Who You Callin' Czarist?

Ignatieff rolls up his sleeves and fights dirty for his family's honour.

Election speculation has reached a fever pitch this week, but with the Liberals consistently trailing in the polls, some have wondered why the Grits would even consider forcing a vote. The Windsor Star’s Chris Vander Doelen suspects it’s so they can lose and replace their terminally underperforming leader, Michael Ignatieff. “But what if the grim poll findings have nothing at all to do with Ignatieff?” Vander Doelen asks. “What if Ignatieff is in fact the quintessential Liberal leader?” Iggy is handsome, intelligent, and experienced, after all, and Vander Doelen suspects the real reason for the Liberals’ poor showing in the polls is that Canadians haven’t forgotten the sponsorship scandal. But need these ideas be mutually exclusive? Maybe the Liberals’ poor showing is a result of both a poor track record and a leader who, although intelligent, lacks a grand vision.

The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin says that if there is a spring election, it’s clear Ignatieff’s plan is to fight dirty. Martin reached this conclusion after watching Iggy’s fiery defence of his family against a Conservative ad that (possibly correctly) portrayed Ignatieff’s forebears as something other than impoverished Russian immigrants. Ignatieff’s incensed response is a clear sign that “the Liberals are planning … an all-out assault on the prime minister, one that beats him at his own attack game, the one he’s been winning for years.” At the rate the Conservatives are piling up scandals, however, Martin suggests the Liberals hold off on an election until Harper has buried himself a little deeper.

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant says Ignatieff’s ancestors were indeed czarist, anti-Semitic, Russian aristocrats, and asks, “Why is Ignatieff trying to revise his family's history to make them sound like poor, working-class shlubs?” The answer to this question is the same as the answer to, "Why did a Connecticut-born, Yale-educated president’s son pretend that he was a Texan farmhand named 'Dubya?'" Because it plays well with the voters. We in the Newsroom aren’t qualified to judge the accuracy of Levant’s depiction of the Ignatieffs, but we would point out that his track record on exposing his opponents' dark pasts is very poor indeed.