It turns out he may have been just visiting, after all.
Former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is headed back to the United States, just a few years after his crushing defeat in the 2011 election.
Ignatieff will be named to the Edward R. Murrow Chair of Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in Boston, The Globe and Mail reported.
Ignatieff taught at the prestigious university and was director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy before he was wooed to come home and run for the Liberals. He was elected as MP for Etobicoke—Lakeshore in 2006.
Ignatieff took on some half-time teaching posts at Harvard in 2012, while also teaching classes at the University of Toronto. This new gig is a full-time position.
The 30 years Ignatieff spent away from Canada, working in broadcasting and academia in both the U.S. and United Kingdom, became a major point of attack for Conservatives once he became Liberal leader in 2009.
Tories unleashed attack ads painting Ignatieff as a political dilettante who was "just visiting" Canada and "not in it for you." The central message from each was that he only wanted to become prime minister to pad his resume.
In one particularly damaging ad, Tories dug up an old clip of Ignatieff on U.S. cable network C-SPAN to back up their claim he lacked any long-term commitment to the country.
"You have to decide what kind of America you want," Ignatieff says in the clip. "It's your country just as much as it is mine."
Ignatieff wrote a book about his experiences, "Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics," published in Sept. 2013.
Ignatieff expressed how deeply it hurt him to have his loyalty to Canada called into question and blamed the negative ads as the main cause of his failure. He also called for such ads to be banned in between elections.
While promoting his book last fall, Ignatieff told The National Post that while Canadians all say they hate negative ads, they clearly worked against him and former Grit leader Stéphane Dion.
Yet, he suggested the fate of current Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau might be different.
"The interesting question will be whether [an attack ad campaign] works on Trudeau," Ignatieff said. "Whether his obvious charisma, his family name, name recognition, all those factors act as a Teflon shield. I certainly hope they do.
"But I also hope something else happens, which is that Canadians think, 'Give it a rest guys.' You know? Can we have an election about the future of our country please? Is that too much to ask?"
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