It's good to know that Matt Yglesias shares my own strange interest in Canadian politics (my stems from a bunch of grad school friends from Toronto; what's your excuse, Matt?). And while TPMCafe readers, I am sure, have just about gotten their fill of the comings and goings of the Canadian elections, there is one more interesting story to their recently-called elections: the campaign for the Ontario riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore.

Why should anyone care about Etobicoke-Lakeshore or even know where it is? Well, the Liberal Party's candidate is public intellectual extraordinaire Michael Ignatieff.

Touted by a small group of Liberal Party operatives as the next party leader, they have convinced Ignatieff to de-camp from his post as the head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and return to Ontario to save the party.

Yet, life outside the Ivory Tower hasn't been as smooth in practice as it appeared in theory. Not only is Ignatieff being questioned for not having lived in the country since 1978, but his views on the Iraq war (for) and on the Ukrainians (unclear) are getting him in trouble (Ignatieff is running in the most heavily Ukrainian district in Canada).

More than that, in his bid for public office, Ignatieff -- the human rights crusader and theorist -- seems to have had to deal with the messy side of politics: putting one's principles into practice. To get his seat, Liberal Party operatives pushed out the current MP and then, according to the Globe and Mail "employed a device known as 'electoral urgency' to allow a scant 24 hours for nomination papers to be filed in the riding, resulting in the Harvard academic's "acclaimed" candidacy." This left two other candidates, who actually lived in the riding and the country, from qualifying. What would Isaiah Berlin say?

This campaign has the makings of an over-educated version of the most painful "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode you can imagine. Either follow it in the Canadian press, or hope that one of the publications Ignatieff once published in sends a reporter north to watch him in action.