There's an inevitable mourning of ends of eras; it's schlocky and silly, but there isn't a way around it. Big changes force one to take stock of things - and indeed, approaching 30 years old, I find that I do so with a disappointing regularity, I mourn my time as a student in Paris and Montreal, I mourn the great nights I spent with my friends and my brother, I mourn the places I have and haven't visited, and I mourn these things for having lived them fully, and for living now something far far less exciting. But I couldn't imagine a way to mourning Michael Ignatieff. Jack Layton, Stephane Dion, these are men to mourn; the Igg, he is not. Nonetheless, with the end of the Igg comes the end of an era in which I have been deeply invested. In our lifetime, the LPC is unlikely ever again to select an academic as their candidate for the purple, and certainly never to do so twice in such absurdly quick succession. There is a depressing regularity to Canadian politics, a smallness, a sense in which even the weightiest decisions lack gravity. Say what you will about the Igg: he is indeed an interloper, he's only thinly Canadian, he really doesn't have a clue about what it means to raise a family in this country, or to lose a job in this country, or to be deeply invested (heart and soul) in this country. But he represents the very best intellectual tradition that we have- the cosmopolitan intellectual at the intersection of the public and the academic. And losing him (and Dion) really is losing something very very important to what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand ways that Stephen Harper is wrong for Canada, and his elimination of precisely this sort of candidate for the purple is maybe, maybe the most egregious.
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