It is impossible to understand Peter C. Newman’s When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada without knowing the context that surrounds its writing. The original vision was to chronicle the ascension of Michael Ignatieff to the prime minister’s office. In the same way he documented other larger-than-life Canadians, Newman would record Ignatieff’s rise to power as an ordained outsider, through the kind of long interviews that are allowed when subjects let flattery override good sense.
But history had other plans. As Newman notes: “the election results unraveled my narrative arc and turned it into skywriting, scattered by the breeze.” Newman was not dealt the hand he expected and, to his credit, he lays that fact out for his readers.
The interesting but somewhat awkward result is that When the Gods Changed is not a single book, but rather two distinct books, building to a dramatic crescendo: that the Liberal Party of Canada is...
David Eaves is an adjunct professor at the Centre for Digital Media and is frequently asked to write and speak on public policy, open innovation and politics.
Taylor Owen is a professor of digital media and global affairs at the University of British Columbia, a senior fellow at the Columbia Journalism School and author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age.
Advertisement
Advertisement