Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff Page A

a serious mistake. Aha, said the Quebec nationalists, all your talk about the nation means nothing. I’d planted my stake in the ground on the national unity issue, and now it was time to pay the consequences.
    Our opponents in the Conservative government had been watching all of this, none more so than the prime minister, Stephen Harper. As our leadership campaign drew to a close in late November 2006, hesuddenly decided to snatch the initiative away from us. He introduced a motion in the House of Commons recognizing that Quebeckers—not Quebec itself—constituted a nation within a united Canada. 3 The Bloc Québécois separatist party howled in dismay: they would much rather have had their federalist opponents deny the national character of Quebeckers’ aspirations. Our party howled because we wanted the credit for raising the issue. But the prime minister had us where he wanted us. When the motion was called, I rose in my seat in the House and voted to acknowledge, for the first time in our parliamentary history, the national identity of one of our constituent peoples. I’d played my part in making it happen, but the prime minister, with the tactical shrewdness that was becoming a trademark, got such credit as there was to be had.
    As our leadership campaign criss-crossed the country, I began to understand Canada as I had never done before. At first, the impression was of a cacophony of voices competing for recognition and acknowledgement. Common bonds of national citizenship appeared thin and attenuated. It took me a while to see my country as the site of a constant competition among groups and interests to define what the collective “we” should stand for. Of course we had moments of shared enthusiasm for the country, but moments of shared euphoria and common allegiance are actually less frequent than day-by-day conflict over shared meanings. What a person wants from his or her national community often conflicts with what others want. Every community wants recognition of its own distinctiveness but is reluctant to grant it to others. Canadian communities often give the impression of being sealed off from each other. Immigrant communities wanted more immigration and unionized workers wanted less; rich people wanted tax breaks and poor folks wanted a better deal. Gun control, of any kind, was poison in any small town or rural district, and yet it was thekey to holding the vote in a downtown core. Everywhere people wanted more federal money, but everywhere people wanted the federal government to stay out of provincial jurisdictions. The defence of the local and provincial was as strong on the island of Newfoundland or in the interior of British Columbia as it was in deepest Quebec. As these facts sunk in, I began to see our country as a political rather than a natural fact. Once you see a country as a sustained, everyday act of will, you understand why politicians matter. They bring people who want different things into the same room to figure out what we share and want to do together. Countries are “imagined communities,” and politicians are the ones who represent what we share and then figure out the compromises that enable us to live together in peace. 4 Throughout that summer of my leadership campaign in 2006, I talked about the “spine of citizenship” that ought to tie us together through all our differences. The spine meant more than equality before the law and rough comparability of services across regions. It meant for government to do what it could to strengthen the common experiences, sense of shared history and common rights and responsibilities that make us into a people. It’s only when you’re in politics that you understand both the divisions of a country and the hunger for unity that transcends those differences. Politicians have to find ways to articulate what is common and then build that common life into the fabric of its institutions. I didn’t know that this was my job when I started in