What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book for a leader by a leader,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Okay, back to work, for you and for me. I’m rewriting my next book, for the third and last time I hope, and a new session of Parliament is opening soon. We both face a busy winter.

I believe you said in an interview not long ago that you hadn’t read much of Michael Ignatieff’s work. It’s obvious that you should, isn’t it? After all, you will be facing him every day in the House of Commons this year—he may even take your job—so it would be to your advantage to get to know his mind. The man has an impressive c.v., I must say. Degrees from the University of Toronto, Oxford, Harvard; teaching positions at Cambridge, Hautes Études in Paris, Harvard; a career in broadcasting and journalism; sixteen books to his credit (including three novels)—I can’t think of an aspiring Canadian prime minister with a resumé to match.  There have been prime ministers who were well educated and prime ministers who have written books, but none to this extent. Does that mean he would make a peerless prime minister? Of course not. Leadership can’t be reduced to academic credentials or books on a shelf. Personality, vision, instinct, people skills, practical knowledge, toughness, resilience, rhetorical flair, charisma, luck—there is much that goes into the making of a political leader besides grey matter. 

Having said that, a formidable intellect can only help, especially if it has been tested in practical ways, as Mr. Ignatieff’s has. There’s been little of the proverbial ivory tower in the years before he was elected to Parliament. His concern for human rights and democracy are real, not theoretical. He has travelled to many troubled spots on this planet to try to answer that essential question: how best can a society govern itself? Should Mr. Ignatieff ever move into 24 Sussex Drive, the gain for Canadians will no doubt be public policy goals that are sound and enlightened. Will he be able to bring these goals about? Will he know when to listen, when to compromise, when to act decisively? Many a politician has come to power with set ideas on how to fix things, only to find reality either more complex or more resistant than they had anticipated. We’ll find out in the coming months how Michael Ignatieff fares.

In the meantime, to help you not only in dealing with the new Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition but also as an aid in setting policy, I am sending you The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, a more recent book by your fellow parliamentarian, published in 2004. The cover seems uninspiring. It was chosen for a good reason: it’s a photograph of a staircase at Auschwitz. Up and down those stairs went people who were in the grip of political ethics gone terribly wrong. As I said, there’s nothing abstract about Mr. Ignatieff’s concerns. He looks at real-life political dilemmas and seeks to find out what went wrong and how those wrongs might be made right.

The Lesser Evil is a study on liberal democracies and terrorism. How do people who value freedom and dignity handle those who commit senseless violence against them? What is the right balance between the competing demands of rights and security? What can a democratic society allow itself to do and still call itself democratic? These are some of the questions that Mr. Ignatieff tries to answer. He looks at nations as diverse as Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Chile, Argentina, Israel and Palestine, in their current state but also historically, to see how they have dealt with assaults by terrorists. He also makes literary references, to Dostoyevsky and Conrad, to Euripides and Homer. Throughout, the approach is open, fair and critical, the analysis is rigorous and insightful, the conclusions are wise. Last but not least, the style is engaging. Mr. Ignatieff has a fine pen. My favourite line in the book is this one, on page 121: “Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores.”

Mr. Ignatieff is a passionate yet subtle defender of liberal democracies and he finds that generally the tools they already have at their disposal will do in times of terrorist threat. Indeed, he argues that overreaction to a threat can do more long-term harm to a liberal democracy than the threat itself. The U.S. Patriot Act and Canada’s Bill C-36 are two examples Mr. Ignatieff gives of well-meaning but redundant and misguided attempts to deal with terrorism. When the regular tools won’t do, he acknowledges that the choices faced by liberal democracies are difficult. He makes the case that when a society that values freedom and human dignity is confronted with a threat to its existence, it must move beyond rigid moral perfectionism or outright utilitarian necessity and—carefully, mindfully, vigilantly—follow a path of lesser evil, that is, allow itself to commit some infringements of the part in order to save the whole. It is a position that seeks to reconcile the realism necessary to fight terrorism with the idealism of our democratic values. To work one’s way through such treacherous ground, to get down to details and talk about torture and preemptive military action, to give just two examples, requires a mind that is tough, sharp and brave. I’m glad to say that Mr. Ignatieff has such a mind.  

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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