The Best Laid Plans (12 page)

“Angus, I’m your campaign manager. I will handle it. You need not worry yourself over glowing articles in the university rag. You want me to take care of it? Thy will be done,” I concluded with a bow and a flourish.

Angus was mollified enough to return to his tinkering. I took my leave and scaled the staircase to my apartment. I pulled out last week’s edition of
The Fulcrum
and scanned the masthead. I found what I was looking for, flipped through the yellow pages, and reached for the phone.

“Hello, I’m just checking in to see when tomorrow’s
Fulcrum
will be delivered to the campus?”

The things campaign managers do to appease the neuroses of their candidates. I drove back to the campus at two forty-five in the morning. As I anticipated, at various points around the campus, I found bundles of
The Fulcrum
fresh off the printer’s delivery truck. I doused the headlights on the Taurus or, rather, headlight, and pulled up to the curb. I didn’t want to trigger a second print run, so I only loaded about three-quarters of the bundles into the back of the station wagon, leaving a lonely stack on the sidewalk. I drove around campus, repeating the procedure at each delivery location. By my estimate, instead of 10,000 issues of
The Fulcrum
distributed around the campus, only about 2,000 remained. Given the hour, I went about my clandestine task unseen.

The floor panel in the back of the Taurus wagon sagged under the newsprint burden. I prayed that I would make it to my destination without it giving way, depositing 8,000 newspapers onto the highway. Half an hour later, I pulled into the Prescott landfill site and joined three tractor trailers lined up for the weigh scale.
The sleepy attendant, unaccustomed to family station wagons at that hour, just waved me onto the scale. When the light turned green, I drove around to a remote section of the landfill where I wouldn’t be observed.

Before I started dumping the bundles, I pulled out a copy and looked for the story. I didn’t have to look far. Dominating page two was a large colour photo of a somewhat younger Angus McLintock in full Scottish regalia. His grey hair tried desperately to escape the gravitational pull of his head, and his beard cascaded onto his chest like Montmorency Falls. The headline read “U of O’s McLintock takes run at Cameron.” Angus was right in one sense. The story was obsequious well past nauseating. I finished reading the piece, slipped one copy onto the front seat to keep, and returned to the back of the car to complete the job. The dome light cast an eerie glow over the scene and shed just enough light to guide me in finding an appropriate drop zone. The bundles cartwheeled down the slope, ending up under an overhang created by stacks of drywall, which were likely culled from a house demolition. I doubted the papers could be seen even in daylight. Done.

It was pushing four o’clock when I finally made the boathouse, hit the horizontal, and fell into an untroubled sleep. Perhaps it should have been troubled, but the night’s deed paled next to the chicanery that was the daily fare I’d left on Parliament Hill. I slept a saint’s sleep.

Other than three more near-arrests, courtesy of the two Petes’ unorthodox canvassing attire, an editorial critical of Angus and the virtually unknown New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for their low profiles, and a broken exhaust system in the McLintock-campaign headquarters, the first two weeks of the race unfolded without incident. Relatively speaking, it was smooth sailing, without a dark cloud or a Liberal voter on the horizon. After the initial campus-based stirrings of support for Angus, he now seemed satisfied that there was no McLintock tsunami rolling across the riding. In fact, the Cameron team had taken to calling our candidate “Angus the Invisible.” Fortunately, with the election outcome a forgone conclusion, no one bothered to organize any all-candidates meetings in the riding. What would be the point?

Driving through the riding, I was immersed in a monochromatic sea of blue as glossy Cameron signs stood like sentinels on virtually every lawn. Sometimes, having expensive signs featuring photos of the candidate posed a few problems. Some juvenile vandals had drawn garish moustaches and blacked-out teeth on a large and growing number of Cameron signs in several different sections of the riding. The effect was quite comical and earned a front page photo in
The Cumberland Crier
, along with an editorial decrying the assault on the Cameron campaign. Petra Borschart and her obedient young team of Tory brown-shirts were incensed and, for some reason, suspected the McLintock camp. I looked into it
and was able to confirm that we had nothing to do with it. After all, ours was a high-road campaign with a focus on the issues. It was sheer coincidence that the timing and location of the lawn-sign enhancements paralleled the two Petes’ canvassing schedule. Some thought we were just jealous because we didn’t have signs of our own. The Petes and I conferred privately. Shortly thereafter, the unauthorized artistry ceased. If we were going to be annihilated at the polls, and there was no doubt of that, I wanted to be slaughtered fair and square. Head held high as it’s lopped off, etcetera, etcetera.

Muriel, Lindsay, and I sat alone at a table for ten in the River Ballroom of the Cumberland Motor Inn for Eric Cameron’s luncheon speech, sponsored by the chamber of commerce. Every other table was packed to capacity. There was certainly no shortage of Cameron buttons, posters, novelty flags, T-shirts, and the ugliest hats I’d ever seen. Cameron’s monotonous campaign theme song blasted over and over from 175 two-inch ceiling speakers in the ballroom’s archaic sound system. It had the fidelity of a cheap walkie-talkie just heading out of range. “Cameron, Cameron, he’s our man. Cameron, Cameron, takes a stand.” (Yes, I’ll take that Gravol now, please.) Torture on an endless loop.

We proudly wore our V
OTE
L
IBERAL
buttons, hence our extra elbow room, not to mention our table’s location. We were seated as far from the podium as possible while staying within the same area code. We’d also arrived just minutes before the scheduled start, so I admit that our timing might have been a contributing factor. As I passed Muriel a basket of stale buns as hard as lacrosse balls, I noticed with horror two lines of bouncy cheerleaders from Cumberland Secondary, forming at the main entrance to the ballroom. They were singing along to the campaign song, shaking their pom-poms and jumping up in the air, and landing, hands on hips, in the traditional cheerleader dismount pose. I looked around to make sure I knew where the washrooms were.

“What is this, the 1950s?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, when Tories in Cumberland get together, yes, it is the 1950s,” explained Muriel. “It’s a humiliating period piece, an embarrassing time capsule with Cameron and Borschart at the helm.”

“It’s just plain creepy,” said Lindsay with a shiver as she surveyed the scene. “It looks like they’re all drugged or zombies.”

Just then, the lights dimmed, and in partial answer to our prayers, the Cameron theme song faded out as the large projection screens on either side of the head table flickered to life. What followed was the most nauseating, gilded video portrait of the Honourable Eric Cameron that I could possibly have imagined. No, check that. I could never have conjured up such a fawning tribute. It included clips of his childhood, the young man going to university, his wedding day, his early campaigns, his inaugural speech in the House of Commons, his first budget address, and his international trips to meet foreign dignitaries. After seven minutes, it closed with shameless cemetery scenes at his wife’s gravesite. The whole thing was set against a symphonic soundtrack scored for maximum emotional impact. I had to admit, it was a political tour de force that left many in the crowd weeping – even while our table was gagging. A still photo of Cameron hunched over his wife’s headstone slowly faded on the screen while the soundtrack moved into a dramatic brass prelude reminiscent of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” often heard around the Olympic Games. In this case, it felt more like “Fanfare for the Uncommon Sham.” A single spotlight pierced the room, touching down at the main doors, accompanied by a voice not unlike that of famed ring announcer Michael “let’s get ready to rumble” Buffer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Cumberland Chamber of Commerce is pleased to welcome the most popular Finance Minister in Canadian history, the long-time Member of Parliament for Cumberland-Prescott, and perhaps, just perhaps, our future Prime Minister. I give you our very own local hero and favoured son – the Honourable Eric Cameron.”

As the campaign song restarted at full volume, the room, as intended, erupted in a rock star reception that I’m sure briefly worried the paramedics standing discreetly at the back of the room. It was quite a performance. Framed by vibrating cheerleaders, a smiling Eric Cameron, taking care to stay with the moving spotlight, worked the room like the master he was. He held one hand high in triumph and stretched the other towards as many enthralled voters as he could reach. Melee was an understatement; frenzy was a slow dance next to the bedlam in the ballroom as Cameron inched towards the podium. Ten minutes later, he reached his destination, and the ovation still showed no signs of abating. By this time, I’d fled to the bathroom, unable to stomach the total Tory orgy of Cameron’s entrance.

In the men’s room, I bumped into André Fontaine there to cover the Cameron speech. He seemed a little agitated. “Addison, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve just seen something very interesting,” he whispered, even though we were alone in the bathroom.

“I’m in your hands, André.” In retrospect, probably not the most appropriate thing to say to him as we stood side by side at our respective urinals. “I mean, I’m all ears.”

“I just saw Cameron and Petra get out of his Buick in the parking lot. They were partially hidden between two parked cars and clearly thought they were unobserved. She was yelling at him and stabbing her finger into his chest and was obviously very angry. He just had this hangdog, ultrasubmissive look on his face like he was a six-year-old being chewed out by his mother. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he recounted.

“Carry on,” I urged. “Then, what happened?”

“Well, then, he nodded his head a few more times while looking at his feet, she calmed down, and they walked into the motel as if nothing had happened. Very odd,” André concluded.

I doubted it was any kind of prespeech pump-up ritual. Curious. When I returned to our table, Cameron was still trying to quell the clamour so he could actually say something. Eventually, the wild
cheering dampened to the point that he felt comfortable starting in on his stump speech.

He spoke for 40 minutes without a single note in front of him. It was a perfectly balanced and nuanced mélange of substance, humour, self-deprecation, politics, and drama. He never missed a word, never messed up his timing, and never broke the magic spell he’d cast over the audience. It was the perfect campaign speech. I’d heard him speak before, but he was really at the top of his game this afternoon. The crowd hung on every word, every gesture, every smile, and every pause. He torqued the strings of our emotions until they were taut and tuned then played us like Yo-Yo Ma. Cameron never once mentioned his Liberal opponent. Why would he? Why should he? There was no need.