The Feast of the Epiphany marks the moment the Magi, the three kings who had followed the Star of Bethlehem, finally laid eyes on the baby Jesus. In today's secular Quebec, it is rarely observed. But at the home of lapsed Catholics Stéphane Dion and Janine Krieber, the sixth day of Januaryis still celebrated the old way -- with a galette des rois, or kings' cake. As tradition dictates, a regal figurine is hidden in the marzipan-filled pastry, and whoever is lucky enough to be served the slice that contains it becomes king for the day.
"There's something about Stéphane and the Epiphany," says Ms. Krieber, who has been Mr. Dion's partner and intellectual soulmate since they met as graduate students on the Laval University campus in the late 1970s. "It's always him who gets the king. This year, too.''
Few delegates to last month's Liberal convention could have known of Mr. Dion's extraordinary winning streak at home, or of his own personal epiphanies, before they crowned him their leader. Indeed, there is much they did not know about the man they are counting on to lead their party back into government. And much of what they think they know of him — his visceral disdain for Quebec nationalism, his support for a strong central government, his reasons for championing the Clarity Act — may, in fact, be misguided.
Stéphane Dion, for all his insistence on clarity, remains much misunderstood.
This may be the bane of any intellectual who seeks elected office in an age when sound bites, simple formulas (federalists good, sovereigntists bad) and, above all, celebrity define the political process. Blessed with celebrity to burn, Michael Ignatieff insisted on thinking out loud, as intellectuals tend to do, and it may have cost him the crown.
Mr. Dion is an intellectual as well. But unlike Mr. Ignatieff — and most of all, unlike Pierre Trudeau, whom many Liberals mistakenly consider his spiritual father — he is not an abstract thinker. Despite his absurdist sense of humour (Monty Python meets Louis de Funès), he has no time for metaphysics. A future king maybe; a philosopher not.
He is steeped in the theories of great minds from Aristotle to Raymond Aron. But after earning his doctorate in France — a country long on talk, shorter on action — he returned to Canada with a desire for the concrete. His life has been one big clarity act, seeking to refine and implement his ideas about the proper relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada, between the provinces and Ottawa and, more recently, between Canada and the planet. He knows what he stands for — but many Liberals and most Canadians still do not.
Who, then, is this strange, and strangely successful, political animal, who can be insufferably haughty and tenacious on one occasion and hopelessly self-conscious and socially awkward the next? Let's take an intimate look at the man some say will be our next prime minister.
Stéphane Maurice Dion was born on Sept. 28, 1955, in Quebec City, the second of the five children of Léon Dion, then a young academic at Laval University, and his feisty French-born wife, Denyse Kormann. The family had just moved from their small apartment on rue Cartier to a modest bungalow in suburban Sillery. The new subdivision was sparsely populated, and their backyard had a frog pond on one side and dense forest on the other. It was a boy's paradise. When young Stéphane wasn't catching toads and snakes, he was usually caught up in an imaginary world inhabited by more daunting creatures.
“My first interest was for the society of animals, not of man,” he recalls. “We had a neighbour named Gaston Moisan, a biologist who was a deputy minister of natural resources. He set traps for the rabbits, to band them, and used to take me with him. He was 5-foot-7, but he was a giant for me.”
