28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  By the time the election was called in May 1999, I’d been running for a year. Along with David Caplan’s fight in Don Valley East, mine was considered a good underdog campaign for young people to join. I got endorsements from the local municipal councillors, like Joe Mihevc, who would become a good friend and local ally, notwithstanding his traditional allegiance to the NDP. Perhaps most important, Councillor Michael Walker introduced me to the politics of rent control.

  At the time, rental rates in Toronto were going up because landlords were taking advantage of the Harris government’s landlord-friendly statutory changes. In St. Paul’s, almost 70 percent of the constituents are tenants, so my strategy was to focus on that. I assumed the highly educated homeowners in Forest Hill would swing their vote based on what the leaders did. Like most urban areas that year, it was moving a little Liberal. What made the difference for us were tenants. I’d knock on doors and say, “Hi, I’m trying to get rid of Mike Harris and bring back rent controls.” And they’d open the door and say, “Where do I sign?”

  I also benefited from joining the Save Our Schools campaign mounted in reaction to the Harris education policy. The campaign was led by Mike Colle, an incumbent Liberal MPP who had represented a big chunk of St. Paul’s before redistribution and was now running in the riding next door in Eglinton-Lawrence. Mike taught me a lot about retail politics, and how to be a good local politician. He remains one of the best.

  A lot of the basics I knew from my dad. But, as usual, I was lucky. Mitch Frazer, a veteran Young Liberal, who was at University of Western Ontario law school at the time, ran my nomination campaign via telephone from London, and he showed me how to win an election in Toronto. When the nomination campaign started to stall in the spring of 1998, Mitch told me to hire Tom Allison, the best campaign manager around. Tom would become a great friend and work with me off and on for the next decade.

  Throughout the campaign, I knocked on doors like a madman. I hadn’t done any polling, but one of the local papers said I was ten points ahead of Bassett heading into the stretch. My parents came in from British Columbia for the last few days of the campaign.

  On June 3, 1999, at the age of 33, just like my grandfather and my father before me, I was elected to public office. I was the new MPP for the Toronto riding of St. Paul’s, part of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ontario.

  FOUR

  To the Palace

  The Ontario Legislature building at Queen’s Park was once described by historian Desmond Morton as sitting like “a huge red toad” peering gloomily at the traffic down University Avenue. By the time I arrived there in June 1999, it was more commonly known as the “Pink Palace,” owing to the hue of the sandstone from which it had been built more than a century earlier.

  Red toad. Pink Palace. I didn’t care what anyone called it. All I knew was that I’d arrived. Election night was one of the most exciting of my life and my most exhilarating moment in politics. I guess it showed.

  In my first months as MPP, I felt like I was floating, constantly, six inches off the ground. Theresa Boyle, a Toronto Star reporter in the Queen’s Park press gallery, told me I seemed like the happiest guy in the Legislature. “You’ve always got a stupid grin on your face,” she said with a laugh. And she was right.

  Political entrances, after all, are occasions of limitless hope, nothing but the promise of the joyful unknown. And I was joyful. Once, coming down the grand staircase in the building’s foyer, I literally pinched myself.

  But the business of politics soon overtook my reveries.

  During the campaign, our leader Dalton McGuinty had bombed in the televised leaders’ debate. After the election, there spawned a small and ineffectual “Dump Dalton” movement. But the truth is that McGuinty grew a lot from the experience of his first campaign as leader. And he made it clear, in a terrific concession speech on election night, that he was staying on.

  Dalton and I immediately hit it off. About that time, his Chief of Staff Monique Smith (who would later become an MPP and cabinet minister) resigned. So there was no buffer between him and his MPPs, even the rookies. I was in his office every week, on strategy, on everything.

  He was trying to shore up his leadership for the review the party constitution required to be held after any election. Right away, McGuinty called that review for late November 1999, preventing dissent to ferment over time. It was also held in his hometown of Ottawa, which ensured local advantages. He was masterful that weekend, gave a stirring speech, and won an endorsement from party members that was more than strong enough to quash dissent.

  As a result of his polite, reserved demeanour, a lot of people underestimate Dalton McGuinty. But there is a lot more steel there than is obvious, and a lot more competitive fire.

  “I worked very, very hard to get this job,” he told Robert Fisher that weekend on Global TV’s Focus Ontario program. “I have been working very hard at this job; I am now working hard to keep this job.”

  No one should have doubted that for a minute. Or that he was working very, very hard to become premier.

  Dalton soon asked me to chair the Ontario Liberal Caucus Niagara Conference on ideas for renewing the party, which would be held in 2001. I was gung-ho and genuinely believed in the leader. Looking back, Dalton McGuinty and I were probably as tight then as we would ever be.

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I did after the 1999 election was to call Charles Harnick. Charlie had been Attorney General in the government of Mike Harris. But he’d also been in opposition for a term and had been A.-G. Critic. That was important. He had exactly the kind of experience I needed. Charlie had basically been ostracized by the Harrisites after he decided not to run again in 1999 and was happy to talk to me.

  Actually, I suppose I had a thing for former Progressive Conservative Attorneys General of the Red Tory persuasion. By 2000, I’d also befriended Roy McMurtry, who was then chief justice of Ontario. We started having tea in his office and had lunch together periodically. McMurtry became a confidant and sounding board to me as well. His son would run under the federal Liberal banner a few years later, confirming what many of us had assumed—the chief justice had a healthy dose of liberalism mixed into his political DNA.

  He’d been known as Roy “McHeadline” in his political days. So our affinity was obvious. By now, though, his whole life was justice. Nobody was talking politics to him anymore, but he still had the bug. So I suppose I was his outlet for that. And, next to my dad, he was as good an éminence grise as one could find.

  Charlie Harnick told me that being in opposition was going to be the most fun I would ever have in politics and that I should make the most of it. And I did. I soon figured out that if I got the visuals right—the pictures to go with any story—and if I got the timing right, I could get myself in the newspaper.

  If it was a slow news day, that meant there was “dead time”—also known as a great opportunity to fill the void. In our circles, it was known as feeding the goat. The media often have no choice but to fill the void with whatever they can find; I was willing to make it easy for them. I would wake up in the morning and wonder how I was going to do it. “Okay, how are we going to embarrass the government today? How are we going to feed the media goat?”

  In Opposition, we created sort of a Rat Pack II, reminiscent of the aggressive group of young Liberal MPs—Sheila Copps, Don Boudria, John Nunziata, Brian Tobin, Jean Lapierre—who took on the huge Brian Mulroney majority PC government in Ottawa in the 1980s.

  In our case, it was George Smitherman, Sandra Pupatello, Steve Peters, Rick Bartolucci, Dwight Duncan, the late Dominic Agostino (who died in 2004), and me.

  I had a red-letter day on my birthday in April 2000. Early that year, I found out that BB guns, pellet guns, and starter pistols could be purchased at hardware stores by anybody. There was no regulation of them whatsoever. Meanwhile, I learned that about half of the guns found at Toronto crime scenes were those phony, replica guns. So police were encountering them, and they’d
been used to rob banks. We had a problem here.

  I went to a Canadian Tire store and bought a phony gun—a BB gun disguised as a handgun. It was amazing. It looked just like a Glock. McGuinty’s new communication director, Jim Maclean, passed me his BB gun that looked like Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum. I called a news conference outside my office. I had a placard printed up—mouth-wateringly delicious to the hungry goats of the media—to put on a podium: “Phony Guns Kill.” I held a couple of these guns on my fingers and told the story.

  I ended up on the front page of most of the newspapers in Ontario and got a tonne of media. It was my first blast of attention. And I discovered I had both a talent and a taste for it. Better still, when Premier Mike Harris was on a radio interview that day, the interviewer told him about my call for regulation of these guns and asked what he thought about it. Harris replied, “I think it’s a good idea.” So it became a huge story. Premier Backs Opposition Ban on Phony Guns.

  In the next Question Period, Dalton decided that he would ask the questions about the phony guns. And Premier Harris humiliated him. The Premier applauded me over and over. He said the new member for St. Paul’s—that would be me—had already done more to fight crime than McGuinty ever had. In fact, Harris said, I was “the first member of this Liberal caucus that I have seen in five years who has actually expressed an interest in this area.”

  It was embarrassing for Dalton. But I didn’t quite get that. I thought it was funny. Harris had said my name three times, so I thought the whole thing was cool. But Dalton got this very tense look on his face, a very tense smile, and he turned back and looked at me in the back row as he sat down. That was probably the beginning of our slow unravelling.

  The next day, one of McGuinty’s senior staffers showed up in my office, demanding to know what other press I was trying to generate. I was told that Dalton had basically called his office onto the carpet and said, “I should be getting this kind of media.” Another of McGuinty’s guys I knew told me to watch my back. I said, “What? This is great. Did you see the photos? It was great!” I just didn’t get it. I thought it was awesome.

  In fact, it was vainglorious. Dalton McGuinty was a colleague and a friend, deserving of my support. I couldn’t see it that way, and I would regret this selfishness years later. A political leader’s need for support should be assumed, and unspoken, but pride disallowed me to reach out to him, in the absence of him reaching out to me. His own pride is not my business. My pride, on the other hand, would become my business soon enough.

  So, between that and the fact that Dalton now had an entourage around him, my access to the leader’s office all but disappeared.

  About that time, I got some advice from Doug Frith, the former Liberal MP and federal cabinet minister from Sudbury whose son-in-law was a volunteer on my campaign. As was my habit, I was keen to pick the brains of anyone with political experience. Frith counselled me about relations with the leader of the Ontario Liberals. He said, “You’ve got to proceed from a position of strength. Don’t reach out to Dalton. Just make it necessary that he has to respect you.”

  I decided, from that time on, to get as much press as I possibly could for myself. My strategy would be to seek forgiveness, not permission, for any of my stunts. And that was the way I carried on.

  Frith’s advice seemed to work. In 2002, McGuinty made me Energy Critic. Again, I was lucky. It was just about the time that the entire energy system in Ontario would be scandalized by a series of events, some within the Conservative government’s control, some not. But I’d play Chicken Little regardless, and lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Conservatives.

  In October 2001, after the Thanksgiving weekend, Mike Harris announced his resignation as premier. He was succeeded in March 2002 by his finance minister and golfing buddy Ernie Eves, who won a second-ballot victory over neo-conservative rival Jim Flaherty. Eves had retired from the Legislature a year earlier for a senior post at Credit Suisse First Boston, but decided to return to politics when the top job became available.

  Eves’s first budget in June 2002 was a shrewdly generous Red Tory document that postponed proposed tax cuts and tacked away from Harris’s right-wing course. We considered it a really bad day, because Eves was moving back onto more moderate turf we intended to claim.

  But over the next year we caught a lot of breaks. A judicial inquiry report into the Walkerton water tragedy (involving contaminated water in a public water system, killing and injuring people)—was released, an extremely balanced but inevitably politically damaging critique of the Conservative government. A Superior Court judge ruled the Hydro One sell-off planned by Harris to be illegal and Eves cancelled it. Bizarrely, Eves decided to announce the 2003 Ontario budget at an auto-parts facility rather than in the Legislature. Historian Michael Bliss wrote that this showed contempt for Ontarians, treating them like “mindless, manipulable couch potatoes.”

  As if that weren’t enough, August ’03 brought the Great Blackout, during which the province was without electricity for days. And shortly after that, Eves called the election and turned in an awful campaign. (Ernie Eves was always gracious and polite to me over the years, even though I’d defeated his partner Isabel Bassett. But still, it was a lousy campaign.) Ontario was tired of the uproar of the Common Sense Revolution. We asked Ontarians to “Choose Change.” And, on October 2, 2003, they did.

  It was a landslide victory for me by more than 13,000 votes in St. Paul’s. And McGuinty won a majority Liberal government.

  Over the years I’ve observed that there are two ingredients needed to topple a government seeking re-election: the voters must first decide that the government has defeated itself, then the alternative party leader has to perform well. In 1999, Ontario voters decided to give Conservatives another term, so it didn’t matter how well McGuinty performed. It mattered in 2003, however, because the people were ready to toss out the Conservatives.

  In 2003, veteran Liberal MPP and cabinet minister Sean Conway sat out his first election in decades. Watching the election as a historian (as he is at Queen’s University), he observed that McGuinty performed better than any leader he’d ever seen in an Ontario election. I just thought that Dalton was quite literally flawless, every single day of the campaign.

  On election night, the Leader’s Office brought some of the freshly elected MPPs to a central campaign party and asked us to say a few words. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what they were conducting, I suspect, was a little audition for Cabinet. OK, how do they do in a crowd? Are they full of themselves? Do they talk enough about the glories of the leader?

  I knew from my dad, and from watching in Opposition, what not to do on such occasions. The worst was to speculate about your own bright future and aspirations. I’d seen other MPPs go up in flames doing this. I reined it in.

  In the days that followed, one of my great political godfathers, Les Scheininger, who’d been through several elections, advised me to leave town. My father agreed. They said to make sure the right people had your phone numbers, and then get away somewhere. The speculation will drive you crazy. It was good advice. Susan and I went to the cottage on Stony Lake to hide out.

  On October 22, 2003, the day McGuinty’s office was going to make the phone calls preceding cabinet appointments, a caucus meeting was called at Queen’s Park. MPPs were all told to go home and sit by the phone from 4 o’clock on. And I did.

  I was pretty confident that I was going to be in the Cabinet. Overconfident would be a better way of putting it. I had already arranged for my parents to fly in from Victoria for the swearing-in the next day. They were in the air on the way to Toronto.

  By around 4:30, the phone rang. It was the first time I’d heard someone say “the Premier is on the line.” And Premier Dalton McGuinty asked me to be his Attorney General, with additional portfolios: Minister Responsible for Aboriginal Affairs, and Minister Responsible for Democratic Renewal.

  I couldn’t have asked for more. Those were precisely the
three things I was interested in. My dreams had come true. I was 37 years old and I was the Attorney General of Ontario.

  When I got off the phone, I started calling people. I wanted to tell Susan face to face, so I waited until she got home from work. By 7 p.m., my parents arrived. My dad kept repeating it over and over again: “Attorney General. Attorney General. Oh, my God, Attorney General.”

  And I drank a bottle of Scotch.

  AT THE CABINET SWEARING-IN the next day, I spotted the legendarily loquacious and colourful Ian Scott, the A.-G. in David Peterson’s Liberal governments in the 1980s who had made a painstaking recovery from a debilitating stroke. I told him the gods had smiled—Ontario finally had another modest Attorney General.

  Scott roared with laughter, but I wanted to pay a proper tribute to him. I decided, sitting on the government benches, amongst the MPPs to be sworn into Cabinet, that I would give a dramatic wave to Scott after I was sworn in, and then blow a kiss to my wife, who was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery with Sadie on her lap and her mom, Arlene, beside her. In the hurly-burly of the moment, I blew a stage kiss to Ian Scott, and failed to acknowledge Susan. Neither Sadie nor my mother-in-law could see to whom I was blowing a kiss, but Susan figured it out: “It must be Ian Scott,” she assured them.

  Any crumbs of modesty I did have, and it wasn’t much, lasted about 24 hours. After the ceremony, there was a reception with the Lieutenant-Governor. That’s where the deputy ministers all showed up looking like day-care supply teachers who’d reluctantly come to collect their charges.

  Mark Freiman was the Deputy Attorney General. He used to be my boss at McCarthy Tetrault. So we were familiar with each other. He took me and my family to the ministry offices at 720 Bay Street, which I would later have named the McMurtry-Scott Building.