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

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

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

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

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Often recognized by his sailor’s cap, Newman also wrote about 20 books and earned the informal title of “Canada’s most opinionated and argumentative commentator,” HarperCollins, one of his publishers, said in a note from the ‘author.

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

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

“The books of the Canadian establishment persuaded everyone – their peers, the book-buying public – that Canadian stories could be as important, as interesting and fascinating as stories from elsewhere,” he said. declared. “And he sold truckloads of these books. My God.”

This series of three books (the first of which was published in 1975 and the last in 1998) tells the recent history of Canada through the stories of its unelected powerful actors.

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 arrived in Canada in 1940 as a Jewish refugee. In his biography, Newman describes how he was shot by the Nazis while waiting on the beach in Biarritz, France, for the ship that would take him to freedom.

“Nothing compares to being a refugee; They steal your context and you 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 had “revolutionized Canadian political journalism with its controversial ‘pundits tell all’ approach “”.

Newman was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1978 and promoted to Companion in 1990, recognized as “a chronicler of our past and an interpreter of our present.”

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