Dear John (Baird)

A deluge of letters from the Conservative transport minister in advance of the last federal election prompts a response from editor Matt O’Grady.

John Baird has a crush on me. There, I said it. I wasn’t sure if going public was the right thing to do, but I figured – he’s Canada’s Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. This is big news: people should know.

I believe the infatuation may have started about 15 years ago, back when I was an undergrad at Queen’s University. I participated in a model parliament in Ottawa, and he was a rising up-and-comer in the provincial government of the day. He spoke to our group, we shook hands – and clearly he was smitten. Yes, it took a few years for him to muster the courage to write, to make that first move. But since February, I’ve received three impassioned missives from his office, so our relationship has evidently turned a corner.

Of course I could be misreading those letters. But why else would the MP for Ottawa-West Nepean be writing lowly ’ole me, a no-name ratepayer from Vancouver Quadra?

As it turns out, it has to do with our mutual acquaintance, Michael Ignatieff (Iggy to friends). You see, Mr. Baird’s bosses don’t like Iggy, and so Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers are being told to spread the word about Iggy’s internationalist ills. On radio, on television – and now, in personal letters to “concerned” fellow Canadians. “Thirty-four years is a long time to be away from your home country,” writes Mr. Baird, about the notoriously cosmopolitan opposition leader, in his latest note. Indeed. Who knows what sort of crazy ideas Iggy might have picked up while living and working in London and Boston?

Anyway, I’ve resisted responding to John – er, Mr. Baird – because it has been 15 years since we last talked and, well, he’s not my MP and, to be frank, I don’t share his animosity for globetrotting intellectuals. But I realize I’m in the minority here. It’s all the rage these days, at least in populist circles, to slag life experience and international exposure – just look at how U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was raked over the coals for suggesting working-class immigrant roots might enrich her judicial rulings. Clearly the preferred breed – in Ottawa as in Washington – is someone who has traveled nowhere, seen nothing and experienced little. Like, say, the current prime minister – or the previous U.S. president.

If I were to write a Dear John letter, I’d probably thank him for remembering me, but say that it probably wouldn’t work out; the long-distance thing, after all, is quite hard to maintain. But I also might add that his, and his government’s, time would be better spent fixing our economy than gathering recruits for a war against intellectualism. As we journey into a decade of big deficits and tough political choices, we’ll need all the experience and brainpower we can get.