff wakes up and asks, “What are you doing here? Have we met?” His expression, though says something else. What am I doing here? You expect me to remember you? He seems offended to have a private moment intruded upon, even though his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, offers to bring me a coffee and speaks freely about the physical cost of a campaign.

“Do you mind?” he asks. The savior of Canadian politics nods off again. Ignatieff approves of sleep deprivation as “permissible duress” in lieu of torture, but draws the line while campaigning.

When he finally heads upstairs to the Pearson Room (no escaping old ghosts), Ignatieff shakes hands and briefly speaks with a few of the attendees for twenty minutes. Then he and his wife head for the door. Too few people, too late in the day and the campaign, too much trouble. After The Guardian has profiled you and ran your byline regularly, it must be hard to work up enthusiasm for The Etobicoke Guardian.

Ignatieff will soon be back to sleep for the night but when he wakes up, he will he get word of a nightmare: The president of the Lakeshore-Etobicoke Liberal voters association will quit and throw his support behind John Copobianco. “I was hoping that he’d establish himself as a credible candidate,” Ron Chyczij announced to the press. “I don’t think he has. I don’t think that he’s learned [how to campaign effectively]. There’s been no progress since day one. He doesn’t connect with people in this riding.”

 

IN a bar down the street from Ignatieff’s campaign headquarters, a rock-and-roll joint mockingly named Hollywood on the Queensway, the room is crowded with volunteers and media types awaiting a first peek at the election results at the stroke of 9:30 p.m. An Ignatieff campaign elder is doing an avuncular number with a young campaign worker in the role of Grasshopper. Every piece of wisdom is accompanied by wide-eyed nods of agreement.

“I remember I had to write a speech for ______ when he got into a shitstorm over ______. You can’t run away from your shitstorms, y’know, pretend that they’re not there. You have to talk about those things to get past them …”

The kid recognizes neither the name nor the shitstorm, but he nods anyway.

“Maybe now Liam can concentrate on his homework. What was he thinking … that people were going to vote for someone who had never held a mortgage in the riding?”

Another nod.

“Michael is going to have to use more humour as thing goes on. He didn’t have that this time but he’s going to need it …”

The four party leaders flash up on the television screen.

“… These guys sure didn’t have it. We all could have used it. That’s what Trudeau had … the intelligence and confidence to use humour and get away from the script, the talking points … Michael should be able to get there.”

The numbers from Etobicoke-Lakeshore roll in. Ignatieff is in front by a few hundred votes. Soon it’s over a thousand. Then two thousand. Finally five thousand. A bit over half Jean Augustine’s margin.

On the big screens around the room, a tide of Liberal red is washing over Toronto, save a little orange lifeboat with Jack Layton and his wife Olivia Chow aboard.

At last, when there can be no surprises left, Ignatieff walks onto the stage and looks at the crowd. The diversity of the riding is a given, but the representation here is like a sight gag out of a straight-to-video movie. The Kurds in the riding are out on what is one of their high holidays, one belle of the ball wearing what looks like a hubcap from an old Caddy on her head and a metal topcoat. Muslim women show up in their burkas. A Ukrainian senior is wrapped in an orange scarf, a show of his support for the new rule in his home country. The Maritimers in the house volunteering as human shields for the bartenders. In his acceptance speech Ignatieff manages to acknowledge these and other constituencies.

“Stephen Harper came here ten days ago and said let’s send this Ignatieff fellow back to Harvard,” he said, revelling without gloating. Read what you want into the fact that the most memorable line from his speech places him and the incoming PM in the same sentence. On the night of Harper’s greatest victory, Ignatieff is taking a lot more than consolation in his own win.

Finally, Ignatieff engages in a scrum with reporters. He concedes that it will be hard to represent his riding’s interests with the Tories in power but not impossible, particularly if MPs from Toronto pool their resources. No, he won’t discuss his plans to move or not move into the riding.

One scribe asks about the latest development – Paul Martin has announced that he will be stepping down as the leader of the Liberal party. Will Ignatieff be throwing his hat into the ring? Leadership, he replies, is not a point he’ll discuss now. Instead, he offers a theme of his experience on the campaign trail. “Politics is the art of managing surprise,” he observes.

Behind the scrum, on the big screens you can see but not quite hear the panel of experts assembled by one of the networks for their election coverage. Brian Tobin is leaving viewers and voters to wonder why, in the prime of his career, such an engaging politician absented himself from the fray at the time his party needed him most. Then the network cuts away to reports from the ridings. There’s Belinda Stronach, smirking, like she knows that the Paris Hiltons shall inherit the earth. And away from the TV cameras, Frank McKenna is in Washington, about to send in his resignation to Stephen Harper. The surprise Ignatieff and other potential leadership candidates will have to manage is the decision of McKenna, the presumed front-runner, to stay on the sidelines in the coming leadership race.

That leadership race will be a real “contact sport.” But should Ignatieff toss his beret into the ring, his rivals may well be surprised when their shouts being drowned out by the intellectual who won’t raise his voice.