Free Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff Page B

not admit of a political solution, or at least not a solution you can devise. People will accept that you cannot solve their problems if you give them all of your attention, looking into their eyes, never over their shoulder at the next person in line.
    I was learning all of this for the first time, and I was up against some stiff competition, rivals for the leadership who were strongcandidates with longer histories in the party than mine, all of them with lots of experience with the arts and skills of politics, all of them with the ability to put a name to a face and call in old favours.
    As we travelled the country, I learned that people’s inner map of political concerns begins with the local and widens out to the provincial and national. It is an inner map that pays no attention to constitutions and jurisdictions. People would always ask me questions, and if the question was about the local hospital shutting down or a daycare centre closing in their community, you couldn’t duck it by telling them that none of it was under federal jurisdiction. People won’t listen to you on national issues unless you display literacy about local ones, and the literacy test was tough to pass. We were once in Esterhazy, a small town in rural Saskatchewan that both Zsuzsanna and I had visited before we entered politics. It’s a place on the plains where the Hungarian pioneers came in the 1880s to settle the land, and there is a haunting graveyard on a hill outside of town where some of them are buried. My wife, being Hungarian, pronounced the town’s name the way she did back home, with a short
a
, but when I did so from the platform, there were frosty looks from the crowd. They all pronounced it with a long
a
. Your ability to connect with people could turn on a detail as small as the right vowel sound.
    The intensely local nature of politics often left me wondering what exactly we did share as a people and as a country. It is the politicians’ job to speak for what we share, but at first there didn’t seem to be much in common at all.
    This felt especially true in Quebec. I had thought my French was pretty fluent, but it was tested when I was campaigning for delegates in those rural parts of the province where the majority speak only French and have such a strong accent that it can be hard to understand. Establishing trust in a second language can make you feel as if you’retalking long-distance on a bad line. Besides, my French was more Parisian than Québécois, a fact the nationalists in the province kept pointing out. It took me a while to get comfortable and to feel I could command a hearing. My wife said that I changed when I spoke French: I made more expansive gestures and I hammed it up a bit more.
    Quebeckers have wanted many things from our national politics, but it all comes down to one big thing: recognition of their distinct identity as a people. It remains an amazing achievement that a French colony of sixty thousand souls defeated by the British in 1759 has grown into a dynamic, close-knit and passionate community of nearly eight million people. But for all their success, they never forget they are an island of French speakers in a continent of three hundred million English and Spanish speakers.
    Our party had a visceral connection to Quebec. The party’s real founder, Wilfrid Laurier, was the first French-Canadian prime minister, and since Laurier, three Quebeckers—Louis St. Laurent, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien—have served as party leader and prime minister. Our vocation as a party had always been national unity, drawing French and English together in common cause, but corruption scandals had been draining away our credibility in the province and we were losing seats to the separatist Bloc Québécois on the left and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives on the right. Even the New Democrats, long marginal to Quebec politics, were making inroads into the Liberal vote in the province.
    Regaining our credibility