FVerhoeven:____Ignatieff's books tell us interesting and sometimes important things, but it is true they deal with broad political ideas like freedom and tyranny, not the concrete steps needed to improve living conditions, which is what matters everyday to politicians.____Ignatieff once remarks of his hero, the famous British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, that he dealt in broad ideas about freedom, but had no interest in advising governments on social policy. I got the sense that this disdain for social policy was Ignatieff's too. In any case, he does seem to me to be a bit forced in his interest when he is talking about social policy.____Frankly, he is in the wrong job.

I feel sorry for Ignatieff.

He had reached very creditable peak sin his chosen professions of writer, TV presenter and academic.

Then he made the comical error of thinking he could become a first-class politician in late middle age, moreover in a country in which he had not lived for three decades.

The gamble has failed. The Canadian people do not respond to him.

Ignatieff was misled by his streak of vanity.

No wonder he goes around looking faintly embarrassed.

The trouble with Ignatieff is that he is a very interesting man, but there is no way to make the Canadian public see this.

Ignatieff is an interesting writer. He has written very readable books on political ideas, events in modern Europe, his own Russian family background, the life of a fascinating thinker like Isaiah Berlin.

All very fine.

But the Canadian public does not care for any of this.

Also, Ignatieff is just on sixty years old. He got into politics too late. You can no more become an effective politician in your late fifties than an effective doctor. The profession is a very demanding and gruelling one, contrary to what people often suppose.

So Ignatieff comes across as a hesitant, slightly embarrassed, late-middle-aged professor, with well-meaning ideas but no way to get through emotionally to the Canadian people, in whose land he has not lived for nearly all of his adult life.

The Liberals had better ask him to stand down, pretty soon.

Canada is NOT rejecting multiculturalism.

Hinduism, Bufddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, etc are flourishing there.

Canada is rejecting Islamism, which it correctly recognises as a force for inculcating a mentality of violent alienation.