Fire and Ashes (20 page)

I’m not sure when I knew the tide was turning against us. Certainly, my chief of staff, Peter Donolo, must have known what our overnight polling was saying, but he didn’t tell me and I didn’t want to know. It was too late to change our strategy anyway, and I was having too much fun preaching to the converted in those crowded halls. I do remember realizing that the two national debates on television, one in French, the other in English, did not do me any good. Looking back I see now that we became so consumed by the run-throughs of our mock debates that we failed to settle on a basic strategy. This was, after all, my one chance to show most Canadians that I wasn’t just visiting, and my one opportunity to show some charm and warmth. Instead, I jabbed at Mr. Harper relentlessly and probably came across as just another of those angry partisan politicians. Jack Layton had done three national debates and he knew better. He smiled a lot, waited for his moment, and when I jabbed at Harper for demeaning our democracy, he jumped in and pointed out my attendance record in the House, adding that if I was campaigning for a promotion, I ought at least to show up for work. He knew that I’d been doing open town halls across the country, but the blow landed. What I remember best about the debates was afterward, in the green room, hearing the cheer as the prime minister returned to his dressing room next door. The spectacle of Jack taking me apart was music to Conservatives’ ears. The visceral roar through the partition wall told me all I needed to know about how the debate had actually gone.

On May 1, we waited for the results in a suite in a Toronto hotel. A certain expectant gloom had settled in, but we had no idea what we were in for because none of the experts had any idea what was coming. The earthquake began in Quebec. The vote for the separatist Bloc Québécois collapsed; its leader, Gilles Duceppe, went down to defeat in his own riding. Their nationalist pro-Quebec vote flowed
overwhelmingly to Jack Layton’s NDP. Québécois voters had not forgiven the Liberals for the scandals of the 1990s and so the federalist, pro-Canada vote in Quebec also went to Jack. In the last weekend before the election, the NDP wave in Quebec, by then widely anticipated, set off a counter-wave of people fearful of the NDP surge. Instead of flowing to us, this counter-wave flowed to the Conservatives. In riding after riding, the Liberal vote was pulled apart from both sides: increases in the NDP vote pushed support to the Conservatives, while increases to the Conservative vote drained votes away from us. Our seats began falling like ninepins. I sat, with stunned staff, watching the returns on TV as the centre of our politics, the place where my party had positioned itself for a century, collapsed in one night. By late in the evening, it was apparent that I would even lose my own seat.

By midnight, I was up at the podium in an emptying ballroom in front of a diminishing band of disconsolate and shocked supporters, thanking all of those who had stood with me for five years. All I could think of saying—you cannot prepare for such events—is that failure is a great teacher and I would learn all its lessons.

The defeat was certainly a rejection of me—I could handle that—but it was so much more, a rejection of some fine and devoted members of Parliament, some excellent candidates and a century’s worth of political tradition. I knew that it would take us a long time even to understand what had happened. As Zsuzsanna and I traversed an empty ballroom filled with the detritus of defeat and returned alone to our hotel suite, I was shaken but also calm. So this was politics, I thought. If you didn’t understand that you could lose everything, you didn’t understand what politics truly was.

There is one moment the next morning that I want to recall, a moment that shows the other side. As we left our hotel suite, crossed the lobby and prepared to enter the bus taking us to the airport, there
was a single figure standing outside waiting for us. It was the turbaned owner of the car company whose dispatcher hut I had visited in my first week in politics five years before. He had been there from the first moment, and he was there, at the very last, wearing another of his magnificent turbans, elegant as always. This time, tears were streaming down Baljit Sikand’s face.

ZSUZSANNA AND I RETURNED
to Stornoway and disconsolately packed up our things. I remembered a photograph I’d seen of men in overalls carting belongings into a moving van at the back of 10 Downing Street after Margaret Thatcher defeated James Callaghan in 1979. The arrival of the moving van is as momentous a symbol of the sovereignty of the people as the moment when a leader takes the oath of office. Now the moving vans were at our back door. The people had told us to pack our bags. In an emptying house that had once felt like home, I pulled my books off the library shelves as the portrait of Laurier, our greatest prime minister, seemed to follow me with its eyes. Every leader of the party but two had become prime minister. Now I had become the third leader to fail.

The day before I’d had an airplane, a security detail, a staff of a hundred, a car and driver, a chef and housekeeper to welcome us home, and, most valuable of all, a political future. The day after, that future had vanished. I was unemployed and five and half months short of eligibility for the pension that usually goes with six years of service as an MP. I was filling boxes while making phone calls to find myself a job. Rob Prichard, a friend of thirty years, came to the rescue, and after he’d made a few calls to John Fraser, master of Massey College, David Naylor, the president of the University of Toronto, and Janice
Gross Stein, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, I was back in my old life, teaching human rights and politics once again. Finding a new start was much harder for many of my defeated colleagues.

I hadn’t driven for five years, and so I went to renew my licence the day after the defeat. The photograph they took that day shows a person I now barely recognize: defeated, disconsolate and forlorn. The eyes—my eyes—don’t focus.

I cleared out the desk in my office on Parliament Hill and bade farewell to a shocked caucus, now reduced to less than half its size. It was terrible to commiserate with defeated colleagues, many of whom had been excellent, even self-sacrificing members of Parliament and who now, like me, were struggling to comprehend defeat. Some vowed to “get back,” but you could tell they did not believe it. Others took defeat calmly, as if admitting that this phase of their life was over. But for the ones I used to call the “rink rats,” because they so loved being in the House, their grief at having to say goodbye to the chamber was painful to watch, especially since I felt responsible for their fate. The defeat still felt like an act of nature, a great storm that had knocked down all the trees in the forest. Most caucus colleagues commiserated with me on our common misfortune, while those who felt bitter kept silent. More than one came up and said I had fought a good campaign. There was little recrimination, because I had paid for my mistakes with the loss of my own seat. Zsuzsanna came with me to the last caucus meeting, and when caucus noticed her sitting to one side, weeping with her head in her hands, they rose as one and gave her a standing ovation. She deserved it. No one had worked harder for our common cause. After that, I gave my last speech to caucus, thanked my friends, ignored my enemies and, hand in hand with Zsuzsanna, I strode out of Parliament for the last time.

In the weeks afterward, the solitary reality of defeat began to sink in. It turns out that there is nothing so ex as an ex-politician, especially
a defeated one. Your phone goes dead. While I had been in office, ex-politicians refusing to accept their status had occasionally bedevilled my life, and I vowed that having been defeated, I would at least have the good taste not to foist commentary or criticism on my successor, whoever it might be. When you’re done in politics, you are well and truly done, and it is a good idea to accept this as quickly as you can. The voters had decided my fate. Now it was my task to accept their verdict and move on.

All this, of course, is easier said than done. As I battled the gloom that came over me, I understood—not immediately, of course, but over time—that the psychic challenge after defeat is to recover your standing. In my case, I had sacrificed my standing as a writer and thinker to enter politics, and now that I had been defeated, I had lost my standing as a politician. Defeat invalidated me as a politician but also as a writer and thinker. I was an embarrassment both to my former political colleagues and to my new ones at the university. I wondered whether I was much use to anybody.

This period of self-pity, I am happy to say, was brief, because defeat had a surprising aspect that I had never anticipated. For five years, I had lived in the public gaze, courting every eye, every glance in the hopes of getting their vote. I had turned myself into a state of complete dependency on the judgment of strangers. Now that they had decided my future, to my immense surprise, strangers came to my rescue. So many e-mails came into party headquarters thanking me for my years in office that the staff bound them in a thick book and presented them to me. Everywhere I went, people came up and congratulated me like someone who’d survived an illness. Keep up the good work, many of them said. Great job, others shouted from the windows of passing cars. I think some of them mistook me for some contestant who had just been voted off a reality TV show, which, in a way, was true.

I’d always assumed that people would praise me on the way up and kick me on the way down, but that’s not what defeat was like. Heading out to pick up some dry cleaning a week after the election, back in our condo in Toronto, I passed the firemen lounging in front of the fire station next door, waiting for their next call, and they all gathered around and commiserated on my loss. Tough game, one said, and I said, no tougher than putting out fires. We all laughed. In the dry cleaners opposite our apartment, Michelle, our friend from Vietnam who watches Korean videos on her iPad and never seems to charge us full price for our dry cleaning, came around the counter and gave me a hug. A Sikh truck driver waved brightly as he drove past in his cement mixer. These reactions confirmed me in the view that in politics, the politicians can be awful, the press unspeakable, but the people are actually all right. So many perfect strangers came up to tell me they’d voted for me that you could be forgiven for wondering why we’d lost.

Of course you take defeat personally. You mourn the life you will not get to lead. You mourn the things you will not get to do. I’d finally figured out whom I was doing politics for and now I wouldn’t have the chance to do anything for them at all. You grieve and then, as with all forms of grieving that I have gone through, life slowly comes to the rescue. It feels good to have time on your hands, good to be able to read a book again, good to go to a concert. Defeat brings lucidity and it also brings liberation. You get your freedom back when you least expect it. The most surprising reaction to failure is relief.

I began reading again and with reading came the first stirring of the intellectual curiosity, the avidity for ideas that the routine of political life can slowly drive out of your system. Within three weeks of defeat, I started preparing my fall classes, and as I sat in my Massey College office I began thinking about the relation between political life as I
had lived it and the great works of political theory that I would once again be teaching.

Naturally enough, I found myself thinking that much of the political theory that students are assigned in classes the world over was written not by those who succeeded in politics but by those who failed. Cicero’s
On Duties
and
On Rhetoric
, taught to students of politics for two thousand years, were composed by a man who once wrote a friend, “I used to sit on the deck and hold the rudder of the state in my hands; now there’s scarcely room for me in the bilge.”
¹
The brilliant defender of the Roman republic who held the consul’s office was to meet his death at the hands of imperial assassins. As for Machiavelli, another staple of politics classes for five hundred years, he wrote
The Prince
and the
Discourses
only after he had been turfed out of office in 1512, thrown into jail, tortured and sent back to his estates to brood on rejection and defeat. I felt a deep kinship with him now as I read the wonderful letter to his friend Francesco Vettori in which he describes the days of a defeated politician, snaring birds on his estate, chopping wood in the forest, grousing with friends in the tavern and then returning at night to his library, donning the clothes he once wore at court and entering the vanished but consoling world of the Roman classics.
²
Another large figure in the canon of political theory, Edmund Burke, had to live with the criticism that he was never as good a politician as he was a thinker. He wrote
Reflections on the Revolution in France
in 1790, the most penetrating conservative critique of revolutionary ardour, but was ridiculed by the poet Oliver Goldsmith’s memorable barb about the politician.
³

James Madison co-wrote
The Federalist Papers
with Alexander Hamilton to secure public support for the ratification of the US Constitution. It’s still the most successful and vivid political pamphlet in history, but Madison’s tenure as president was not exactly crowned with success. He became the only president to flee the White House and endured the sack of his capital city at the hands of the British in the War of 1812. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the greatest single observation of democracy as a culture of universal aspiration,
Democracy in America
, mouldered on the backbenches of the French parliament throughout the 1840s, writing bitterly about the idiotic speech-making of his fellow MPs. He rose briefly to ministerial office after the revolution of 1848, but in 1851 he retired from politics in disgust.
⁴
John Stuart Mill may have been the greatest theorist of representative government who ever lived, but as an MP in the British Parliament from 1865 to 1868, he chafed at the legislative incompetence of his fellow MPs and was defeated in his second election.
⁵
Max Weber, the German sociologist and aristocratic liberal, failed even to gain nomination as a candidate for the Democratic Party in 1919. As an activist, he knew humiliation and defeat. As a theorist, we still assign him to students every year.