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Or maybe all you remember of Dion before this was his Chance the Gardener spell as Liberal Party leader, sandwiched for two years between that guy who lost to Stephen Harper and promptly left politics and that other guy who lost to Stephen Harper and promptly left politics and Canada. Dion as the huggable tree-hugger, selling his “Green Shift” tax policy with broken English and a dog named Kyoto, was never going to fly west of Yonge Street or east of Boul. St. Laurent. But along the way he got disgracefully sandbagged by Mike Duffy on national television, then blew himself up with a screwball attempt to lead a coalition to overthrow the Harper government and install himself as prime minister, after he had already resigned as leader.

Which is to say that if your appreciation of Stéphane Dion’s career in politics goes back a decade, you might have him pegged as the Liberal party’s Joe Clark — an intelligent, well-meaning man who won leadership by accident and who found a second wind in politics as a quiet, hard-working but unexceptional MP.

If so, you would have the complete mismeasure of the man. Because there is another Stéphane Dion, who is something of a hero to anyone who worked in the trenches of the federalist cause in the ’90s.

It’s important to remember that from the moment Pierre Trudeau retired, there ceased to be anyone in power in Ottawa who would defend federalism on intellectual grounds. From Brian Mulroney’s cravenness towards the provinces to Jean Chrétien’s refusal to even think about the problem, two political generations were suckled on the conviction that the separatists had the arguments while the federalists had to rely on sentiment.