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The Conservatives' "just visiting" television campaign to help Canadians recognize the qualities that render Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's intention as fit to lead the Liberal party back to the ascendancy and himself to the prime ministership is a lesson in civic responsibility. Well certainly it is also a political gambit, a ploy, a construction to remind the electorate that a vote for Mr. Ignatieff is a vote for an individual who had no personal use for life in Canada for most of his adult life.

Isn't that strange? That a Canadian would make a deliberate choice to live outside Canada for 34 years? That living in Britain or in the United States would exert a greater personal appeal than to find one's place within the country that one now sees fit to run as a prime minister? How much can someone who has chosen to live outside the country for three and a half decades really understand about that country?

More to the point, why would such a candidate assume that he represents the electorate's best interests, having made himself a stranger for most of his life to the essence of the country, its concerns and its people? What kind of monumental egocentricity might be engaged to persuade someone that he is fit to govern a country he hardly stepped foot into, preferring life elsewhere?

Mr. Ignatieff made his international reputation as a political commentator, a reporter, and an academic. He thinks highly of himself and considers it meet that others do likewise. And no one is immune to the kind of flattery he must have felt when a visiting group of Liberals travelled to Harvard to exhort him to vacate academia for higher aspirations; the leader of a country.

All of a sudden the country that he so long spurned for more opportune, enticing and exciting pastures must have looked mighty appealing. Nothing quite like appealing to someone's vanity, pledging support to enable him to reach for the stars; in this case the leader of a country. Now that's power, that's prestige, that's opportunity unparallelled.

Not necessarily appealing as a country to visit for an extended period of time, much less to resettle in, but one desperately awaiting his return, to rescue it from a floundering political process, by which the natural governing party had fallen on hard times. Permitting that most dreadful of circumstances to evolve whereby the Conservatives looked like a better electoral prospect to the electorate.

What, precisely is unethical about one political party cannily pointing out the obvious. After all, just about anything and everything is fair in politics; virtual assassinations and hatchet jobs are par for the course. Look at Michael Ignatieff attacking the Conservatives for agreeing to Liberal and NDP demands and in the process ratcheting up the debt and the deficit to unwholesome proportions.

And look over there - Mr. Ignatieff railing against Conservative perversity in honouring Liberal-structured Employment Insurance constraints, obligations, rules and benefits. Carefully outlining which areas of the country should benefit most, and hauling in EU contributions that outmatch claims, hatching a monumental nest-egg for inclusion in general revenues.

To pay down the debt, of course, and parade before Canadians how fiscally wise are the Liberals. While slashing social services because there was a need to do so, to take the country out of its dreadful debt situation. So while the Liberals now decry the wastefully errant Conservatives, taking the country into deep debt (at their own behest and urging) during an international financial downturn, they also insist that EI must be reformed.

That will rack up another huge cost to the country, but no matter. Once that happens the Liberals can point fingers of blame again. And hope that the voters will permit their perennially poor memories to be exploited for votes to be dredged out of people forgetting that the Liberal leader not that long ago considered himself American.