Heroes and Windbags

Long ago, when Pierre Trudeau arrived as prime minister and Liberal Party leader at 24 Sussex Drive, he met the fabled Liberal political wizards gathered at his dining room table. Recalling his Conservative father’s rants about the terrifying Liberal machine, he asked the admen, pollsters and plotters before him, “Is this all there is?”

Michael Ignatieff probably should have asked the same question when “the Toronto Three”—two Bay Street lawyers, Alf Apps and Dan Brock, and film producer Ian Davey—made a pilgrimage to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to ask him to come to Canada to replace Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, whose government, Brock reported, was “heading for a train wreck.” Ignatieff labelled his visitors the “men in black.” As they disappeared into the night, he quickly began to take their invitation seriously. (Ignatieff calls his three visitors the “men in black,” a curious evocation of the mysterious men in dark suits and big cars who...