28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  As history records, we won a second majority government in October 2007. But when the cabinet call came a little while later, it turned out not to be quite the magical moment it had been four years earlier.

  THE PREMIER TOLD ME he was appointing me Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Government House Leader. I was surprised. But I saw immediately what he was doing. The combination made it clear. He was trying, with the House Leader’s job, to keep me close to home at Queen’s Park. When I wasn’t, I’d be up at the far northern communities that most Ontarians didn’t know existed.

  He was burying me. He went on to say, “I need you to be more thoughtful” and less quippy. But I’m not sure he expected my reaction.

  I said, “Oh, this is great! This is the portfolio that demands your leadership, Premier. I can do this. After all, I’ve got my two graduate degrees in aboriginal affairs.”

  There was a pause. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

  Immediately, I started spinning madly in the media that this was great news for me. People were trying to get me to complain, but I didn’t. I refused to acknowledge the obvious: it was an intended demotion by the Premier.

  It was great!! The best thing that ever happened to me!! And I got kudos from columnists in The Globe and Mail and the Star for not pouting. But we all knew the score. Greg Sorbara came up to me and hugged me and said a crummy thing had been done to me and to hang in there.

  The day I was sworn in, John McGrath from CBC Radio asked me when I was going to Caledonia, the site of a standoff between police, residents, and one of the largest and most powerful First Nations in Canada: Six Nations. My predecessor in the ministry hadn’t gone to Caledonia (against his private protests to the contrary), nor had the Premier. And that was the subject of some criticism.

  At first I ignored the question. I hadn’t cleared anything with the Premier yet. But then I looked at McGrath with a familiar twinkle in my eye, and he repeated the question: “When are you going to Caledonia?”

  “Tomorrow!”

  So I got hauled once more into the Premier’s Office. The conversation was pretty heated and went on for a long time. I can’t speak for Dalton McGuinty, who was no doubt frustrated that I was headline-grabbing yet again. But I can speak for myself as to what was happening between the Premier and me.

  From where I sat, our relationship had unravelled into a power play. I refused to be controlled and he, perhaps, felt that his own authority was being undermined. While I did have a keen sense of just how far I could go, in defiance of any attempt to rein me in, in hindsight I see that I must have looked totally out of control. The truth was that I was deeply stung by the perceived demotion. My ego did not respond well. Out of defensiveness and fear of failure, I became further unrestrained.

  Meanwhile, I noticed that the size of the cabinet binders was shrinking. While the binders we used for cabinet meetings used to be about the size of a breadbox, now they were less binders than thin folders. The government’s electoral agenda would take a few months to be rolled out. It would be a full year before some of our key plans could be implemented. That created a vacuum that I was happy to fill with new initiatives in aboriginal affairs.

  A week after becoming Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, I attended a gathering of First Nations chiefs, where I took aside Tom Bressette, Chief of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. It was the home of Ipperwash Park, where Dudley George had been shot dead by a police officer. Bressette brought Dudley’s brother, Sam George, along to our impromptu huddle.

  During the Second World War, the federal government expropriated land adjoining Ipperwash Park to build a military base. Aboriginal families, including Dudley George’s family, were moved to Kettle Point reserve and told their land would be returned after the war.

  In 1995, Dudley George and others occupied the park to protest Ottawa’s failure to return the expropriated land and to protect sacred burial grounds. George, 38, died when OPP members fired on the protesters.

  I told Chief Bressette and Sam George that I had a proposal for them to consider. I couldn’t help with their federal claim, but the province did own a piece of the park. If I just handed the park over, local non-aboriginal residents would have been outraged. So I offered to give the First Nation the title to the land, but that the park would be jointly managed by the local community and the First Nation. We shook hands on it, and the deal was done.

  Then in February 2008, two things happened that led me to believe that my time in the political arena was soon up. Up in the far, far north of Ontario, a First Nation called Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, or “KI,” had begun to receive national attention. Chief and council were defying court orders, and were willing to be jailed, in protest to an attempt by a junior mining company to explore and mine disputed lands. I went up there three or four times to try to find a resolution.

  At the same time, a dispute over casino gaming between the government and Ontario’s First Nations was finally going to trial after years of talk. So I tried to negotiate a solution. It took a week, literally day and night negotiations. We booted all the lawyers out of the room, except for me. So it was just me on one side of the table and five chiefs on the other.

  Day and night we negotiated in a windowless room on the conference floor of the Delta Chelsea. Except for one day, when I travelled to KI in a last-ditch effort to forestall incarceration of Chief Donny Morris and KI councillors. I returned after a gruelling day to recommence negotiations with the chiefs—at 10 p.m. It earned their respect. A couple days later, we shook hands. We had a deal.

  The agreement saw all of Ontario’s First Nations share in all of Ontario’s gaming revenues. The agreement, worth an estimated $3 billion over 25 years, will provide the long-term, stable funding needed by First Nations to invest in improvements to quality of life in their communities.

  That was the first time I thought, “OK, I think I’m ready to leave politics.” I thought I’d done something concrete that would serve a community for years. I also felt exhausted. And I was tired of fighting the Premier’s Office. For the first time, I opened up the want ads section.

  About halfway through my political career, in 2005, I gave an interview where I speculated about how long I’d stay in politics. I said then, “I’m here for a good time, not necessarily a long time. I don’t want to be a career politician. I am here only as long as it makes sense.” Quite suddenly, in the spring of 2008, it no longer made sense.

  I came to believe that it wasn’t right for someone in Cabinet to be job-hunting. So after spending the summer discussing the matter exhaustively with Susan, I decided I was going to leave.

  When I told the Premier in September, he was at first confused by my explanation. I was nervous and therefore verbose but inarticulate in explaining what I was doing. Or perhaps my reasons for leaving were not compelling.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why are you leaving?”

  I paused for a moment. Looking back now, I wonder if the thought crossed my mind that, in fact, there was no good reason for me to leave, only bad ones. Was I leaving because of ego, pride, or fear? I don’t think so, but nor could I pinpoint my motivation, other than a strong intuition that it was time to go. Or, as I’d said in that interview years earlier: “I am here only as long as it makes sense.” In short, it no longer made sense to me that I remain in office. And ten years of public service was enough, I thought, to refute the argument that I owed it to the people to remain an MPP regardless of my own sensibilities.

  Moreover, I’d always believed that the second an MPP lost his or her mojo, it was time to go and give someone else that opportunity. (Which is exactly what happened: Dr. Erik Hoskins, former head of War Child, a non-profit organization assisting child victims of war, was elected Liberal MPP of St. Paul’s in a by-election after I resigned.)

  To McGuinty’s question, then, I blurted out: “I just know in my gut that it’s time to go, Dalton. It’s just time.”

  Suddenly, the Premier becam
e laudatory, cheerful, and, for him, effusive. I couldn’t help but think he was thrilled to learn of my decision to leave, but perhaps that’s unfair to him, and more than a little self-flattering. Perhaps he was just happy for me.

  At the time, I didn’t have a job to go to but didn’t think I’d have much trouble landing one. But before I could finish drafting my farewell speech to the media that same afternoon, I got a phone call from Peter Wilkinson, the Premier’s chief of staff and enforcer in the government.

  “You can’t leave now,” he said. The Conservative Leader John Tory was without a seat in the Legislature. He’d lost his seat in the general election, having lost his bid to unseat Education Minister Kathleen Wynne in Toronto. Now he was hunting high and low for by-election in a winnable seat.

  “If you leave, John Tory will run in St. Paul’s and we don’t want to give him an opportunity—”

  “So I’ll hang onto my seat ‘until further notice,’” I replied. Wilkinson rejected that and every other argument I had for stepping down from Cabinet.

  “We have our foot on his throat,” Wilkinson said, “and we can’t take it off at this time.”

  I didn’t see why having John Tory as Conservative Leader was such a threat to McGuinty, given his overwhelming victory in the polls in 2007. However, as ever I underestimated the political prowess of McGuinty and his team. In hindsight, a John Tory–led Conservative Party might very well have succeeded in the 2011 election.

  Wilkinson asked me to stay until the spring of 2009, because he figured by then they’d be rid of Tory. (They were right.) It was less than a year, which was not unreasonable.

  He then said that the Premier wanted to offer me the Economic Development portfolio, to ensure that I didn’t get stuck in a portfolio prone to elongated standoffs. I didn’t want to bolt from Aboriginal Affairs next spring if tensions had arisen between a First Nation and a local community or police, which happened sometimes. Little did we know that the economy was about to take an interesting turn.

  So I agreed to stay. And on September 18, 2008, I was sworn in to what would be my last cabinet post. Susan, Sadie, and Louie came to the small swearing-in ceremony. Afterwards, a photo was taken at the press conference that had me literally flexing my biceps, with McGuinty caught in the background looking perplexed. Thus began a crescendo of ego flexing that would end abruptly—in 28 seconds.

  The weekend after I was appointed Economic Czar, Lehman Brothers collapsed, the global financial crisis blew up, and the automotive crisis hit the largest manufacturer of vehicles in North America: Ontario.

  Politically, the portfolio was stressful but invigorating. I went to Congress with my federal counterpart and friend Tony Clement to lobby Congress and the administration to assist Chrysler and General Motors. I found myself at the largest boardroom table I’d ever seen, and ever will see, at Chrysler headquarters in Michigan, across from Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli (he of golden parachute fame for his $200-million-plus take from Home Depot).

  Nardelli was incredibly charming, joshing with each of us like we were old friends. Then as we sat down, he blurted out, “We’re going to go under if you don’t give us a loan.” I was flanked by the Finance Minister, Dwight Duncan, and the International Trade Minister, Sandra Pupatello, both of whom represented the automanufacturing capital of Canada, Windsor.

  “How much you looking for?” I said, before I could stop myself.

  “Oh, I dunno,” waving his hand around, “$100 million to start?” Nardelli then looked over at one of his executives, who went poker-faced and silent.

  I marvelled at the chutzpah, the arrogance, of this flippant request for Ontario tax dollars, pulled out of his butt. But the number didn’t matter so much, I would see: Nardelli was looking to generate some momentum for a government bailout. Start with Ontario, then shame other jurisdictions to follow: the State of Michigan, the Government of Canada, and finally the big kahunah of cash, the U.S. Treasury.

  Nardelli would eventually have to resign as CEO, as would his counterpart at General Motors. In fact, all the global executives at Chrysler and GM turned out to be remarkably glib about their request for “free cash,” or government-backed loans.

  But loans were clearly not the way to go. Early on in the auto crisis, I called a financier in New York City at the behest of my classmate Joe Freedman, now at Brookfield Asset Management. Freedman thought that Steven Rattner, a private equity executive, would have some insight. I called Rattner at his offices at Quadrangle, in NYC.

  “I don’t know anything about the auto industry,” he said, “but I know about restructurings and that’s probably what these companies need.” Of course, Rattner went on to do just that as Obama’s Car Czar some months later.

  During this time, I had the privilege of getting to know some remarkable union leaders: Buzz Hargrove and then Ken Lewenza of the Canadian Auto Workers; Leo Gerard, the Canadian head of the United Steelworkers; and Doug Jolliffe, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. Labour politics is remarkable, to me, for its unabashed member-based populism. Labour leaders cannot survive without convincing their members that they are fighting for them no matter what, even during labour negotiations, when this process is highly professional and pragmatic. It’s tough politics, and Lewenza, in particular, showed tremendous heart in all our conversations. I admire him a lot.

  Then came my exit. Early in 2009, I was meeting with delegates from the City of Toronto to discuss their new economic plan. Under the mayor’s leadership, they were setting up Invest Toronto and Build Toronto, two new agencies intended to revitalize the city. Councillor Kyle Rae mentioned offhandedly that they were looking for a new CEO for Invest Toronto.

  So, after the meeting was over, I pulled Kyle into the adjacent office. I said, “What do you think of that job? Would you take it?” He told me he was getting out of politics altogether. But he mentioned me to Mayor David Miller. The mayor called me. We had breakfast.

  During that breakfast, he made it clear that he couldn’t just appoint me to the position. We didn’t know each other well enough for him to know that I wasn’t expecting the process to be anything other than transparent and unbiased. On the contrary, I wanted to get a fair shot at the job. That’s all one could ask. He said that I’d have to apply for the job like anyone else, and go through the inter-view process like anyone else. So I did. And I got the job.

  In the week before I left my political post, I gave another variation on a “Reverse Reaganism” speech I’d been giving at various places. I learned that the Canadian Club of Toronto wasn’t like various places. The speech caused a splash, mostly because I said it was the job of government in the new economy to identify what enterprises to back. The Premier immediately undercut it, giving one of those “what-the-minister-was-really-trying-to-say” scrums, which is the equivalent of a public spanking.

  Anyway, that sort of thing would soon be behind me. On June 3, 2009, ten years to the day after my first election, I said farewell in my last speech to the Legislature. For most of us who have the honour of occupying one of those Legislature seats, we are probably never as seized by the magnitude of that honour and responsibility than on the day that we arrive and on the day that we leave.

  “To all of you who share this chamber, on all sides of the House: I have learned much,” I said. “I have listened much. I have spoken much—much too much sometimes; sometimes a little too loud and brazen for some Upper Canadians. The best we can do here, I suppose, is to be ourselves and hope for the best. That’s what I did, and I have no regrets.”

  I had so many people to thank. And the thanks one is able to say in so short a time—to my wife, my children, my parents, my constituents, my staff and colleagues—just never seem enough.

  “My final words are to my family,” I said. “To my mom, a multiple sclerosis conqueror extraordinaire, who taught me I could do anything that I wanted to do; to my dad, who taught me exactly how to do it; and to Susan, for putting up with all th
is, for supporting me in all this, for sharing me with a lot of people and a lot of priorities. Thanks for letting me live this dream.”

  After ten years at Queen’s Park as the member for St. Paul’s, I resigned. I was off to Invest Toronto. I was on top of the world. And, less than three months later, what happened during 28 seconds would knock me off that pedestal but good.

  SIX

  Last Call

  Of all the memorable dates in my ten-year thrill ride through Ontario politics, other than my kids’ births, the one that matters most is March 7, 2006.

  That day had nothing to do with landmark legislation, or creative policy initiatives, or precedent-setting court cases, or media extravaganzas designed to enhance my profile and reputation. Rather, it was—as turning points often are—my bottoming out, my occasion of personal bewilderment and abject defeat.

  It was the day I stopped drinking. And it arrived, this day of reckoning, in its own time and not a moment too soon.

  Drinking problems are hardly a rarity in politics. Once upon a time they were almost commonplace, the injudicious antics of inebriated politicians unreported by press galleries whose inhabitants were usually just as habitually besotted.

  After all, the business is almost tailor-made for such indulgence and excess: the pressure, the travel, the socializing, the boredom, the loneliness, the euphoria of the very public successes and the humiliation of the very public defeats. The lifestyle practically screams for something to level out the highs and lows. And no few politicians have answered the bottle’s seductive call: Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Winston Churchill, Ulysses Grant, Boris Yeltsin, Edward Kennedy.

  Former Texas Governor Ann W. Richards died in her seventies, sober for more than a quarter century, during which time she served as Governor of Texas and became an international celebrity after her speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Her reign as governor was cut short by one George W. Bush (also in recovery) in 1994. Richards had begun drinking heavily after first being elected in her local county. Sober and in recovery, she was elected as state Treasurer, and then Governor in 1990. She was always open about her alcoholism recovery: “I like to tell people that alcoholism is one of my strengths,” she said.