Prof. Ignatieff goes to Ottawa?

IF THE POLITICAL supporters of Michael Ignatieff have their way, the Boston-based human rights scholar and journalist may soon abandon his post as director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and enter the political fray. The Canadian media is abuzz with rumors that power brokers within the Liberal Party have recruited the Toronto-born Ignatieff to return to Canada after three decades of living in England and the United States in order to run for Parliament in the next election, with the intention of grooming him to succeed Paul Martin, the current prime minister.

So far, the rumors are just that. And on Wednesday, John Ibbitson of Canada's Globe and Mail reported that Ignatieff (who was unavailable for an interview for this article) was said by friends to be ''quietly appalled" by reports of his political ambitions. Still, the idea has caught the imagination of those nostalgic for the days of another Liberal ''philosopher king," Pierre Trudeau.

In the United States, Ignatieff is largely known as a prominent liberal hawk, an eloquent advocate of humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia as well as the Middle East, including the war in Iraq. In Canada, however, Ignatieff was born famous, the scion of two very distinguished political families. His paternal grandfather, Count Paul Ignatieff, was the last minister of education in the reign of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. After the Russian Revolution, the family moved to Canada, where Ignatieff's father George became the premier diplomat of the Cold War era.

On his mother's side, Ignatieff is descended from one of Canada's leading conservative families, the Grants. His great-grandfather, George Munro Grant, was the preeminent Canadian advocate of British imperialism in the late 19th century. One of Ignatieff's uncles, George Parkin Grant, was widely regarded as Canada's greatest conservative political philosopher, a disciple of Leo Strauss and Simone Weil who criticized the Liberal Party for abandoning Canada's loyalist heritage while embracing American imperialism.

If he were to succeed on the hustings, Ignatieff could become the third Liberal prime minister with the Harvard imprimatur. Mackenzie King, who governed for 21 years (more than any prime minister in Canadian history) during the Depression and World War II, laid the groundwork for the modern Canadian welfare state, putting into practice ideas about using the federal government to mediate between capital and labor that he first developed in a 1909 Harvard doctoral thesis (later published as ''Industry and Humanity"). And Trudeau--who defeated another intellectual, the political theorist Charles Taylor, in his first parliamentary run in 1965--studied political economy at Harvard, where he was heavily influenced by the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith (another Canadian).

Ignatieff's supporters are clearly hoping to replicate the Trudeau model. As many liberal insiders have acknowledged off the record, Paul Martin has run a lackluster and uninspiring administration, dogged by a long-running financial scandal. Ignatieff himself made this point in March, when he delivered a rousing keynote speech at the Liberal Party's policy convention that contrasted the tepidity of current politics with the visionary ambition of the Trudeau years.

The prospect of an Ignatieff candidacy has prompted some mischievous counterproposals. Writing in the Ottawa Sun, the right-wing columnist Douglas Fisher suggested that the Conservative Party might draft another Canadian with significant south-of-the-border experience--former Bush speechwriter David Frum--to run against him. Frum is ''a formidable debater and every bit as much a global analyst as Ignatieff," wrote Fisher.

Journalist Campbell Clark, writing in the Globe and Mail, has cast a more skeptical eye on a potential Ignatieff candidacy, noting that Trudeau had more political experience before running for office. Others have speculated that Ignatieff's support of the Iraq war, which is deeply unpopular in Canada, might be a political liability. And as John Ibbitson slyly noted in the Globe and Mail, the Harvard professor may no longer be sufficiently, well, Canadian to run for office. After all, wrote Ibbitson, ''Mr. Ignatieff writes in The New York Times using the first person plural."

Jeet Heer is a frequent contributor to the Globe and the National Post of Canada.