Political Parties

Federal Parties: The Liberal Party - Party Leader Biography

Michael Grant Ignatieff, MP (born May 12, 1947) is a Canadian public intellectual, historian, politician, the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Leader of Official Opposition in Canada. He has held academic positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and the University of Toronto. An award-winning author, he has also worked as a journalist and documentary film-maker. On January 23, 2006, he was elected Member of Parliament for the constituency of Etobicoke-Lakeshore.

Son of a Russian émigré father, Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff and a Canadian mother, he read History at the University of Toronto and gained a doctorate at Harvard University. He is a former Senior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, and has held teaching posts at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, the University of California, the University of London and the London School of Economics.

A regular broadcaster and critic on television and radio, Michael Ignatieff has hosted many programmes including Channel 4's Voices, the BBC's arts programme The Late Show, and the award-winning series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, first screened by the BBC in 1993, examining the issue of nationalism in the late twentieth century. His first book, A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1780-1850, a study of the English penal system, was published in 1978. The Russian Album (1987) is a memoir of his family's experience in nineteenth-century Russia and its subsequent exile to Europe and, eventually, Canada. It won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction? (Canada) and the Heinemann Award. His first novel, Asya, a love story about a Russian living in Paris and London during World War II, was published in 1991, and was followed by Scar Tissue (1993), a powerful examination of love and the acceptance of loss, which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award.

His acclaimed biography of Isaiah Berlin, the result of ten years' research, was published in 1998. It was shortlisted for both the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Non-Fiction? and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998) is an examination of modern warfare and its complex moral implications, and Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000), which won the George Orwell Prize, is a study of the NATO bombing of Kosovo, and Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001) is an account of the successes, failures and prospects of advances in human rights. His most recent book on ethnic war and intervention, Empire Lite: Nation Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, was published in 2003. Charlie Johnson in the Flames: A Novel, the story of a veteran war correspondent whose rash expedition into the war-torn Balkans has life-changing consequences, was published in the same year. The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror was published in 2004.

Michael Ignatieff is also the author of a television play, Dialogue in the Dark, an exchange between the dying philosopher David Hume and the writer James Boswell, based on Boswell's diary and Ignatieff's own book The Needs of Strangers (1984). It was directed by Jonathan Miller for BBC Television in 1989.

In 2000, Ignatieff accepted a position as the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He taught at Harvard until 2005, when on August 26, it was announced that Ignatieff was leaving Harvard to become the Chancellor Jackman Visiting Professor in Human Rights Policy at the University of Toronto. Ignatieff has received nine honorary doctorates.

Political Career

In 2004, two Liberal organizers travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to convince Ignatieff to run for the Canadian House of Commons, and to consider a possible bid for the Liberal leadership should Paul Martin retire. As a result of this, speculation began in the press that Ignatieff could be a star candidate for the Liberals in the next election, and possibly a candidate to succeed Paul Martin, then the leader of the governing Liberal Party of Canada.

After months of rumours and repeated denials, Ignatieff confirmed in November 2005 that he intended to run for a seat in the House of Commons in the winter 2006 election. It was announced that Ignatieff would seek the Liberal nomination in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke—Lakeshore. Ignatieff went on to defeat the Conservative candidate by a margin of roughly 5,000 votes to win the seat in the January 23, 2006, election.

Leadership bid

After the Liberal government was defeated in the January 2006 federal election, Paul Martin resigned from party leadership. On April 7, 2006, Ignatieff announced his candidacy in the upcoming Liberal leadership race, joining several others who had already declared their candidacy. At the leadership convention in Montreal in December 2007, taking place at Palais des Congrès, Ignatieff entered as the apparent front-runner, having elected more delegates to the convention than any other contender. However, polls consistently showed he had weak second-ballot support, and those delegates not already tied to him would be unlikely to support him later. In the fourth and final round of voting, Ignatieff took 2084 votes and lost the contest to Stéphane Dion, who won with 2521 votes.

Deputy Leader to Leader

Ignatieff served as the party's deputy leader from December 18, 2006 to November 14, 2008. He was re-elected as Member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore in the 2008 federal election. Following the Liberals' dismal results in the election, Dion announced that he would resign and scheduled his departure as Liberal leader for the next party convention to be held in May, 2009. Ignatieff held a news conference on November 13, 2008 to once again announce his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. As of December, it was reported that at least two thirds of the Liberal caucus in the Commons and Senate supported Ignatieff. Among these who supported Ignatieff was Bob Rae's 2006 leadership campaign co-chair, Maurizio Bevilacqua, who said that among Ontario MPs, they had concerns about the legacy of Rae's premiership during the 1990s recession.

After Parliament was prorogued until January 26, 2009, delaying the non-confidence motion, Ignatieff and other party insiders put pressure on Dion to resign immediately. Leadership contender Dominic LeBlanc, who was running in third place, dropped out and threw his support behind Ignatieff. On December 9, the other remaining opponent for the Liberal Party leadership, Bob Rae, withdrew from the race, leaving Ignatieff as the presumptive winner. On December 10, he was formally declared the interim leader in a caucus meeting, and his position was ratified at the May 2009 convention.