Altered states: in Michael Ignatieff's Canada, you, too, can create your own nation.

THOSE OF US WHO'VE BECOME 24/7 JIHAD BORES ARE often told we're not dealing with real issues of real concern to real Canadians. So, in an effort to bring myself up to speed on what exactly are the real issues of really real concern to totally real Canadians, I steeled myself and read the Canadian papers. And it seems that my old BBC comrade Michael Ignatieff is running for the leadership of the Liberal party on a pledge to recognize Quebec as a nation.

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What, you mean with its own head of state, armed forces, seat at the United Nations?

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Whoa, whoa, calm down, boy. This is Canada, remember. No, Professor Ignatieff wants to acknowledge in the constitution that Quebec is a nation within the state of Canada. Just because we speak of "nation states" doesn't mean that Nation A can't be within State B. After all, south of the border, State A (North Dakota) is in Nation B (the Great Satan). Ignatieff's move is apparently regarded as an ingenious move that cunningly defangs the recent resurgence in sovereigntist sentiment exemplified by Gilles Duceppe's endearingly eccentric decision to raise the issue of Canada adopting the U.S. dollar. After all, if Nation A happens to find itself in State B, why can't it use Currency C? Not to mention Flag D (Chad), Anthem E (Bhutan) and National Dance F (Tajikistan). Truly, Quebec's non-separating separatist movement is the death of satire. M. Duceppe further alleged that the reason the feds are too scared to tackle this vital issue of moving to the Yanqui dollar is because they're cowed by the presence on the currency of Her Majesty The Queen. The Queen is the head of the Canadian state, but, as M. Duceppe sees it, that doesn't make her head of the Quebec nation. Once it's all in the Constitution he reserves the right to draft the emir of Dubai. So, by his deft constitutional innovation, Michael Ignatieff has managed to ... fingers growing heavy ... losing the will to type ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

Where was I? Oh, yes. Quebec nationhood. C'mon, Iggy. This is pathetic. For the last quarter-century, he's been squinting at the far horizon and the great questions--war, peace, post-Communism, pan-Islamism. But, of course, that was when he was the prince across the water at the BBC and Harvard. Unlike my old friend Paul Wells, I have no particular problem with Ignatieff's long residence beyond our borders: if Canada is a state that can accommodate other nations, there's no reason it can't also accommodate a leader who's spent his entire adult life in other nations. But what's dispiriting is the ongoing downsizing of the Great Thinker since he set foot on Trudeaupian soil. It's like Honey, I Shrunk The Ig. Or, rather, he shrunk himself. On my entirely unscientific survey of the first 24 citizens of la belle province--whoops, nation--I ran into, not one gives a hoot about this phony-baloney cockamamie nation-within-a-state concept--or, as Ignatieff puts it, recommending Quebecers say it "with pride," "Le Quebec est ma nation, le Canada est mon pays." It would be truer to say that the real problem is that Quebecers don't think of either as either: le Canada est mon paycheque would be closer to the mark, and if Quebec really believed in itself as a nation it would be one by now, as Slovenia and Slovakia are.

So Ignatieff and Duceppe and the rest of the gang are just indulging in the usual urgent tackling of pseudo-issues of pseudo-concern to nominally real Canadians, whether pseudo-federalists or pseudo-separatists. Needless to say, the professor has expanded his concept of a Quebec nation within the Canadian state to embrace hundreds of others--to wit, the "indigenous nations of Canada." So diseased kleptocrat band councils would be embedded as constitutional co-equals with the provinces and the feds with all the opportunities for activist judicial romping one might expect. What of a band council within Quebec? A nation within a nation within a state? Like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel never ending or beginning on an ever spinning wheel as the images unwind like the circle that you find in the windmills of Iggy's mind. At what point do other, more seriously self-segregating groups within Canada also get most favoured "nation" status? Why shouldn't an Islamist cell in Toronto also be a "nation"? That, too, would appear to be what Ignatieff calls a "sociological fact."

The ersatz combat in which a political class engages is not a complete waste of time. For example, a willingness to propose non-solutions to non-problems for the non-aggrieved can be very revealing of how a culture might act when faced with a serious challenge. Which brings me, as everything wearily does, back to the jihad. It's impossible not to feel there's been a toughening of the Canadian spine these last few months: whether or not they approve of the mission, people understand that what our troops are doing in Afghanistan is real and hard, and not just the sappy peacekeepy blue-helmet non-military soldiering to which we are allegedly partial. There's no evidence, by the way, that the fellows who wind up having to do it are in fact partial to it. Ineffectual peacekeeping is far more corrosive of a military than the most brutal war, and it's interesting to note that recruitment is up significantly since it emerged that our boys are on a proper combat mission over there: Not surprisingly, there aren't a lot of takers for multinational social work in war zones; if that's your bag, you're better off in Saskatchewan. But joining the army in order to do army-type stuff is much more popular. These brave Canadians deserve our support, and it shouldn't be necessary to say that.

It is, however. Because Jack Layton, the colossus of the political scene, is now demanding talks with the Taliban. As in Canadian delegates negotiating with Mullah Omar's senior wives-beaters and gay-crushers. What a grand idea, and maybe Jack could be our chief negotiator to the conference--preferably in, say, Hamilton rather than Waziristan, just to give him a sporting chance of coming back alive.

Some years ago now, I wrote about the "mainstreaming of jihad"--the point at which the plenipotentiaries of the civilized world would find themselves sitting around a table with the head-hackers and suicide bombers. "Talking," after all, is what a large proportion of our leadership do--even when, as in the case of Quebec's phoney "nation" status, it's not worth talking about. And, if you get into the habit of making concessions to folks you don't need to make 'em to, where does that stop?

That's always a good question to put to the left: where do you draw the line? In America, the Democrats have turned national security into a shell game: whichever war you're fighting is never the right one. Whenever they're mocked as soft on jihad, they say, oh no, that's not true, we think Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. They demand 200,000 troops in the Hindu Kush to go cave to cave to find Osama's remains. So they're not soft on the war. It's just that the pea isn't under the Iraq cup, it's under the Afghanistan cup. You get the distinct feeling, though, that if you took them at their word and said OK, 200,000 troops go in next Thursday, you'd suddenly discover that the pea was no longer under the Afghanistan cup but under the Sudanese one. That's certainly how it felt in the fall of 2001, when the Democrats were insisting, a week in, that it was an almighty quagmire and the Taliban could never be toppled. As a practical matter, no matter how frantically the left scramble the thimbles, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.

Jack Layton's call for talks with the Taliban is a modest northern confirmation of this sad fact--that, to a certain decayed "progressive" disposition, there's no one we're not prepared to talk to and nothing we're not prepared to talk about. It's the bitter dregs of the bromides promised by Ignatieff apropos Quebec and the "First Nations": there's nothing that isn't up for grabs.

If there are multiple nations in Canada, my sense is that the majority of the non-nation--the non-Quebec, non-native slab of the Dominion--thinks talks with the Taliban and the pseudo-separatists are, in the first case, an abomination and, in the second, a frivolous indulgence. Whether Stephen Harper's Canada counts as a pays or a nation under the new constitutional arrangements, unlike Layton's or Ignatieff's at least it has the merit of being located in the real world.