Did Michael Ignatieff's pro-Iraq war stance doom the Liberals? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user WmPitcher.

Listening to Michael Ignatieff address his few remaining dispirited supporters on election night, I couldn’t help but picture the room dotted with the ghosts of Baghdad. I wonder whether Ignatieff saw them too, like so many Banquos’ ghosts in the room that night as he took responsibility for his party’s dismal showing in the 2011 federal election.

Having since resigned his leadership, it may seem to rude to kick him now that he’s down. But the colossal scale of the Liberal defeat in this election can’t be fully understood unless we talk honestly about Michael Ignatieff’s career as an intellectual and politician—and the Iraq War remains central to both.

Ignatieff’s career as a Canadian politician is bound up in the war: he was first courted by backroom Liberals in the spring of 2004, as an iconic “serious” small-L liberal. (American liberalism was entering what would be years of toxic, self-destructive debate about whether “good liberals” could oppose the war.) For this type of centrist liberal, supporting the invasion of Iraq was the “serious” choice, contrasted with the dreamy foolishness of pacifism.

Paul Martin’s government, terrified that the brief moment of spine Jean Chrétien had shown by avoiding direct Canadian involvement in the war, was terrified about the state of relations with the Bush government. Ignatieff’s recruitment was a signal to the Americans and the Canadian elite that the Liberal Party could still be trusted, despite Chrétien’s heresy. It was more about distancing the Liberals from left-wing policies than the war itself.

Ignatieff wasted no time. His landmark speech to the Liberal Party in 2005 was full of rhetorical slaps at the left, but here’s my favourite, in retrospect:

“…many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.”

This week the Green Party launched an anti-attack ad criticizing other parties for their sensational advertisements. The meta attack ad aims to benefit from Canadians’ supposed distaste for ad hominem vilification and mudslinging.

It’s commonly believed that the first attack ad was the iconic 1964 “Daisy Girl” commericial, which threatens American voters with the prospect of nuclear war (another long-held American political tradition). Attack ads returned in 1988 with the George HW Bush “revolving door” spot suggesting a candidate’s prison reforms led to an increase in violent crime.

That same year featured Canada’s NAFTA election, in which the Liberal party ran ads suggesting Canadian sovereignty was at stake. You can read about it in a CBC interactive feature documenting 10 prominent attack ads from the English-speaking world.

A 1993 Kim Campbell ad mocked Jean Chretien’s facial Bell’s palsy. Political figures decried the ad as “political desperation” and “totally inappropriate and in poor taste.” It’s a shame the same terms apply to today’s political discourse.

Conservative Senator Doug Finley, a “genius of political attack ads,” was interviewed by the Globe and Mail last month. Responding to those who believe negative ads turn off voters, his response: “Politics is an adversarial business. Kellogg’s doesn’t make their money by telling everybody General Foods are a great product.”

There’s little consensus on the effectiveness of attack ads. A 2007 psychological study suggests that although negative political ads make us want to turn away, we remember their negative messages. Some studies suggest negative and positive ads both have the same effectiveness.

Attack ads have made a lot of inroads south of the border. A study of the 2008 US presidential campaigns found that almost all McCain ads were “negative,” with many focusing on Obama’s personality over his politics. It’s gotten to the point where the hilarious “demon sheep” ad was actually used to sway voters, before it went viral and generated a spinoff.

In the past five years, attack ads have gained worldwide prominence.

An ad from the 2006 Mexican election compares one candidate with Hugo Chavez. Australia, a country with some really broken political discourse, saw the rise of attack ads in last year’s national election — including one monumentally stupid commercial.

Although such ads remain uncommon in UK elections, there’s been a recent increase in Europhobic ads — the word works for both definitions — attacking EU policy by airing stereotypes of continental neighbours.

TV ads in the 2006 São Paolo mayoral race speculated on a candidate’s supposed homosexuality. The tactic is eerily similar to a homophobic Tamil-language radio ad that aired in Toronto’s recent mayoral election.

The rollin’-in-dough Conservative party financed comparatively civil attack ads with funds allegedly arranged through the now infamous “in and out scandal” (that ironically focused on accountability and transparency). While it’s tempting to pin attack ads on one party or political persuasion, the Liberals, Bloc and NDP take part too.

These ads have repercussions on our democracy as a whole. In the 2008 election, the Conservatives made the daft choice of posting their pooping puffin ad online. The ad itself was intellectually (and otherwise) insulting. But more troubling: the Toronto Star ran a frontpage story about it.

Rick Mercer’s 2009 rant on the issue makes some pretty poignant points (and his parody ads are pretty funny, too). Attacks ads are bad for democracy. Instead of helping us debate serious issues as a society, it creates poisons our discourse with character assassination, the politics of fear, and a culture of sound bites over substance.

To me, our Canadian identity has always seemed deeply rooted in our belief that as a country we do the “right thing.” We assumed for years that we were the moral compass of the globe and could do no wrong. But from where I’m standing, that reputation is being dragged through the mud and plenty of us are red-faced in embarassment.

A recent major survey indicates that three quarters of Canadians are embarrassed about our country’s lack of a leadership on climate change. And don’t think the results were specific to just one province. In Alberta, heart of the controversial Tar Sands, 65% of those surveyed agreed we should be doing more, with the highest level of those embarrassed by our government’s inaction at 86% in Quebec.

Imagine what the results would be if that translated to the polls? It seems that our government might have assumed that just because Stephane Dion was defeated as Liberal Party Leader last year, thanks largely to his controversial Greenshift proposal, that Canadians don’t give a hoot about climate change.

But the evidence seems to be stacking up that people are tired of Canada’s increasingly ridiculous climate legacy, and are telling the government exactly that. Last week, I began encouraging everyone to send a postcard from the government’s own website telling Stephen Harper about climate change, and was very happy to read that I wasn’t the only person asking a government official to stand up and fulfill their obligations.

High School students in Mississauga organized an event to call the Ontario government and ask them to take action on climate change. According to the students, they were asked by the Prime Minister’s Office to stop calling in as they were blocking up the switch board.

Going for the heart of the beast in Calgary, seven people were recently arrested after occupying Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice’s office, demanding action on climate change. Mr. Prentice even held a brief phone conference from Ottawa with the occupants, but ultimately an agreement couldn’t be reached.

Probably because Mr. Prentice insists we don’t need to make any real impact on climate change for about 40 years, even though the International Panel on Climate Change (a group of scientific leaders from across the world, generally thought to be the authority on climate change) outlines it is essential to take action immediately in order to halt and reverse the already very real damage we’ve caused.

This is the man who is supposed to protect our resources for now and future generations and be an authority on best environmental practices. Sure, I get it, what does he care? Both Mr. Prentice and Mr. Harper will be out of office in 40 years time. So I suppose it might be tempting to sit on one’s hands when it won’t have any direct impact on you either way. But for a party eager to win a majority government in the next election, you would think they would give the people what they want in the meantime, because while they might not be around to care, you bet those of us who will are going to fight damn hard for our future.

So keep pushing those buttons, because people are taking notice. The message is getting through to the public, and that squeaky wheel is slowly catching the attention of our government. Hopefully it won’t be long before they begrudgingly accept responsibility for their part in reducing the international climate burden—and then it can be their faces that are red.