Peter C. Newman, the iconic chronicler of Canadian public life, says the party that governed Canada longer than the Communists ruled Russia is dead in the cold, cold ground, a corpse of its own making only tangentially helped into the grave by Michael Ignatieff.
In the wake of the Liberal Party’s worst electoral defeat in history, Mr. Newman has laid out its path to ruination in his new book, When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada.
He sticks to his thesis in spite of the party’s leap this month toward resurrection, proposing to open its leadership and riding nominations to the broad public and proclaiming a caste solidarity with the country’s besieged middle class.
Mr. Newman’s prognostications are never to be taken lightly. At 82, he has been famously narrating Canadian politics for more than half a century.
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