A question that’s often asked of Michael Ignatieff is whether he knows how much he doesn’t know. If he read the resumés of these three wise guys, for example, did he know enough to read between the lines, to pick up the distant early warnings? It seems not. And how could he be expected to have known, for that would have required paying close attention to the nitty-gritty of Canadian politics for the decades he just happened to be living somewhere else?

Even those of us who stayed behind often forget how close Pierre Trudeau came to losing the leadership race to Robert Winters, a pleasant fellow with movie star looks who had moved back and forth between the cabinet table and the boardrooms of Bay Street. By comparison, Trudeau was a quirky, controversial gamble, relatively unknown to the country, with few roots in the party, an unsettling combination of haute bourgeois aloofness and leftist rhetoric.

In fact, it might have given Ignatieff cold feet if he had remembered that Trudeau initially refused to run for leader because he sincerely believed he didn’t have the experience or the credentials for the job. He felt rather old at forty-eight to be entering such a high-stakes game. He had only been an MP for three years and a cabinet minister for one. And what did he know of business, bureaucracy, or party politics?

“Don’t let that bastard win it,” as one cabinet minister so colourfully expressed it. “He isn’t even a Liberal.”

Canadian Liberals like to imagine themselves as true Grits, les rouges, progressives, even radicals, the heirs of those who rose up against the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Lower Canada on behalf of the common people. While remnants of that nineteenth-century legacy survive among the grassroots, ruling as the natural governing party for most of the twentieth century made its leaders, ministers, and MPs extremely comfortable with exercising power hand in glove with the regional brokers, the business elites, the senior bureaucrats, the academic camp followers, and the media.

It was a cozy, symbiotic little world, born under Mackenzie King, nurtured by the CEOs who became dollar-a-year czars in Ottawa during World War II, and brought to fruition by C. D. Howe, the minister of everything in the 1950s. Lester Pearson, always the diplomat par excellence, bridged the two lineages. A child of a Methodist manse in small-town Ontario, a student of history at Oxford, a civil servant during the Depression, he leaned toward Keynesian economics and progressive policies without going as far as the CCF. A pooh-bah in London and Washington, a winner of the Nobel Prize, a minister of external affairs, he moved easily among the movers and shakers.

The party thrived on its internal tensions and contradictions. It made a virtue out of being in the centre, somewhere between the United Empire Loyalists and the social democrats, moderate, flexible, open to any good idea or practical solution. It usually succeeded by campaigning to the left and governing to the right. And while its convention resolutions were replete with noble sentiments about equality and sharing, they were invariably drafted by guys in suits, smart, slick, the best and the brightest, hustling to build up their CVs with a stint as an executive assistant or a job in the Privy Council Office between law school and a six-figure salary in Toronto or Montreal.

The foundation of the Liberals’ electoral success was based on simple math: a majority of Ontario plus a majority of Quebec equals an excellent chance for a majority in the House of Commons. That led to an entente cordiale between the party’s machine in Ontario and the party’s machine in Quebec: the boys from Toronto would divide the spoils in Ottawa if the boys from Montreal delivered enough moutons to show up and vote. Ontario got Finance and Commerce; Quebec got Justice and the post office; and they would take turns in the prime minister’s job.

Pierre Trudeau changed the game. He had his own set of ideas. He had his own core of advisers, many of them from Montreal and fresh to power. And because of television and his extraordinary personality, he had his own direct relationship with the Canadian people, which freed him from feeling beholden to the old guard of the party and the traditional ways of doing things.

He slighted Pearson by dissolving Parliament before the House had its chance to pay homage to the outgoing prime minister. He introduced reason and order into Pearson’s crisis management chaos. He trashed Pearson’s beloved Department of External Affairs, where Ignatieff’s father was a star. He humiliated Pearson’s warhorses with experiments in participatory democracy and regional desks. He turned away from Pearson’s moves toward special status for Quebec. In the eyes of the Pearsonian Liberals, of whom Ignatieff often says he’s the last in existence, he took their party away from them.

The left Liberal elites in Toronto were disappointed, what with Trudeau’s limp nationalism and the War Measures Act, but they were appeased to a certain extent by the return of Keith Davey, Jim Coutts, and Dick O’Hagan, three of Pearson’s canniest advisers, after the party’s near-loss in 1972. Determined to learn the art of the possible from them, anxious to win back Ontario, and needing to placate the NDP in a minority Parliament, Trudeau led an activist, pro-Canadian, progressive government and was rewarded with a majority in 1974.

Meanwhile, the party’s right wing sat in their clubs, offices, and faculty lounges and stewed. John Turner, the Prince Valiant of the ancien régime who had been trounced by Trudeau in 1968, resigned as minister of finance in 1975 and returned to his table at Winston’s. Donald Macdonald quit two years later to join a prestigious law firm and a number of corporate boards, only to be succeeded as finance minister by Jean Chrétien, whom most Bay Street bankers and brokers dismissed as a clown. Stagflation set in, deficits rose, and the prime minister fiddled with the Constitution while Canada burned.

These weren’t thick or incompetent people. On the contrary, they were accomplished leaders in their community and professions. Like many smart, successful people, however, they tended to assume that their expertise in one field made them experts in the field of politics. Worse, like many Torontonians, they tended to confuse their own interests with the interests of the nation. They drank their own bathwater and thought it the elixir of wisdom. They looked out from their towers on Bay Street and saw their own images reflected in the glass. As Madame du Deffand is said to have remarked when told of the political philosopher Helvétius’s theory that every action, including generosity and kindness, is based on self-interest, “Helvétius has revealed everybody’s secret.”

There were deep and genuine policy concerns, to be sure, but there was also the very human matter of ego, access, and touchy-feely gratification. (I know two prominent businessmen who once wagered during a drunken lunch on which of them could get the prime minister to call them back the fastest.) Trudeau didn’t really know the Toronto elites and didn’t much care to know them. They feared and respected him at the same time as they thought him a socialistic dilettante.

At one meeting organized by O’Hagan to break the ice between the prime minister and the city’s media tycoons, someone made a lighthearted put-down about René Lévesque not knowing anything about football. “It may be difficult for you people to understand,” Trudeau snapped, to everyone’s surprise and discomfort, “but football is not a French Canadian sport.”