The High Road (14 page)

“Friends, welcome to the inaugural meeting of Geriatrics Out to Undermine Tories. Welcome to the GOUT squad.”

The theme music for
The A-Team
TV series started up in my head. Four women and two men clapped. The fifth woman, sitting on the aisle, pumped her fist in the air and shouted, “Yeeee-haaaaa!” I have to say that it was a little creepy.

“You are not members of the Liberal Party. You are not volunteers on the campaign, at least to the untrained observer. The campaign will not acknowledge your existence, particularly if your cover is blown. You are deep undercover. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ask Emerson Fox the tough questions.”

“We’re not doing anything illegal, are we?” one frail but strong-voiced woman asked.

“Of course not, for pity’s sake,” replied Muriel. “We’re just exercising our constitutional right to organize, aggravate, irritate,
and agitate. Your job is to get under Emerson Fox’s skin. To keep him guessing. To knock him off balance. To flummox him. To force him into revealing his ignorance. To make him pay for what he’s done to politics in this country.” More applause.

That was my cue to leave. I stood and Muriel simply waved to me and smiled sweetly as I eased myself out of the room. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing. Muriel just wanted me to know that Fox would not be sailing through the all-candidates meetings unchallenged, even if it wouldn’t be Angus who was going for his jugular. As I left, I heard the group debating nasty questions to hurl Fox’s way. The GOUT squad. Nice.

I was to meet the two Petes and Angus at campaign headquarters at 10:30 to map out the week’s canvassing priorities. I was early and grabbed a
Globe and Mail
before sequestering myself in the back office to kill half an hour. The campaign office was humming along and even though I was the campaign manager, I certainly had less to do this time around. The growing volunteer staff, selected and trained by Muriel and the two Petes, had the operation running like a well-oiled machine. Clipboards and coloured markers were involved. The canvassing team met each evening, after the door-knocking was done for the night, to map out the priority polls for the following day. They compared notes on voter reaction and which issues were coming up at the door. They brainstormed compelling response lines and rehearsed delivery. While doing all this, they were also cutting lengths of red ribbon to hand out when they stumbled upon a Liberal household. A smaller team worked with Norman Sanderson on the fundraising front. It was almost like a real campaign. Much of the time, I was merely taking up space, which was fine with me.

The newspaper was chock full of economic doom and gloom. It was amazing the speed at which the recession came upon us. Canada’s economic fundamentals remained relatively sound and we seemed to be weathering the storm better than most other
industrialized nations. Nevertheless, Angus was very concerned. He had already left to drive in to Ottawa to meet with a faculty friend in U of O’s economics department for a briefing. Angus read the papers and was extraordinarily well informed, but he really wanted to dig into the economic situation. Being on the faculty of a top university gave him free access to leading independent economists who weren’t on the payroll of the Department of Finance or the Bank of Canada.

After my session with the two Petes, I stayed in the campaign office and worked on the Angus McLintock website. I’m no programmer, but we’d chosen to build our site using blogging software rather than HTML so that even non-geeks like me could add new material. I spent some time uploading a digital recording of Angus’s nomination speech. Then I scanned and uploaded André’s piece in the
Crier
about Angus and me. I did not upload the front-page photo of Angus being dragged by
Baddeck 1
. Several times I had to ask for Pete2’s help with some of the more esoteric technical procedures, like lifting the lid of the laptop, turning on the computer, and logging in.

When I was done, I looked around the campaign office and was gratified to see that it looked not that much different from any other Liberal campaign headquarters across the country. There were several volunteers hard at it, colour-coded riding maps on the wall, phones ringing, newspaper articles pinned to bulletin boards, fifty-year-old desks and chairs, the stench of coffee burning to the bottom of the carafe, and a box of day-old doughnuts as hard as pucks. Well, they’d been day-olds a week ago. What made our campaign office unique were the two pierced punk rockers holding clipboards, overseeing it all.

When Angus returned home from campus late in the afternoon, Muriel and I were waiting for him in his living room.

“How was your economics tutorial?” I inquired.

“Fascinatin’!” he gushed. “Bob is a first-rate teacher. I already had a reasonably good understandin’ of why the economy has
collapsed, but I really needed some help on what the options are for pullin’ ourselves out of it.”

“Why don’t we just throw on another shift at the Royal Canadian Mint and print more money?” I joked.

“Because the value of our dollar would plummet and inflation would go through the roof,” Angus countered.

“I know. Thank you, Angus, but I was actually kidding. Even I have at least a passing understanding of our monetary system.”

“So what’s the solution?” asked Muriel.

“Well, since we’re discussing economics, there is no clear consensus on what we should do. Bob believes that Canada’s infrastructure is its economic backbone. We’re so large a country that we rely more than most nations on our roads, rail lines, ports, etc. He made quite a compellin’ case,” Angus concluded.

Muriel was starting to fidget and I could see that it was more than her Parkinson’s.

“Love to hear more about that, but we’re running up against the clock here, Angus. Are you ready?” I asked. The first all-candidates meeting was that night and we had only an hour to get ready.

“Aye.”

We stood Angus up in front of us as Muriel and I stayed on the couch. Muriel started.

“Do you respect Canadian laws?”

Angus furrowed his brow.

“I’m not clear on what you mean.”

“It’s a simple question with a simple yes or no answer. Do you respect Canadian laws?” She sounded cold and hostile.

Understanding dawned on him.

“I do respect Canadian laws, including the laws that protect our right of assembly and our right to protest legislation that citizens deem to be unjust. That’s called democracy.”

Muriel wasn’t done yet.

“But as I understand it, you were arrested more than twenty times. Arrested! Is that the kind of example our Member of
Parliament should be setting for our young people?”

Angus was into it now.

“I’m proud of the civil disobedience in which I partook to protest laws that I felt enslaved women in Canada. Had my late wife and I ever been blessed with children, I hope they would have had the conviction and the courage to challenge legislation that in their eyes promulgates injustice and inequality. To me, that is the essence of leadership in a democracy.”

Okay, not bad. My turn.

“Your wife, Marin Lee, was a femiterrorist whose extreme views threaten our family values and social fabric. Do you support everything found in her books?”

Angus’s face clouded and he bounced from left foot to right. I felt like a jerk but knew it was better for him to hear this for the first time in his own living room and not an hour later in the all-candidates meeting. Angus gathered himself and turned to face me. Calm now, and confident.

“I was married to Marin Lee for nearly forty years. She was a great woman: the most intelligent person I’ve ever known. She was greatly concerned about the state of women in Canada. Most of her work was in the service of equality for women in all respects. We still have a distance to travel, but she left us with a clear sense of our destination and the maps to get us there too.”

Not so fast.

“But in one of her early books, she demanded that women working in the home be compensated for house cleaning, laundry, and cooking. Wouldn’t that introduce a harmful distortion in the free market economy that has helped Canada to prosper?”

“It depends on your definition of ‘distortion.’ To me, when a businessman takes his shirts to the cleaners or hires a cleaning woman, he pays for the service. When a businessman takes a meal in a restaurant, he pays for it. These transactions fuel our market economy and drive wealth generation. If the woman who performs these very same services does so in the family home and is his wife, the businessman benefits in the same way, yet
pays nothing. That to me is the longstanding distortion in our vaunted market.” Angus paused and then continued. “I’m not proposing or promoting a policy change to address this anomaly. But I certainly support the underlying analysis my wife advanced.”

“Nicely done, Angus,” I said, and meant it. But something wasn’t quite right. Now that the performance was over, Angus suddenly looked downright mean. His index finger was in my face.

“You’d be wise to watch your words, sir, when you’re invokin’ the memory of my wife.”

“Angus! Don’t you talk that way,” Muriel scolded. “You’re missing the point. You should be thanking Daniel. He just gave you a taste of what Flamethrower Fox is going to unleash an hour from now. Daniel did that for your benefit, not his enjoyment.”

Angus sighed and collapsed into the chintz cushion next to me, closed his eyes, and rested his head on the back of the couch. No one filled what seemed an uncomfortable silence. Finally, he opened his eyes, nodded, and patted my knee.

“Aye” was all he said.

The phone rang, breaking the moment.

“Hello.” Angus pressed the receiver to his ear.

“Ah, André. The man with the camera.” Pause. “Aye, that’s what Daniel argued. But do you have to take so many?” Pause. “Anyway, what’s on your mind?” Pause. “What? On what earthly grounds? Excluding Stonehouse from the all-candidates meeting is unfair. He’s a duly registered candidate, isn’t he? Why should he not participate?” Pause. “Well, Fox can believe what he pleases, but I’m certainly not in favour of cutting out Stonehouse. We’ve some tough challenges ahead and I think the more heads tackling them the better.” Pause. “You’re welcome. See you later on. Perhaps keep that lens cap in its place a little longer this evening.” He hung up the phone.

“Let me guess,” Muriel sighed. “Emerson Fox is trying to freeze Alden Stonehouse out of the all-candidates meeting just
because he’s running as an independent, right?”

“Aye, but the Returning Officer is havin’ none of it.”

Angus drove Lindsay, Muriel, and me over to the all-candidates meeting. Halfway there Angus turned on the radio. His timing wasn’t good. The fading tail of a song was overtaken by an angry woman’s voice.

“Does a man who’s been arrested twenty-three times deserve to represent Cumberland-Prescott in the House of Commons? Angus McLintock has twenty-three arrests on his rap sheet. You didn’t know that, did you? That’s because Angus McLintock doesn’t want you to know. This has been a message from the committee to elect Emerson Fox, PC candidate in Cumberland-Prescott.”

I turned off the radio, a little late. Cars honked.

“Angus, you can’t just stop here in the middle of the road, we’re blocking the intersection,” I said quietly.

With white knuckles on the wheel, he eased forward and was soon back up to speed.

“Well, we knew it was coming. There should be no shock in this at all,” Muriel observed from the back seat as she leaned forward to rest her hand on Angus’s shoulder.

He looked straight ahead.

“Welcome to the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce all-candidates meeting,” intoned the moderator from the podium. “We’ll begin with two-minute opening statements from each candidate, Liberal incumbent Angus McLintock, Progressive Conservative Emerson Fox, NDP Jane Nankovich, and Conservative Independent Reverend Alden Stonehouse.”

We were in the auditorium of Cumberland Collegiate. About 150 voters filled the theatre-style seating, with the media occupying their traditional space along the risers at the back. André was there, of course, but this time he had to work the video camera on his own.

The candidates had drawn straws and providence was with us. Angus rose, removed the microphone from the lectern mount, and walked around the podium to stand at the very front of the stage. His suit was a little rumpled. He wore no tie. In the pitched battle with his hair, waged in the car on the way over, the brush and comb tag team had clearly lost. He had no notes as he stood alone, as close to the voters as he could get without falling off the stage. He spoke calmly and quietly, but was heard by all.

“Thank you all for coming. Democracy works best when citizens take their civic obligations seriously. You’re doing that by being here tonight, and I’m sure I speak for my fellow candidates when I say we’re grateful. I’ve met my opponents for the first time this evening and I look forward to more discussions and debates with them, I hope on topics that are relevant to the challenges we face as a nation in the throes of an economic tailspin. I, and I hope you, have no interest in discussing issues that do not bear on the current and future state of our government, our economy, our society, or our country.”

A few people applauded while Emerson Fox, beyond Angus’s field of view, smirked and slowly shook his head.

“You will all know that I landed in the House of Commons somewhat unexpectedly. Not only was I shocked to be elected, but I was surprised to discover over time that I was actually enjoying the adventure. I like to think we made a few good things happen while holding the government to account, supporting that which earned our favour, and opposing that which rightly deserved our opposition. That is our duty to you.

“I’ll not blether on much longer so we have time to try to answer the questions you have on your mind. But before we get to the truly important issues we’re confronting, let me seize the benefit of speaking first by launching a pre-emptive strike of sorts. I want to tell you a few things that I’d much rather you heard from me. If you’ve listened to the radio recently, you might know something about this already. As a young graduate student shortly after I arrived here in Canada, I participated in demonstrations
protesting laws I could not and would not countenance. Partly due, I believe, to the public awareness and support engendered by these protests, these unjust laws were eventually changed by the Trudeau government. I’m referring to legislation that allows a woman to choose, in consultation with her doctor, whether or not to continue an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy – a right Canadian women have enjoyed since 1969.