The Best Laid Plans (23 page)

“In a weak moment of folly, I made a commitment. I stand by it and will serve though I’d certainly rather continue my engineerin’ work, toilin’ in relative obscurity.

“Let me congratulate Jane Nankovich for the campaign she ran. She undoubtedly did her supporters proud. I extend my heartfelt sympathies to Eric Cameron for the calamity that has befallen him. Whatever his extracurricular interests may be, he undoubtedly has served Canada well and deserves our respect, our gratitude, and in particular right now, our understandin’.

“For all my new constituents, I can only say I will do my best in a role for which I feel ill suited and unprepared. Whatever the situation, you may rely on me to be honest and direct. I shall never forget whose money the government is collectin’ and spendin’. And I promise that I will always, always be guided by two immutable questions, posed, considered, and answered in this essential order of priority: Firstly, what is best for Canada? And secondly, if necessary, what is best for the people of Cumberland-Prescott?

“I guarantee that some, perhaps many of my own constituents will take issue with this approach and the positions and decisions it will sometimes yield. I can only suggest they will have a chance to vote for someone else in four years’ time – perhaps sooner, if we’re all lucky.

“I want to recognize the long and distinguished service of Muriel Parkinson, who ran before me in the previous five campaigns. A lasting regret of mine will be that it is I and not she who stands before you now. While I am well aware of her famed organizational skills, part of me laments that she deployed them with such vigour and obvious success in poll 22, the Riverfront Seniors’ Residence where she lives.

“Finally, I may need a few days to recover from my two weeks in a different hemisphere, not to mention from the surreal trip I’ve taken since landin’ here in Ottawa. I seek yer patience and indulgence until I am feelin’ myself again. In the interim, if you need anythin’, you may contact my newly appointed executive assistant,
or whatever his title should be, Dr. Daniel Addison. He helped me get into this situation, and he will be with me every step of the way on Parliament Hill. Good night.”

I had to stop for a minute or two to sort through the jaws on the ground until I could find my own. Stunning. The reporters were transfixed. As was I – so much so that Angus’s last sentence hadn’t yet registered. André Fontaine just stood there blank-faced and dumbstruck. The scrum parted for us like the Red Sea for Moses. Come to think of it, Angus looked the part. I walked two steps behind as we made our way to the luggage carousel and then to the parking lot. I was trying to catch up, literally and figuratively. Seven cameras trailed us all the way to the car.

He spoke only once on the drive home and I, in a daze, not at all. “You’d best have left me plenty of Lagavulin.”

I leaned against the stone wall on the other side of the corridor, watching the sign painter.

Only the House of Commons would employ a commercial artist whose raison d’être was hand-stenciling the names of MPs in gold-fleck paint on the front doors of their offices. I watched as he worked meticulously to finish the final O-T-T as if it somehow confirmed as real what I’d hoped might be some particularly cruel nightmare. The irony was painful. I felt like the sad-sack inmate who had tunneled out of his cell only to miscalculate and surface in the gas chamber. Just a few short months earlier, I’d very nearly made a clean escape. Yet here I was, back on Parliament Hill, atop my own personal pyre of politics.

While a weak and distant little whisper in my head argued for abandoning Angus and seeking political refugee status at the university, the whisper was quickly drowned out by a sanctimonious, annoying voice, delivering a will-sapping refrain of “do the right thing.” Shit. I knew what I had to do. I just wondered what it would be like to flirt with being a jerk for once. I would certainly have been in good company. But I had gotten us both into this
mess. I really had no choice but to stand by Angus in his hour of need. And how I wish an hour was all that was required. The way my luck was going, the next election might well have been five years off – despite the Government’s minority status.

At least, the university had been reasonable, even generous. Both Angus and I had been granted open-ended leaves of absence with no loss in seniority and with our tenure status unaffected. Angus had his, and I was on a long road to get mine. My future seemed reasonably secure; it was my present that depressed me. On the brighter side of the ledger, neither one of us would be teaching English for Engineers. In a rather satisfying twist of fate, Dean Roland Rumplun had been forced to take over the class – the blind leading the blind. For Angus, the knowledge that Rumplun would be enduring the weekly torture of E for E almost made coming to Ottawa tolerable.

I was greeted by my former colleagues as the prodigal son, their smirking incredulity standing in for the fatted calf. Bradley Stanton, the weasel, offered muted congratulations, but the Leader seemed genuine in his praise for the “brilliant campaign” I’d run. My veteran status on the Hill conferred some privileges unavailable to the new kids on the block. I snagged us a choice office suite along the quiet corridor that ran the length of Centre Block behind the House of Commons and the Senate chamber. The suite was small but gave us a glorious view of the river. It was not unlike the vista offered up by Muriel’s traditional vantage point in the lounge of the Riverfront Seniors’ Residence some 30 kilometres east.

Not many MPs even wanted offices in Centre Block, opting, for more spacious accommodations in the Confederation Building just to the west. But I wanted Centre Block. And in time, Angus would thank me. In the deep freeze of an Ottawa February, he merely had to saunter down the hall to the House for evening votes while many of his colleagues would be re-enacting Admiral Peary’s North Pole trek to get there.

In the three weeks since the election, Angus had still not adjusted
to his status as a Member of Parliament, not to mention his folk-hero notoriety. His extemporaneous, yet eloquent, airport soliloquy had endeared him not just to the press gallery but to millions of Canadians who watched, heard, and read it over and over through the media in the days that followed. The long-time parliamentary bureau chief for
The Calgary Herald
coined “Honest Angus,” and the moniker stuck like a lamprey with nothing to lose. I must say it was a big improvement over “Absent Angus,” with which we’d been tagged during the campaign.

True to his word, Angus slowly came to grips with the election’s unlikely – check that, shocking – outcome. A few letters to the editor in the Cumberland newspaper decried the election of a Liberal on the strength of a piddling 3,700 votes, calling it an affront to democracy. These were easily overwhelmed by the dozens of letters from Canadians who considered Angus to be just the sort of politician we needed – an honourable representative who spoke his mind and did what he said. His frank admission that he’d run with neither the intention nor the desire to serve, passed through the country’s consciousness and out the other side with nary a discouraging word. And the skies were not cloudy all day. His honeymoon had started.

Angus had sequestered himself in his workshop in the immediate aftermath of the election, using me as his shield from the outside world. For an entire week, he spent his days painting his beloved hovercraft; I spent mine fending off reporters and getting high on the fumes rising through the vents in my floor. His contact with me in the first few days was perfunctory, even cool. It was clear he was wrestling with what had befallen him and was struggling to make peace with the hard-left turn his life had taken, with me at the wheel.

When his painting was done, he seemed to emerge from his funk, and our chess games resumed. In our initial contests, he crushed me with such relentless fury that I could only conclude it was his way of punishing me for involving him in this fiasco.
While I felt justified in noting that no one had forced him into our little arrangement, I figured shoving that particular red-hot poker up his nose was ill-advised at best and suicidal at worst. I took my shellacking, game after game, with stoic good humour as Angus slowly burned through his considerable reserves of anger and self-pity. Eventually, he passed through the dark valley and emerged on the other side, showing at least traces of the personality I’d come to know, enjoy, and respect.

My agreement to return to Parliament Hill with him, as if he’d left me any choice in the matter, seemed to help put our relationship back on a tentative but promising footing. In the week following the election, Angus had studiously avoided newspapers, television, and radio. But I’d clipped and kept the stories chronicling his evolution from anonymous engineering professor to political giant killer. Most stories reprinted verbatim the remarks Angus made in front of the baggage carousel and conveniently overlooked that Cameron’s demise had been wholly self-inflicted. Reading the coverage and how it developed over the days and weeks after the election was a case study in how heroes are manufactured out of media hyperbole, rose-tinted hindsight, and concerted lily-gilding.

We are all, to greater or lesser degrees, captives of our own egos. Angus, for all his hard-nosed honesty and honour, still lived with human frailties. During the second week following the election – his election – and after he’d soundly trounced me a dozen times or more on the 64 squares, I gave him the folder of clippings to read. Though he endeavoured to mask it, I could tell he was pleased and surprised that his predicament and response had been the subject of such positive, if exaggerated, comment. Though he scoffed and declared it all “drivel,” I noticed that he’d read every article.

After carefully and sensitively managing Angus’s moods and emotions for nearly three weeks, free from the prying eyes of the public and the media, I felt he was ready to venture into Ottawa
and begin his new life. He was less certain, but allowed himself to be cajoled into acquiescence.

Angus was sitting behind his standard-issue MP’s desk, his back to the leaded window panes high above the river. His head was in his hands. His office was pretty well organized with only a few pictures on loan from the Parliamentary art collection yet to be hung. He looked as if he were at a funeral. Pale and stiff, he might have been at his own funeral. When I lost him in the black depths, one of my many jobs as his executive assistant was to drag him back up, boost his spirits, and force him to confront and, I hoped, accept his new reality. I called it doing a “Lazarus.” It required delicate management of mood (his, not mine) and a passel of patience (mine, not his).

“Angus, we’ve got 20 minutes before you’re due in the Clerk’s office. Let me show you something I know you’ll like,” I proposed with the finesse of a neurosurgeon who knows his patient’s head inside and out.

“Blow it out yer hindquarters! I cannae enjoy my wallowin’ with you playin’ cruise director.”

I clearly had him right where I wanted him. “Come on, Angus. You’re in Centre Block – the very seat of our nation’s history. I guarantee you’ll love what I’m going to show you. I know you, and you will want to see this,” I persisted, carefully gauging my tone and words to yield the desired effect. I sensed I was close to reaching him. Reading and managing his temper really was an important skill, which I like to think I possessed in some modest measure.

“Was there a particular part of ‘blow it out yer hindquarters’ that left you confused as to my disposition?” he replied through teeth clamped tighter than canal locks.

I was obviously on the right path. Just a little more. “Angus, you need to buck up, and you need to trust me. You’re in my house now, and I just want to show you a very special place. It’s on the way to the Clerk’s office anyway.” Nothing. “Come on, Angus, you’re about to embark on a completely new and rare experience
that comes to very few Canadians. Please let me help you get off on the right foot. Now, let’s go.” I moved towards the door, hoping my very motion might help push him over the edge of agreement.

“Buck up and trust you? Get off on the right foot?” he said, hissing. “I’ve got a better idea of what I can do with my right foot if you come a wee bit closer. I wish you’d just shut up.”

Brilliantly played. From buck up to shut up in two seconds flat. I stayed silent and trained a sympathetic gaze on him. It was my last gambit. Mercifully, he softened.