TORONTO

IN the last few years, Michael Ignatieff’s friends in the United States and England began receiving self-deprecating e-mail messages from him lamenting how dull and low-profile his life had suddenly become.

He had spent most of the preceding four decades making a name for himself in both countries  writing essays on the world’s war zones for The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books; writing novels and screenplays; enjoying popularity as a television-show host in Britain and a regular at the Groucho Club; and teaching at Harvard and Cambridge universities.

Now, he joked, he was stuck in the pedestrian life of a freshman civil servant  in Canada no less.

Mr. Ignatieff shocked friends and colleagues three years ago by chucking the life of the mind for the hurly-burly of politics and returning, after a long exile, to his native country to win a seat in Parliament. And if he was bored, it wasn’t for long. Last December, after a tumultuous fortnight of machinations in parliament, Mr. Ignatieff, 61, became the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, which has been called Canada’s “natural ruling party” and has been in power for much of the last century.

Should his party win control of the government, something it came close to doing last week and still hopes to in the coming months, he would become the next prime minister of Canada.