OTTAWA – The new coalition government in Britain wants to follow the example of Liberals in Canada in cutting deficits, says Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff had a meeting in London earlier this week with Britain’s new Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.

The two politicians know each other from their work with the Liberal International organization and Ignatieff was in the U.K. for his daughter Sophie’s graduation from the University of Edinburgh. For most of next week, Ignatieff will be in China.

“We had a very good discussion about how Canada under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin got the deficit down. He was very interested to see how we did it,” Ignatieff told reporters on Friday.

“In fact, if you look at the British plans for deficit reduction, they closely mirror what Canada did in the 1990s, right down to the process, right down to the questions that were asked in program review.”

Program review was an intense, cost-cutting exercise across government that took place when Chrétien, as prime minister, and Martin, as finance minister, launched an aggressive effort in the mid-1990s to get Canada’s fiscal house in order. Within a few years, Canada’s budget was afloat in surpluses, though provincial governments experienced massive cuts in education and health transfers.

Ignatieff was not part of that government, but he says that Clegg was most interested in talking about the lessons Britain can learn from the Canadian Liberal experience.

It wouldn’t be the first time that British politicians borrowed from the Chrétien-Martin example from those years either – the famous “red book” of 1993 campaign promises was also borrowed by former prime minister Tony Blair and his “new Labour” movement that came to power as well in the 1990s.

It’s less clear whether any lessons are being applied in reverse – whether, for instance, Canadian Liberals are finding any political instruction in Britain’s new experiment with coalition government. Chrétien, in the past month, has been not so discreetly urging that Liberals consider some kind of arrangement with the New Democratic Party.

But Ignatieff says this subject didn’t even come up in his talks with Clegg on Monday.

“We discussed his situation. We did not discuss mine. Because there’s nothing to discuss here,” Ignatieff said. “I’m running to form a Liberal government. Period. End of story.”

The Liberal leader, attacked by his Conservative rivals regularly for spending too much time out of Canada, is currently in a whirlwind of international appointments. It was London earlier in the week, a meeting with the Queen on Friday and then later in the day, departure on the long flight to China.

The Liberal leader says he plans to use his six-day trip to see how China’s booming economy can become tied to Canada’s future, but he also wants to take a closer look at controversial matters over human rights – or the lack of them – under the Chinese government.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a hard line with China on human rights for most of his first few years in office – only visiting the country late last year. Ignatieff said on Friday that this is not the way to deal with the Chinese government, whose President, Hu Jintao, was in Ottawa last week, and also met with Ignatieff.

“I think Mr. Harper began his relationship with China by wagging his finger and giving them a lecture. I don’t think that was productive. It put the relationship in the deep freeze for nearly four years,” Ignatieff said.

He said that the burgeoning economy is linked to human rights.

“I’ve taught human rights most of my life…. One of the most important human rights advances in the world in the last 25 years is 250 million Chinese have come out of absolute poverty. That’s something we have to acknowledge,” he said.

“There are 250 million members of the Chinese middle class who’ve had unparalleled economic freedom and now the question is whether little by little, the country will open up some political freedoms.”

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Ignatieff’s international forays will come to an end when he returns from China and spends the rest of the summer on a bus, dubbed the Liberal Express, which will tour every province and territory over the next two months.

Ignatieff said he’s looking forward to the odyssey.

“Every time I sit down with Canadians and talk to Canadians and I’m with Canadians, it seems to work. It’s the part of my job I like the best,” he said.

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