Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff Page B

politics, but I soon learned.
    As we travelled the country that summer, one division seemed both overpowering and, at the same time, almost completely ignored. It was the division between urban and rural, downtown and hometown, north and south, metropolitan and remote. In the downtown parts of the country, along the American border, time ran fast and jobs were mostly plentiful. In the rural, remote and northern parts—most of thecountry—time ran slowly, the girl at the gas station cash register read the want ads from the big-city paper and dreamed of escape, the Internet connection was dial-up or non-existent, the roads turned to gravel on the edge of town, college was far away, and the nearest hospital was a four-hour drive. The country was divided into two kinds of places: those where you could make a living where you grew up, and those where you had to leave if you wanted to have a chance of a better life.
    This seemed to be an inequality that no one was talking about—and as the campaign went on I talked about it more and more. There was nothing wrong about leaving your birthplace if you wanted to, but it didn’t seem right that so many people had no option but to leave. Government alone couldn’t stop depopulation of remote and rural regions, but surely it could do something—with investment in roads and schools and Internet connections—to enable those who wanted to stay to raise a family where they stood. Most of the resource wealth of the country, after all, was in rural, remote or northern areas. That was where the mines were, and the acres of wheat and forest, and the pumpjacks drawing out the oil and gas. Some of the most desolate places I ever visited—Indian reserves, dwindling and abandoned towns—were right on top of natural resource bounty. Surely there was a way to make some of the wealth stay where it was instead of being sucked down into the big cities. I became the unlikely candidate of the urban–rural divide, the hard geography of opportunity that keeps so many of our brightest people from moving forward unless they move away. It came to me slowly, but I became determined to fight for a country where hope is fairly distributed, where everyone gets a chance to build a life where they stand.
    These are the ways that doing politics changes the kind of person you are and the beliefs you start with. A thousand meetings in out-of-the-way places, conversations with every kind of person, rich and poor, old andyoung, have a sedimentation effect. You no longer remember the particulars, but layer by layer a truth settles inside you. You take the country into yourself. You learn the terrain. What begins as an adventure just for yourself becomes a journey on behalf of others. Politics slowly introduces you—sometimes the hard way—to the people you want to do politics for and the country you want to build together.

FIVE
MONEY AND LANGUAGE
     
    BY MIDSUMMER 2006 , I was still the front-runner in the race and I was encountering any front-runner’s standard problems. We had become the target of all the other campaigns, and rival candidates were beginning to negotiate deals with each other to stop me from winning. To meet this challenge, we had to scale up our operation and get better at bringing delegates over to our camp. Our offices outgrew a cramped space above a restaurant on Isabella Street, just off the Yonge Street strip in downtown Toronto. We moved to larger quarters nearby on Bloor Street that a property developer let us use—and we just kept growing.
    I did not make the mistake of trying to run my own campaign. I was too busy travelling the country and raising money. Whenever I did show up in my headquarters and surveyed the banks of phones and the complete strangers manning them, all giving me a cheerful wave, I was amazed at the sheer size of the operation. I left management to Ian Davey and a committed team of young lawyers. They had taken leave from their day jobs and were working all