Veteran Canadian journalist and author Peter C. Newman, who held up the mirror to Canada, has died. He was 94 years old.

Newman died Thursday morning at a hospital in Belleville, Ont., of complications from a stroke he suffered last year that caused him to develop Parkinson’s disease, his wife Alvy Newman said per phone.

During his decades-long career, Newman served as editor of the Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine, covering Canadian politics and affairs.

“It’s a big loss. It’s like a library burning down if you lose someone who has that knowledge,” Alvy Newman said. “He revolutionized journalism, business, politics and history.”

Often recognized by his sailor cap, Newman has also written some 20 books and earned the informal title of “Canada’s most dogged and controversial commentator,” HarperCollins, one of his editors, said in a note. of the author.

Political columnist Paul Wells, who for years was a senior editor at Maclean’s, said Newman made the publication what it was in its heyday, “a weekly breaking news magazine with global reach.”

But more than that, says Wells, Newman created a model for Canadian political writers.

“Canadian establishment books persuaded everyone – their peers, the book-buying public – that Canadian stories could be just as important, just as interesting and compelling as stories from elsewhere,” he said. he declares. My God.”

This series of three books – the first of which was published in 1975, the last in 1998 – traces Canada’s recent history through the stories of its unelected power players.

Newman also told his own story in his 2004 autobiography, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power.

He was born in Vienna in 1929 and came to Canada in 1940 as a Jewish refugee. In his biography, Newman describes being shot by Nazis while waiting on the beach in Biarritz, France for the ship that would take him to freedom.

“Nothing compares to being a refugee; you lose context and struggle to define yourself,” he wrote. “When I finally came to Canada, what I wanted was to have a voice. Be heard. This desire has never left me.

That’s why, he says, he became a writer.

The Writers’ Trust of Canada said Newman’s 1963 book, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years, about former prime minister John Diefenbaker, “revolutionized Canadian political journalism with its controversial approach to ‘saying initiates”.

Newman was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1978 and promoted to Fellow in 1990, recognized as “The Chronicler of our Past and Interpreter of our Present”.

Newman has won some of Canada’s most distinguished literary awards, as well as seven honorary doctorates, according to his HarperCollins profile.