TORONTO: The Late Show was never like this. Michael Ignatieff, that mild-mannered, spectacularly clever man who was once BBC2’s resident intellectual, is being followed around Toronto by bands of demonstrators denouncing him as a warmonger and cheerleader for torture. After nearly three decades as an author, academic and journalist in Europe and the United States, Ignatieff returned to his native Canada last year with the intention of getting stuck into politics. But it has been a turbulent homecoming.

The governing Liberal party, or at least a faction within it, embraced him as a potential saviour from its endless corruption scandals and a potential leadership crisis. He was handed what seemed like a safe constituency in western Toronto, which the Liberals won last time by 10,000 votes. It no longer looks exactly like a sanctuary. The Liberals are behind in the polls across Canada, and Ignatieff is being pilloried from his own party’s left, and singled out by the Conservatives, who see a soft target.

With Monday’s election looming four days away, Ignatieff is in a speeding car cutting through the snow flurries of a windy Toronto night, between a campaign event and a television appearance, as his campaign attempts to fight back against the latest volley of accusations. Life was surely easier back at Harvard, where only a few months ago he was a world famous human rights guru worshipped by his students. Ignatieff laughs at the thought of all he has given up for what he depicts as a wild gamble, but insists he is enjoying every moment.

At the age of 58, Ignatieff says he decided he could not spend his whole life as a spectator on the political sidelines. It was time to get involved, and where else but at home. “What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian.

“We have an existential politics in Canada. Do we survive or don’t we? The next train leaving on platform three is a separatist challenge,” Ignatieff goes on.

Just about everyone in Canada knows that there is more to this campaign than Etobicoke-Lakeshore, the diverse, highly industrial, heavily polluted, constituency where western Toronto sits on Lake Ontario, and where Ignatieff is making his political debut. Many in the Liberal party see in Ignatieff a potential second coming of Pierre Trudeau, the flamboyant academic who became prime minister in the 1968 summer of love and who managed, during much of his 16 years in office, to make Canada seem hip and at centre stage.

Like today’s candidate for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Trudeau was plucked from academia for his political role, but at the time he was not nearly as famous. Ignatieff, who campaigned for Trudeau in his youth, is just as smart as the Canadian icon, looks much better on camera and does not have Trudeau’s messy private life. (Ignatieff is married to a Hungarian, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, whom he met at the BBC, and whom he mentions at every reasonable opportunity.)

Back in the campaign car as it closes on the television studios with minutes to go before the candidate is due to be on air, Ignatieff bats away any questions of what might lie beyond the boundaries of Etobicoke-Lakeshore. “I know the [Liberals’] national campaign is not going as well as some would like, but I won’t be drawn on the leadership. I’m not being coy. I’ve been a journalist and I know that being coy is stupid. But I basically don’t have a bloody clue what I’ll be doing after January 23.” If he loses, he will still have a teaching job at the University of Toronto. There is no ‘silk parachute’, he insists, waiting to waft him back to Harvard. But in any case, he adds after his aides glare at him for contemplating the possibility of defeat, he is going to win.

Some Canadian pundits believe he could rise to the top in Liberal politics even if he loses on Monday — most of the other candidates likely to compete for the leadership, including the current frontrunner, the ambassador to Washington, Frank McKenna, will not have parliamentary seats either. And Ignatieff will have powerful people behind him, senior Liberals still loyal to the memory of Trudeau and his successor, Jean Chrétien, who was ousted by Paul Martin in an unpleasant and long-running coup. It was this Chrétien coterie that was instrumental in persuading Ignatieff to run last summer.

“We’re going to get into a leadership race pretty quick,” says one political insider who asked not to be named.

He has certainly got his work cut out for him. First, there is his party. He has boarded a sinking ship, dragged downwards by a nasty corruption scandal in Quebec, in which public funds intended to counter separatist sentiment and promote Canadian patriotism were embezzled instead.

At a candidates’ meeting with voters on Wednesday night, the first question for Ignatieff comes from a man who can still ‘remember the party of Trudeau’ and wonders how the candidate can bear to stand on behalf of an organization as tarnished as the Liberals now are.

“I have to tell you I’m in a difficult position,” Ignatieff acknowledges in his reply. “I can’t put it any more directly than that. We let ourselves down, and we let the country down. We weakened public confidence in government. We weakened public confidence in the party system, because we misappropriated public funds. And worst of all we’ve weakened the national unity of the country.”

Liberal loyalists in Canada are seeking redemption, and Ignatieff, by refusing to make excuses, is offering just that. It is a performance that seems both heartfelt and skilful. It sets him apart from the disgraced party machine, and anticipates the likely post-election landscape, in which his clean hands and new face will be his greatest assets.

However, Ignatieff has some political liabilities of his own. He was one of a handful of prominent liberals around the world who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not because of the Iraqi leader’s alleged arsenal, but to liberate the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant. As he reminds every audience he addresses, he went to the town of Halabja in 1992, to see for himself the legacy of Saddam’s poison gas attack on its Kurdish population, which left thousands dead four years earlier.

This is an unpopular stance in Canada, to say the very least. It makes Ignatieff sound like George Bush, who has been trumpeting the humanitarian rationale for the war since it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, and that is hardly a plus in Liberal circles. The gaggle of protesters who have turned up to most of his campaign events (although they skipped Wednesday’s meeting) have been chanting: “Ignatieff and Bush, partners in crime, send them packing at election time.”

Ignatieff is clearly grieved by the comparison but knows he has to live with it. “I understand the deep feeling in this, and every Canadian community about this,” he tells the audience, but he adds: “I stand with the right of democratic politicians to put on a bulletproof vest and do politics.” All he can offer to the sceptical crowd of 200 who have turned up to hear his views is the promise that as a politician, he would not ignore their opinions in any future vote on war or peace. “In future, I’m under the obligation to meet you here in this assembly hall and listen to what you have to say. I can’t promise I’ll do what you ask me to do in every situation, but I am under an absolute obligation to come here and listen,” he says, and wins some more, somewhat grudging, applause.

Plenty of US Democrats took the same line as Ignatieff before the war but are now saying they would have acted differently if they had known how shaky the intelligence was, and how badly botched the occupation would be. But offered that option in our interview after the constituency meeting, Ignatieff refuses to take the bait. “If you commit yourself in support of overthrowing the regime by force, you have to live with the fact that they can screw it up, and how they have screwed it up. You have to take responsibility for that,” he says. “If you choose the means — American means — you have to take the consequences. It’s not like this is an uncomfortable little episode, and you can just brush it under. You have to live with it.”

What Ignatieff refuses to accept, on the other hand, is the accompanying charge of being an accomplice to torture. His last job was running a human rights centre in Harvard and in the course of the row over how the US was treating its detainees he wrote that in the war against terror, legitimate interrogation could involve ‘isolation and some non-physical stress’. Part of the trouble once more is that the language he was using sounded a lot like the vocabulary being used by the White House to cover far harsher treatment. Ignatieff has had to fight a defensive battle to convince Canadians that unlike the Bush administration, he had always maintained that all interrogations should be governed by international law.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service