The Liberal Party has released new TV ads featuring Michael Ignatieff talking about his family.
It's heartwarming stuff : Ignatieff describes his dad as an immigrant who "came off a boat in 1928 without anything" and worked his way "up the ladder one rung at a time."
"Nothing is ever given to you, everything has to be earned."
Ignatieff told CTV his "family lost everything in the Russian revolution. They started over again in Canada. They came here with nothing."
But according to Ignatieff's own book about his family, The Russian Album, that's just not true. Ignatieff's family weren't regular Russians. They were high-ranking ministers in the government of the czar. They're aristocracy, actually -- Michael Ignatieff himself is a count, a title he will pass on to his son,Theo, and so on.
The Ignatieffs were powerful players in the czar's dictatorship. When the Russian revolution succeeded, the Ignatieffs fled the country.
But like so many, they were able to squirrel away money. The Ignatieffs fled to London in 1919, where they had $25,000 waiting for them in a bank. That's worth more than $2 million in today's currency. The Ignatieffs lived there for nine years before moving to Canada in 1928.
Why is Ignatieff trying to revise his family's history to make them sound like poor working class shlubs?Why did he say his dad came herewith nothing -- when in fact his family were the equivalent of multi-millionaires?
Ignatieff is desperate to come across as a regular Joe. But did he really think no one would notice the contradiction between the new airbrushed story, and the one he described in his family autobiography?
Last year Ignatieff went further, telling reporters "you're looking at a guy whose dad was a political refugee."
A refugee? Really?
Earlier this year, the brother-in-law of the deposed Tunisian dictator applied for refugee status here in Canada -- and was laughed out of town.
Technically, perhaps, he is a refugee -- he'd face persecution back in Tunisia. But to call an aristocratic dictator a "refugee" is to stretch the definition of the term.
Same thing for Ignatieff 's family. Ignatieff's great-grandfather, Nicholas, was personally responsible for some of the most brutal laws inflicted by the Russian czars.
He drafted Russia's May Laws one history book described as "forbidding Jews to move into the countryside, to acquire land, or to open their shops on Sundays."
"When the Jewish leaders asked why they were not entitled to the same protection by the police as other Russian subjects, Ignatieff replied they were not like other Russian subjects ... Jewish shops were smashed and burned ... Delegations of Jewish leaders came to see Ignatieff at the Ministry of the Interior. They told him they were in bondage as under Pharaoh. 'So when is your Exodus, and where is your Moses,' he is supposed to have said in reply."
That history book was written by Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff is not responsible for the anti-Semitism of his greatgrandfather or the tyranny of czars. He's his own man.
It's just strange he would throwhis family's history down the memory hole to win a few votes. And it's stranger still that, having chosen to use his family as a campaign theme, he is surprised and outraged his opponents would correct the record.
-- Levant will appear regularly on Sun News Network
ezra.levant@sunmedia.ca
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