John Bolton - January 26, 2025


Make Mark Carney Iggy 2.0

Topics
Michael Ignatieff parallels Mark Carney Michael Ignatieff comparisons
Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Mark Carney Michael Ignatieff Justin Trudeau Dan McTague John Turner Doug Ford Paglia George Ignatieff Jeffrey Simpson Stephen Harper Pierre Trudeau Jean Chrétien George Grant Paul Martin Brian Lilly John Gray
Is Carney Trudeau 2.0 or Worse？ Liberal Man Assaults Conservative Woman (Melissa call the cops)

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

192.15

Word count

1,922

Sentence count

127


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

There's a parallel between Mark Carney and Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and current Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, who is running to replace Justin Trudeau as the next Prime Minister of Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel. 5.35 a.m. Sunday, January 26th with the big blue mug of
00:00:05.980 coffee. I hope you're having a great day today. A little follow-up from yesterday when I said I
00:00:11.720 want Mark Carney to become Michael Ignatieff 2.0. It was in a video where we were talking about
00:00:17.820 Justin Trudeau being 2.0. Fascinating. So many people were saying that yesterday online. There's
00:00:23.540 actually a story in the National Post today similar to that. Fascinating as well that I had
00:00:29.480 a clip from Dan McTague from Canadians for Affordable Energy on yesterday bashing Mark
00:00:34.640 Carney and people seem to have Dan McTague on yesterday doing the same thing. Maybe I'm a
00:00:40.500 trendsetter. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Who knows? But good to have McTague on because he's
00:00:45.340 certainly a good guess. Now, who is Michael Ignatieff and how is he similar to Mark Carney? Well, it's
00:00:50.180 really quite fascinating that these two guys have some parallel. Now, Ignatieff was actually elected
00:00:56.340 as an MP back in 2006 for the riding of Etobicoke
00:01:01.500 Lakeshore. Ran to become the leader of the Liberal Party but lost to Stéphane Dion. Dion stepped down
00:01:08.240 late 2008. He became the interim leader and then with 97% of the vote on May 2nd, 2009,
00:01:14.380 Michael Ignatieff was chosen as the leader of the Liberal Party. Exactly two years to the day later,
00:01:20.620 he got trounced by Stephen Harper in the election, winning only 34 seats with the Liberal Party,
00:01:24.880 their biggest defeat in history up to this point. It could be worse this time and he quit as the
00:01:32.180 Liberal leader the next day. Now, Michael Ignatieff, very educated man, much like Mark Carney. Lots of
00:01:37.780 letters behind his name is Michael Ignatieff. Again, a parallel with Mark Carney here and if you look at
00:01:43.280 his education that you see right here, University of Toronto, Oxford and Harvard University with a PhD.
00:01:49.980 But people were talking about Michael Ignatieff at the time, much like they're talking about Mark Carney
00:01:55.080 as a savior of the Liberal Party in deep, deep trouble. And the parallels are quite fascinating
00:02:00.180 here. If you look at this article from the CBC going back many years ago, they talk about him
00:02:07.120 being greeted with breathless profiles in national publications. As Canadian journalist and biographer
00:02:13.420 John Gray wrote for cbcnews.ca in the run-up to the 2006 Liberal leadership, Ignatieff was not only
00:02:20.640 the preferred candidate of the Liberal establishment, but someone they thought of as the new Trudeau.
00:02:27.080 Isn't that amazing? The new Trudeau. And here we are replacing another Trudeau a little over a decade
00:02:33.200 later. It's really quite amazing. Whatever the candidate may have thought, his supporters wanted
00:02:38.620 to believe that Ignatieff was the dashing outsider who would rescue the Liberal Party in its hour of
00:02:43.860 need, much like Mark Carney is right now. From the CBC, it did not take Ignatieff's opponents long,
00:02:50.440 for example, to discover his past speeches. Much like Mark Carney, everything he has said is on record.
00:02:57.300 And journalism, in which he assiduously identified himself as an American. He talked and wrote
00:03:03.080 of we, us, our way of life, our constitution, and our leaders. He even went so far as to say being
00:03:10.060 an American is not easy. Ignatieff spent all of his time outside of the United States. He was a
00:03:15.260 presenter on CBC, and then he went to the United States and became a professor at Harvard. Now,
00:03:21.500 what are they doing with Mark Carney? The Conservatives are already trying to cash in on something he said
00:03:26.900 about being a European, and they've used it in one of their attack ads. Mark Carney is back from
00:03:32.580 Europe. Speaking as a European. Carney hasn't spent much time in Canada at all. He's trying to portray
00:03:38.260 himself as an outsider, but he's an insider in a big way, as many people have written. He was made a special
00:03:44.060 advisor on the economy for Trudeau back in September, I believe it was, of last year. Trudeau's been trying
00:03:49.720 to recruit him into the party for a very long time, and he's been pulling the strings from behind the
00:03:53.520 scenes for sure. And then the thing that I've been saying about Carney is the fact that he probably has that
00:03:59.900 one advantage over a lot of the other people in the party. You're Chrystia Freeland's and the rest of
00:04:04.420 the people. All of the liberals are actually running. The people who have been elected have the baggage
00:04:08.660 of being a liberal. They have the baggage of the poor economy. They have the baggage of being connected
00:04:13.340 with Justin Trudeau. And boy, there's a parallel there with Michael Ignatieff. Going back to the CBC
00:04:18.360 story, as the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson wrote of Ignatieff's initial leadership bid,
00:04:23.700 he has the fewest Canadian scars by virtue of having fought the fewest battles in his own country.
00:04:28.440 A fact that in other countries would almost automatically disqualify anyone from serious
00:04:33.220 leadership ambitions, but that in this country, at least inside the weakened liberal party,
00:04:37.960 has apparently become an advantage. There's this as well from the National Observer. Comparisons to
00:04:43.800 Michael Ignatieff, who led the liberals from 2008 to 2011, are far from flattering, but perhaps more
00:04:49.840 than fair. Ignatieff has plenty of expertise and capacity, too. He was also a terrible politician and
00:04:56.320 capable of meeting the moment. He led the liberals to 34 seats in the 2011 election,
00:05:00.880 paving the way for Justin Trudeau to replace him. The liberals, of course, have looked for saviors
00:05:05.840 before, much like they're doing right now with Mark Carney. An article from Yahoo News, this taking
00:05:10.020 us way back to 2012, talking about John Turner, who was supposed to be a savior back in the 80s.
00:05:15.720 Paul Martin, as well, best known as the finance minister under Jean Chrétien.
00:05:19.260 The prime minister for a short period. And then came Michael Ignatieff, the man some liberals
00:05:25.160 described as the next Pierre Trudeau, and certainly he was not that. Ignatieff, an intellect eloquent
00:05:31.000 and charismatic, and early on drew big crowds across the country after a series of conservative
00:05:35.460 party attack ads leveled against him. However, he led the party to new lows, winning only 34 seats
00:05:40.540 and 19% of the popular vote in 2011. I don't think that Mark Carney is very charismatic at all.
00:05:47.800 I think he's kind of a dud when it comes to that. He's certainly no politician. Ignatieff
00:05:52.320 had time to learn from 2006 when he was first elected as an MP to the time he actually became
00:05:58.580 the leader of the Liberal Party. So he learned how to be a politician. Mark Carney has got
00:06:02.360 none of that. Drawing big crowds across the country, I don't think so. He was actually
00:06:06.600 out on Saturday afternoon with a little get-together with some liberal faithful, swarmed by the media
00:06:13.480 afterwards, and he seemed to run away. You said you're the outsider, but it looks like
00:06:20.000 the party, the party establishment is holding, is lying up behind you.
00:06:25.520 No, no. So the issue of deputies, elected members, ministers, others, Liberals across the country
00:06:34.160 who are making a choice, and are making a choice about the importance of the economy, the importance
00:06:38.880 of coming together, building together. That's a free choice. This is the Liberal Party. We believe
00:06:44.000 in freedom, and we believe in good judgment, and thus far, Liberals are showing.
00:06:48.960 As for Michael Ignatieff, the great savior before the election in 2011, Liberals only won 34 seats,
00:06:55.440 a record low for them at the time, which could, well, that record could fall with Mark Carney
00:07:00.480 being the next leader. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Brian Lilly wrote an
00:07:04.560 article about this last year, May 15, 2024. Ghost of Iggy haunts the Liberals and Mark Carney's ambition.
00:07:12.240 Some Liberals think Mark Carney is the next great savior of the Liberal Party. They should look at
00:07:16.160 what Michael Ignatieff is up to lately. I'll get to that in just a moment. A little bit from
00:07:20.720 Lilly's article here. Some in the Liberal Party thought that the bright, well-read, and well-spoken
00:07:25.440 Ignatieff would make a great Prime Minister one day. Perhaps he would have, but one thing stood in his
00:07:30.560 way. Voters never warmed to him, and you have to wonder if people are going to warm to Mark Carney. He
00:07:36.480 hasn't got a lot of time. Ignatieff was born in Toronto. His father was Canadian diplomat.
00:07:41.920 George Ignatieff and his uncle was George Grant, professor, intellectual, and author of Lament
00:07:46.560 for a Nation. The younger Ignatieff went to all the best schools, had a distinguished academic and
00:07:51.520 media career, most of it abroad, but he simply couldn't connect with voters. When I hear Liberals
00:07:56.720 today pushing the idea that Mark Carney is the savior of the Liberal Party once Justin Trudeau steps down,
00:08:02.960 I think of Ignatieff. And that's exactly what I thought of when I heard Mark Carney was getting the
00:08:07.840 race. I thought back to Mark, to Michael Ignatieff. And so what will happen to Mark Carney? Well, first,
00:08:14.720 what happened to Michael Ignatieff? He just basically disappeared off the face of the earth. He went
00:08:19.600 directly back to the United States and went back to his previous life. And here's what he's doing right
00:08:23.920 now. He was recently the rector and president of Central European University in Budapest, stepped
00:08:29.840 down at the end of July 2021 to stay as professor in the history department. What will Mark Carney do? Well,
00:08:35.760 you know, you have to look at it this way. Carney's really got nothing to lose. He's got everything
00:08:40.320 to win if he could happen to become the prime minister and win the next election, which I think
00:08:45.520 is doubtful. But he's not hungry like pure Paglia. Paglia has been working to this point his whole
00:08:50.480 life and he's got lots of plans for the country. I mean, he became an MP back in 2004 and he's been
00:08:57.440 doing this for 20 years. As far as Mark Carney, what's he going to do? He's just going to leave the
00:09:01.520 country probably go back to doom and gloom predictions about the world and make more money
00:09:06.080 of being a businessman. That's what Mark Carney is going to do. So I think it's interesting that
00:09:11.120 these two men have very interesting parallels, maybe not their political careers, but I think
00:09:15.920 Mark Carney is even more on the back foot because he hasn't even been elected yet. And that's something
00:09:20.320 that needs to be looked into when we have him named the prime minister, which I think is going to
00:09:25.920 happen because he is the outsider. And I don't think the other liberals have a chance, including
00:09:30.160 Chrystia Freeland. Now, one more thing before I go, I've been thinking about Doug Ford is expected to
00:09:36.080 call an election next week. I'm wondering how this is going to take the wind out of the sails
00:09:40.480 of the Liberal Party leadership race if Doug Ford calls an election next week. So it could be a good
00:09:45.840 thing that Ford's doing after a lot of bad things he's been doing when it's talking about tariffs and
00:09:50.960 the United States. Just a question I was thinking about. If you like the video, please give me a
00:09:54.880 thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel. I do appreciate it. And well, I'll see you in the next one.