Still Liberal After All These Years
My 85 year old mother was visiting me recently. She's a lifelong Liberal, one of those dyed-in-the-wool types who could always make the switch from whoever she supported in a leadership race to whoever eventually won. I've only seen her close to tears once, and it was after a particularly hard fought race in the Soo, in which the NDP candidate beat out the Liberal, whose campaign she had managed. He was a local doctor (and my father's) and my mother had put her all into it, so sure was she that this time the Liberal Party had a winner.
When people explained later that they didn't vote for him because they didn't want to lose a perfectly good doctor to politics, she scoffed at their selfish and misguided reasoning, "He'd have been an even better MP!" In those days, it seemed to me she was the only Liberal in the Soo. We spent our childhoods going door-to-door with pamphlets, trying to sell finger-pointing NDPers and purse-lipped Tories on whoever was the Liberal candidate that particular election. After a while, I got used to having doors slammed in my young Liberal face, people yelling anti-Liberal arguments at me as I retreated down their driveways, a hopeful, "I'll come back in a couple of weeks - maybe you'll change your mind" tossed over my shoulder, as I put a "maybe" tick beside their name for "pull-the-vote" day.
Even if they had a sign on their lawn my mother would make us knock on the door, "You never know. The husband may be the one who's put up the sign, but the wife might be a Liberal." It seemed to me unlikely. Couples in those days, all the ones I knew, were both Tories, the wife nodding in conservative agreement with whatever sexist pronouncements her husband made about women, particularly Liberal women. I don't think Conservative men in those days even knew NDP women existed, not in the Soo, anyway. And I have no idea how the NDP candidate, a fellow with the, well, prissy name of Cyril Symes, running in an Italian steeltown that was otherwise solidly WASP Conservative, won time after time after time.
But win he did, including against my mother's doctor candidate.
Years later, even though I saved enough money for a down payment on a house in Belleville while working for Bob Rae when he was still leader of the third party at Queen's Park, loss after demoralizing loss, I would be subjected to almost weekly admonishments because I was working for the NDP. And I was never really forgiven for it - until Bob Rae became a Liberal. "I knew he was a Liberal. No one who made sense like that could have been an NDPer." was my mother's pronouncement on his not really very dramatic leap back into federal politics - as a Liberal.
Meanwhile, when I had been working for him back in the days when he was leader of a moribund third party at Queen's Park, she'd phone me up to demand I go work for David Peterson instead, "The NDP are going nowhere. Go work somewhere there's a future." To which I'd respond, "Are you crazy, mom? They pay peanuts over there. I'm making three times the money working for the NDP." And it was true. Plus, working at the NDP wasn't just fun - you'd have had to, well, I don't know what you'd have had to do to get fired - because no one ever was and I worked with some of the most imcompetent people you can ever possibly imagine.
But my mother would gladly have foregone my good salary and excellent benefits and awesome holidays to be able to tell her friends I was working for David Peterson. Of course, these days she can tell them I worked for Bob Rae before he knew he was a Liberal and it's even better. Or it would be except that all of her friends vote for Stephen Harper now. It drives her nuts - she can't stand Stephen Harper and would even actually honest to Satan vote for Jack Layton over Stephen Harper, but her friends have all gone kind of dotty and believe the blue sweaters and kittens and vote for him as if he isn't the phoniest bit of baloney since, well, at least everybody KNEW Nixon was lying all the time when he way lying - all the time.
But Michael Ignatieff. Oh my. Now that's a puzzler for my Liberal mother and the Liberal Party of Canada may well have lost her with that one. I say that because she said it when she was visiting with me a couple of weeks ago. She even went so far as to offer that, while Michael Ignatieff may win her friends back from the smarmy embrace of Stephen Harper's blue wool arms, he'll be a hard sell to REAL Liberals.
Now, personally, I don't mind the guy. Don't ask me why, but I like how he seems to flounder out loud, flip his mind every other day, and frolic in front of a scrum as if he's a prince in disguise, playing a grand joke on both his royal parents and us, his unwitting subjects, "You see. I have no need of a fancy disguise. I can be both prince and politician." as he waves to his royal carriage to take him home to the palace for supper. There's something positively Pythonesque about Michael Ignatieff that endears me to him greatly.
Of course, I would say that, wouldn't I. I'm a New Democrat. That my mother's saying it - that's a problem for the Liberal Party of Canada. She'll vote for him because she's never NOT voted Liberal and she always votes. But I doubt she'll put her money where her mouth is, if you catch my drift, Liberal fundraisers.
