The new party leader

And then there was one. With Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's resignation, the party was scheduled to vote for a new leader next May in Vancouver. But the high-stakes manoeuvring in the House of Commons and the possibility that the minority Conservative government could be defeated on its budget next month suddenly changed the dynamic.

Until Tuesday, there were two contenders in the race: former University of Toronto roommates Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff. The only other candidate, New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc announced his decision to drop out and back Ignatieff on Monday, Dec. 8.

Rae followed suit the next day, effectively handing the prize to his rival who had been the Liberal's deputy leader, the choice of the party establishment who had placed second to Dion at the convention in December 2006.  

Who is Michael Ignatieff?

Michael Ignatieff is an oddity when it comes to a Liberal leadership hopeful. He is possibly better known outside Canada's borders than within.

But after winning two elections in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore and placing second in the last leadership race with 45.3 per cent of the vote, he has now become the man of the hour, not to mention the first new Liberal leader in decades not to be chosen by a convention of delegates.

The Toronto-born academic and author left his post as director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University in August 2005 to teach at the University of Toronto and, soon after, run for Parliament.

Fluent in English, French and Russian (his grandfather was in the government of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II), Ignatieff, 61, has written 16 books, with titles such as Blood and Belonging and The Rights Revolution, exploring themes of nationalism, modern warfare and human rights.

Ignatieff won the non-fiction Governor General's Award for The Russian Album, a family memoir he wrote in 1987, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award for his 1993 novel Scar Tissue.

However, Ukrainian-Canadians in his riding have protested passages in 1995's Blood and Belonging as being derogatory toward their culture, and opponents have accused him of condoning "soft" torture tactics used by U.S. forces dealing with prisoners suspected of being linked to al-Qaeda.

Ignatieff was also called a "liberal hawk" for supporting U.S. President George W. Bush's push to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the grounds that Saddam was torturing and killing his own citizens.

But his decision to move back to Canada in the summer of 2005 was greeted with breathless profiles in national publications, with his future as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada taken for granted.

As Canadian journalist and biographer John Gray wrote for CBCNews.ca in the run-up to the 2006 Liberal leadership, Ignatieff was not only the preferred candidate of the Liberal establishment but someone they thought of as the new Trudeau.

The new Trudeau?

Michael Ignatieff himself is not to be blamed for the Trudeau comparison, Gray noted.  Indeed, he insisted from the start "There was one Pierre Trudeau; there's not going to be another." But from the start, the Trudeau ghost was there.

Whatever the candidate may have thought, his supporters wanted to believe that Ignatieff was the dashing outsider who would rescue the Liberal party in its hour of need.

But the parallel did not really fit, Gray went on. For a start, Trudeau was not a raw rookie. He had served briefly as justice minister; he had been an MP for three years; he had worked in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa and had spent most of his adult life at least on the periphery of political life.

In contrast, Ignatieff only became an MP on the night Paul Martin stepped down from the leadership. He had travelled the world, taught university and written books, but for 35 years he had paid no more than occasional visits to Canada, his native land.

In the past two years, of course, Michael Ignatieff has received a crash course in the intricacies and regional animosities of Canadian politics. He has also been a prime target of Conservative ad campaigns and internet sniping for his many, sometimes unguarded, utterings.

It did not take Ignatieff's opponents long, for example, to discover his past speeches and journalism in which he assiduously identified himself as an American. He talked and wrote of we, us, our way of life, our constitution, and our leaders; he even went so far as to say "Being an American is not easy."

As The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson wrote of Ignatieff's initial leadership bid: "He has the fewest Canadian scars by virtue of having fought the fewest battles in his own country, a fact that, in other countries, would almost automatically disqualify anyone from serious leadership ambitions but that, in this country, at least inside the weakened Liberal party, has apparently become an advantage."

His Quebec gambit

Ignatieff's long absence from the country was not just a problem for its political optics, Gray observed. The man is a quick study, but there have been times when his judgments seemed too much the product of quick study rather than mature reflection. At one stage he protested that "I don't feel I've been away at all," but it didn't look that way.

The issue with which his lack of familiarity appeared to hurt him most seriously was the Quebec question. Of Quebec and the Constitution, Ignatieff said "we must bring this unfinished business to a successful conclusion."

Theoretically, he is right. But only someone who was outside the country for the period of Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord would want to begin that all over again.

Still, Ignatieff's impeccable French and intellectual demeanour appeared to sit well with many Liberal Quebecers. He was said to have had the best Quebec team among the leadership candidates and had stood accused of discreetly undermining Dion's Quebec efforts over the past year or so.

Whither the coalition?

As deputy leader, Ignatieff was probably influential in getting the Liberals to agree to the extension of the Afghan mission until 2011. He was arguably the most vocal Liberal in support of Canada's military involvement in that country.

During the recent election campaign, Ignatieff appeared at rallies with Dion in support of the party's so-called Green Shift, which included the controversial carbon tax. In fact, Ignatieff was the Liberal who first raised the idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax during the 2006 leadership campaign.

But in November, after the election that saw the Liberals reduced to their lowest percentage of the popular vote since Confederation, he told reporters that the carbon tax and Green Shift was dead, and that a new environmental policy would have to be crafted.

Through his supporters, Ignatieff also let it be known that he wasn't a fan of the Liberal-NDP coalition, supported by the Bloc, that Dion cooked up in the wake of the Conservative throne speech and economic statement.

Under the coalition plan, Dion was prepared to become prime minister for a brief time until a new Liberal leader was selected. Whether Ignatieff will take that crown, should it be offered again as part of a parliamentary manoeuvre, remains to be seen.