’Frankly, get lost’

Michael Ignatieff talks to the Globe’s Gary Mason.

“Frankly,” he said, “I think it’s condescending to westerners that being a so-called intellectual is some big liability. People out here are as devoted to the life of the mind, and the life of culture, as anybody else in the country. So I don’t think that’s going to fly. It’s just stupid.”

He said his life has exposed him to different cultures and different experiences. He is the only current federal leader in Canada who has been to Iran. Besides, he said, there were other prime ministers, Lester Pearson among them, who spent a great deal of their lives outside Canada before they assumed power. “The alternative [Mr. Harper] is a politician formed and shaped in the radical conservative ideological world of Calgary and Calgary think tanks,” Mr. Ignatieff said. “To the degree this is about my patriotism and devotion to Canada, frankly, get lost.”

Elsewhere in that piece, the Alberta oil sands explained with a goose analogy.