Ex-Harvard prof to lead Canada's Liberal party

Post likely to become permanent
The Liberal party's national executive official declared Ignatieff leader Wednesday and he is expected to be acclaimed permanent leader at a party convention in May.

Stephane Dion stepped down as Liberal leader earlier than expected after an opposition effort to topple Harper failed last week.

Dion is just the second Liberal leader to fail to become Canada's prime minister. The only other was Edward Blake, who led the party to defeat in 1882 and 1887 elections.

Ignatieff left a prestigious post in 2005 as director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard to enter Canadian politics. He lost the leadership race the next year to Dion.

When Ignatieff lost Dion in 2006 he was criticized as being out of touch with Canada after spending the better part of 30 years outside the country. His support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq also won no friends with Canada's Liberal government, which opposed the war.

Ignatieff, the son of a distinguished diplomat under former Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson, has a doctorate in history from Harvard and has lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics.

He also hosted award-winning shows on the BBC, and worked as a journalist in Rwanda and Kosovo. He won a Governor General's Award — a prestigious literary award in Canada — for his nonfiction work about his family history, "The Russian Album."

Ignatieff is the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff, who was the czar's last minister of education and one of the few to escape execution by the Bolsheviks.

Ignatieff is fluent in Russian, French and English, a must in a country where English and French are the official languages. Dion's struggles to communicate in English became a major issue during the last election campaign.

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