Name: Michael Ignatieff's Confessions — Liberalism, populism and multiculturalism by UnHerd Confessions
Duration: 56 min 18 s
Description: Giles chats to the former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and now rector of the Central European University, Michael Ignatieff, about how his family went from Russian nobles to Canadian refugees, why the Brexit debate was good for the UK's democracy and what threat populism poses to liberalism.

Back when he was a Canadian politician I attended a lecture he gave at an august forum (the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto).  The talk was on the Future of Liberalism.  He mounted the dais wearing his Reservoir Dogs suit (!) but without the indoor sunglasses he was known for while a student there.  Not to put too fine a point on it, he simply had no idea what liberalism was.  It was like listening to a high school dropout forced to talk on a subject he wasn't interested in, and I am not exaggerating.  I left feeling liberalism had no future at all, since one of its leading proponents didn't know what it was.  What a putz.

1 year later: Great comments. So glad he didn't become PM. The Liberal Party of Canada has become a virtue-signalling Capialist party. They don't actually do anything socialist. Sure, they paid Canadians to "stay home" for the last two years... but nothing is free in life, we'll have to pay all that back, and the rich get richer the poor got poorer, not socialist about that. Ignatieff is a wind vane.

A year later: great comments. Ignatieff is a wind vane. The Liberal Party of Canada is a virtue-signalling mess, utter capitalism with a smiley face. Some people call it socialism, but there's nothing socialist about it. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, big corporations move out of the country and thrive. Canada's Conservative finance critic is on oddly the one one in our public speaking of the harms of just paying people off, and increasing the monetary mass. Our debt pre-covid was 600 Billion. 1 year later 1.2 trillion in debt. 2 years later 2.3 trillion in debt. This will all be paid off by the poorest in the country. This is populism. Meanwhile, everyone's happy virtue-signalling their multiculturalism. What a sham.

I live in Ottawa but a Ukrainian-Canadian I curled for used to be a Liberal Party organizer in Toronto. He quit the party and decided to vote for Conservative leader Stephen Harper when Ignatieff won the leadership. He refused to support a leader whose leader was against Ukrainians. Having read Ignatieff’s otherwise charming book “The Russian Album”, I have to agree with him. Ignatieff doesn’t even seem to believe there is such a thing as a Ukrainian language; ethnic Ukrainians just speak rustic Russian dialects. Ignatieff does obeisance to the Liberal Party deity of multiculturalism, but on things that touch on his own identity, he really doesn’t seem to walk the talk, respecting Ukrainians as a related but distinct people from the Russians.

As Giles said Brahman opinion (an Anywhere)

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