The wise men – they were all men, and all heavy hitters in the Progressive Conservative party of the day – sat around on the deck.
They had a job to do. And they had a problem. The job was to win the federal election. I’d been invited to tag along by a friend from my university days who was among the party strategists.
“You know I’m a journalist, right?”
He laughed.
“It’ll all be off the record.” “They’ll be OK with this?” I didn’t want to wreck his young career in a single stroke. “Sure, no problem.”
“I’m in,” I said. And I was. Their problem was women, well really one woman. The local MP had won a surprise victory in the previous election, part of the Brian Mulroney landslide of 211 seats, leaving the John Turner Liberals with just 40 and Ed Broadbent’s NDP with 30.
The local riding had been Liberal forever until it suddenly wasn’t. Now, four years later, the Tories were desperate to keep it. They feared they’d need all the help they could get in the next Parliament.
But the MP had made a terrible mistake. A group of Tory women, all prominent in the party, had flown to Ottawa to attend a party event. As they walked through security at the airport they looked around for their MP. After all, every other women’s group was greeted by its MPs as it arrived.
No MP. Apologies and reasons were … it didn’t matter. It was too late. They’d been embarrassed in front of their friends and counterparts from across the country. The wise men on the deck shook their heads in disbelief – not at the reaction of the women to the accidental slight, but at the MP’s blunder.
I’d kept my mouth shut as ideas about how to rescue the MP from himself were offered up. My friend turned to me during a momentary silence. “Any ideas?”
I smiled and shook my head. “You’re …" this is a family newspaper. Let’s pretend I said, “Your guy is in so much trouble you’re never going to get him out of it. She and her friends would rather lose the next election by making sure no one works for him than see him win.”
OK, I didn’t say that first sentence. My first sentence was much shorter, and cruder. Grudging smiles broke out around the table. They knew.
Elections are funny things. People vote the way they do for the oddest reasons. Just ask Trudeau about getting votes simply because people decide they like you.
“I was certainly happy about it, but somehow I sensed that there was obviously an emotional aspect to this which wasn’t necessarily lasting,” he said. “It was having fun, which politics should be. But how closely were they listening to my ideas, which sometimes I’d expound rather dully, and they’d still applaud. So, I was a bit uneasy, feeling perhaps there were expectations being created which I wouldn’t be able to fulfil.”
Pierre Trudeau was right. Now his son Justin faces similar challenges. And he’ll need to win every seat he can get to hold onto power.
He’d better hope none of his MPs angered their female poll captains. My friend failed to rescue my local MP. He lost, with thousands of votes changing sides.
Rick MacLean is an instructor in the journalism program at Holland College in Charlottetown.
