The Best Laid Plans

I am Daniel Addison. When I escaped Ottawa the first time, I was head speech writer for the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. But after five years in the crucible of Parliament Hill, my public-service calling was battered beyond recognition. Naïve, innocent, and excited when I arrived, I was embittered, exhausted, and ineffably sad when I left.

Still, I remained liberal and a Liberal – in that order. I had come by my liberalism the hard way – by slowly and steadily shedding the expectations and assumptions inflicted by my family’s five generations of leadership in the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party. I had canvassed for PC candidates when the staples in my diet had been puréed chicken and strained peaches. In those days, the candidate-kissing-the-baby shot had been
de rigueur
for campaign leaflets. Well, I had served as the local baby until I was old enough for it to be creepy. Check out the party’s photo archives and you’ll find my smiling mug over and over again, my snowsuits or sunhats festooned with Tory paraphernalia according to the season.

When I arrived at university, I decided that family tradition was one reason to be a Tory, just not a very good one. So I decided to read about ideology, liberalism, socialism, and conservatism and what they really meant in theory, in practice, and in our history. I majored in English but also pursued my personal political science minor on the side. The more I read, the more of what had been my family’s bedrock cracked and crumbled. After literally a lifetime of blind support for the Progressive Conservative Party, the family veil fell, and I realized in my heart and in my head that I was actually a Liberal. My forebears are still dizzy from subterranean spinning.

My parents seemed amused by my conversion and considered it to be a predictable manifestation of late-onset teenage rebellion. Their tolerance of what some of my relatives considered a knife in the family’s back or, at least, a slap in the face was couched in the sincere belief that I would eventually come to my senses. Even then, I felt certain I’d be a Liberal for life.

In the first year of my master’s program in English – after much soul-searching – I capitalized the L and joined the Liberal Party of Canada. Uncle Charlie stopped speaking to me. Had I known, I’d have taken the plunge years earlier.

I landed in the Opposition Leader’s office after completing my coursework for a PhD in Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa. I started in the correspondence unit and within eighteen months, wrote my way up from letters to speeches. For most of my thirty-two years, I had lived with what I called my “completion complex.” I was bound to finish what I started. I couldn’t leave any food on my plate even if the meatballs were hard as golf balls. I couldn’t start a book, hate the opening chapters, and discard it until suffering through all 569 pages of it. I would sit through far more very, very bad movies than someone with even average cerebral capacity would ever endure. So leaving U of O one dissertation shy of my PhD was a therapeutic breakthrough, of sorts. After all, an opening as a wordsmith for the Leader of the Liberal Party (arguably, the Prime Minister in waiting) did not beckon often. I took the job. But in twisted tribute to my completion complex, I somehow nursed along my dissertation on Canadian comedic novels at night while turning phrases by day. After enduring Liberal caucus meetings, I found that defending my dissertation two years later was as easy as the dinner conversation in
Leave it to Beaver
. However, juggling my time and the demands of both poles of my life was not easy. Some of my colleagues thought I was very committed while others simply thought I should be. I languished somewhere in the middle. I was glad the PhD was done but was unclear about the implications. Clarity came soon enough.

On Parliament Hill, the pendulum of power swings between the cynical political operators (CPOs) and the idealist policy wonks (IPWs). It’s a naturally self-regulating model that inevitably transfers power from one group to the other – and back again. It can take years, even multiple elections, for the pendulum to swing to the other side. It was just my luck that I – a member in good standing of the idealist-policy-wonk contingent – would arrive in Ottawa just as the backroom boys were starting their swing back up to the top.

To be fair, governments work best when the pendulum is somewhere near the middle – with the CPOs and IPWs sharing power. When the CPOs are dominant, as they were when I arrived in Ottawa (and when I left, for that matter), they tend to erode public confidence in the democratic process and infect the electorate with the cynicism, self-interest, and opportunism that flow in their veins. In the mind of a hardcore CPO, the ends always, always justify the means. At least, that’s my balanced, impartial view.

On the other hand, when the IPWs are at the helm, however well-meaning we may be, we often lack the necessary killer instinct and political acumen to push our vaunted policies across the finish line. We can’t seem to accept that selling the policy is just as important as coming up with it in the first place. We seldom get to the ends because we mess up the means.

But even the staunchest policy wonk cannot work in a CPO-controlled environment without absorbing and assimilating the overtly political approach we wonks philosophically abhor. It’s insidious and inexorable. One day, you wake up and find you’re instinctively reviewing polling data in a different way; you find yourself thinking about the election cycle and how to isolate the weak Cabinet Minister from the rest of the herd in order to move in for the kill. I felt sick when I realized how my perspective had changed. I was as if I had inadvertently crossed to the dark side and that all the backroom boys were waiting just across the threshold to present me with monogrammed suspenders, shove a cigar in my yap, and welcome me into the fold. It really was time to go.

But in the interest of full disclosure and transparency – concepts sadly absent in government these days – I confess there was more to my hasty retreat from Ottawa than a near-fatal case of political disillusionment. Something else also played a role. Around the time of my crisis of conscience, my two-year relationship with Rachel Bronwin flamed out in much the same way as the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. When I replay our last encounter in my mind, I always accompany the scene with the public-address voice of NASA Mission Control, uttering that now classic understatement, “obviously a major malfunction,” as burning wreckage fell into the sea.

Rachel was serving as senior political adviser to Dick Warrington, the youngish and, some would say, handsome Opposition House Leader. I had met Rachel at a political-assistants’ meeting, and we had clicked in a way that had left me somewhat unnerved. She was wonderful in every way. It was as simple and rare as that. She was intelligent, thoughtful, committed, ambitious, and beautiful – so beautiful that our relationship violated the accepted order of the universe. The match just wasn’t credible. Someone like me was not supposed to be dating, let alone sleeping with, someone like her. But I was. I wore the perpetual, loopy grin of a lottery-ticket holder who wins big his first time out.

When we would walk hand in hand down Sparks Street on a Saturday afternoon, I could almost feel the skeptical glances of passers-by. Modesty aside, I’m a far cry from ugly. But I was not exactly in Rachel’s class. Pierce Brosnan would have just barely made the cut.

For those two years, I’d never been happier. By the end of month six, I had a toothbrush at her apartment in the Glebe. On our first anniversary, she gave me the bottom drawer in her dresser. After two years, I was frequently noting the folly of paying rent for two apartments when only one was really being used. I really thought the big search might be over. I’d also finally stopped looking over my shoulder, waiting for some uniformed relationship bureaucrat to tell me that there’d been some mix up with my paperwork and that I couldn’t see Rachel any more. He never showed up, but someone else did.

Nothing really seemed amiss at the time. I thought she seemed a little distracted, even distant, but I blamed that on a spike in her workload. Lookingbacknow, I realize she was pulling a few more all-nighters at the office than might be reasonably expected of the senior adviser to the Opposition House Leader. It was mid-July so Parliament wasn’t even sitting at the time. Hindsight is a cruel companion.

One night, after Rachel told me she’d be working late again, I unexpectedly found myself back in Centre Block, picking up the car keys I’d managed to leave on a table in the Library of Parliament earlier in the day. No wonder I left my keys there. I usually became misty-eyed and foggy-headed in the Library of Parliament, so I often forgot things there. I thought of the library as one my favourite places in the world. In one of Canadian history’s few spasms of generosity, the fire of 1916 spared the library and its immaculate woodwork while razing the rest of the original Parliament building. A new and equally majestic Centre Block was erected to house the two chambers of our democracy, grafted onto the original library in all its august glory.

I like to think that the best speeches I wrote for the Liberal Leader were penned and polished in the Library of Parliament. My preferred spot was a varnished, wooden table under the watchful gaze of a white plaster bust of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. When words would abandon me, I’d stare at Laurier or read his speeches from Hansard, which lined the shelves behind me. Canada has spawned precious few orators and even fewer leaders of Laurier’s calibre. I fear he’d be disgusted and depressed were he to return to the House of Commons today for the tabloid TV of question period.