Leaving Newark airport by train to NYC. We have not lost a kid yet. But the day is still young.

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1. Agreeing to be chaperone to dozens of grade sevens and eights in New York City for a week.

2. Doing so starting on the very morning the entire US government has shut down.

Welcome to Warren’s World.

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Ten years ago, the world was an entirely different place, with some political wins and some political losses.

In January, 2003, Jack Layton succeeded Alexa McDonough to become leader of the New Democratic Party.

In April, Jean Charest’s Liberals defeated the Parti Quebecois in an election.

In June, Bernard Lord’s Conservatives were re-elected in New Brunswick. In the same month, the ban on same-sex marriages was lifted by Ontario’s Court of Appeal.

In August, John Hamm’s Conservatives were re-elected in Nova Scotia.

In November, the NDP were narrowly re-elected in Saskatchewan — and in Newfoundland, Danny Williams’ Conservatives defeated the Liberals to form government.

And, in December, Jean Chretien stepped aside, and Paul Martin was named leader of the governing Liberal party.

Oh, and Dalton McGuinty. In October, the Ontario Liberal leader swept aside the governing Conservatives of Premier Ernie Eves. The Conservatives had ruled Ontario for most of the years since Confederation — including one extraordinary uninterrupted period, from 1943 to 1985.

The federal Liberals, in 2003, were still regarded as the Natural Governing Party. But it was the Ontario Conservatives which were the true Natural Governing Party, at least at the provincial level. Their record of electoral success was unmatched outside of Alberta, where Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives had been in power since 1971 (and still are).

Ontario — contrary to what some Albertans may think — is no bastion of lefty-liberal latte-sippers. Since Confederation, Ontario’s Conservatives had won power by knowing the province better than their Liberal and New Democrat counterparts. Ontario, in the main, is a pretty conservative place. Economically, socially, Ontarians tend to favour less radical, and less progressive, political choices.

Dalton McGuinty — an Irish Catholic, born to a family of nine, married to his high school sweetheart — came to know this better than any of his Liberal predecessors. McGuinty lost the 1999 provincial election to the Mike Harris Conservatives, in part, because some around him believed downtown Toronto was a reflection of the rest of the province. It wasn’t. It will never be.

McGuinty learned this lesson well and rebuilt the Ontario Liberal Party into a centrist force — one that was socially progressive, but fiscally conservative. After crushing the Conservatives on election day 10 years ago Wednesday, McGuinty rarely strayed from the centre.

While the Ontario Conservatives careened off into policy extremism, McGuinty occupied their former ground — and attracted positive reviews along the way from progressive former Conservative leaders like Bill Davis, Ernie Eves and John Tory.

McGuinty departed a year ago this month, having led his party to back-to-back majorities, and a final victory that was one solitary seat short of a majority. The party he built is unlikely to recapture any of that anytime soon, or even to be re-elected to government in the spring.

McGuinty owed his success, commencing 10 years ago, to sticking to the middle of the road and keeping his ear finely attuned to what the average voter had to say. It’s a formula that worked for Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. Undersell and overperform.

The world has changed plenty since 2003. When the historians write it all up, Dalton McGuinty will be remembered as a winner.

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And he finds us to be “real rough around the edges punk rock, bursting with angst, enthusiasm and youthful naiveté”!

Sounds about right.

His bit on us is here.

Oh, and the Nasties reunion in 2014 continues apace. Stay tuned, geriatric punk rockers!

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Sorry, I just threw up a little in my mouth.

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Daisy the Lab waits for Son Three and his BFF to invade the mainland.

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Authors often complain that reviewers critique them, and not their books.

It’s often true, too. I’ve written seven door stoppers. Whenever I break the solemn promise I earlier made to myself not to read any reviews — good or bad — I inevitably find myself asking no one in particular: “Did (insert reviewer’s name here) actually read the goddamn thing?”

So let’s cut to the chase.

I wasn’t sent a copy of Michael Ignatieff’s new book, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, and nor do I plan to buy it. I didn’t read it. I’m not interested in reviewing his little tome, anyway; most of the Parliamentary Press Gallery are currently doing that already.

(Personal favourite: Bob Hepburn’s take in the Toronto Star: “…the book is a revisionist look at his leadership, revealing a man who accepts little blame for his party’s shocking demise and who doesn’t admit to any real failures as leader. In fact, the book could have easily been titled: It Really Wasn’t My Fault.” Sounds about right.)

No, today we do not come not to bury — er, review — the former Liberal leader’s book. Today, we come to bury the man.

Unlike all of the reviewers, I actually worked for Michael Ignatieff for a while. I hadn’t supported him in his first leadership bid, and I had in fact been highly critical of him in print. But when he asked to meet with me one morning in Montreal — and when his loyalists later asked me to run his election war room — I admit to being fooled.

“He knows he made mistakes,” I said, again to no one in particular. “He’s new to politics and he wants to learn how to win.”

And Michael Ignatieff, with his imperial pedigree and his aristocratic comportment, was indeed new. So he surrounded himself with consummate political pros — Ian Davey, Paul Zed, Gordon Ashworth, Don Guy and others — and then promptly ignored most of their advice.

Ignatieff was, in my experience, a classic newbie politician. Newbies, like religious converts, are always trying to make up for lost time. They want to show they can play the game at every level. To do so, they (too) frequently decide to get vicious.

And it’s true, politics is sometimes vicious. It can be mean. But winning politics, winners will attest, places a higher value on loyalty than cruelty.

Newbie Ignatieff, knowing he was a newbie, wanted to show he could be a tough guy. So he took everyone who got him to the big show — Davey, Zed and a ton of others — and he got rid of them, in a stunningly mean and ham-fisted way. He then brought in a new crew of maladroit mercenaries, who promptly brought the Liberal Party of Canada to its worst showing in Canadian history. (One of them is now running the Ontario Liberal campaign. Political people never learn.)

I wasn’t fired, but I later quit my war room boss post after Ignatieff got rid of all of my friends. I figured if the aristocratic leader of the Liberal Party of Canada could be that treacherous to the people to whom he literally owed his own job — well, then, I didn’t want to work for a treacherous aristocrat.

Those of us who worked for Jean Chretien over the years made plenty of mistakes — but he never, ever did to us what Ignatieff did to his friends. Never. He knew loyalty matters. The aristocratic descendant of Russian royalty, aptly, didn’t.

So there you go: A review of the man, not his book. I measured the author and found him wanting.

On May 2, 2011, more than 10 million other reviewers reviewed Michael Ignatieff, the man, as well.

They all gave him a thumbs down, and they were right to do so.

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He said he has some advice, free of charge.

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My view, a ce moment.

Wish you were all here. We’d play Ramones stuff on my little acoustic and drink beer by the fire.

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