I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.

We knew after they beat the Czech Republic [it was going to be tough]. We knew it was a good club and not an easy team. We respected them.

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

We have got to plant our standard firmly on the centre-left of Canadian politics.

I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.