Unconventional Candour

by George Smitherman

  It was an open-casket funeral, and I remember that just before the casket was finally closed, my stepmother took me aside, removed my father’s custom-made diamond ring from his finger and handed it to me. I wore that ring with pride and a sense of responsibility for my family, and later, when the laws of the country changed to allow me to marry another man, it became my wedding ring, a function it would serve not once but twice.

  The film-shop business prospered, thanks to the steady hand of Richard, my Burnhamthorpe Collegiate schoolmate. Richard was an auto mechanic, and I guess you could say I was a political mechanic. But both of us were keen to run a small business. His personality and genuine warmth made him a natural for the retail business. Our customers, who came from across a wide base, liked and trusted Richard a lot. He is a good athlete and gifted hockey player and for several years represented our business in the gay hockey league, despite his obvious deficiencies as a straight person.

  We had looked at a variety of businesses around the GTA, from downtown coffee shops to suburban tire stores. Then, by pure serendipity, we learned that a film shop was up for sale in my own neighbourhood, the Gay Village. I ended up in the rare situation where my out identity was an asset, not an impediment. We offered discretion to gay customers who didn’t want prying eyes to see their photographs. The shop we bought was already established as the trusted place to go, but we expanded the business and attracted customers from further afield, including regulars who came from as far away as Barrie. We had a clear understanding of the Criminal Code and did not test its boundaries, but there were lots of nude photos to be processed.

  One roll I never believed I would process quickly got very personal. The profile of an image could be made out many minutes before the visual proof presented itself at the other end of the machine in the form of a processed picture. Astonishingly, it was a then-lover of mine in full birthday suit with party favours deployed. Unmistakable. When the gentleman who had brought the film to my store returned less than an hour later, he found some of his pictures were missing. He likely assumed it was censorship on my part and not reputation management.

  At best, the film shop provided us with a modest livelihood. Richard stayed with it for a long time. For me, it provided some community name recognition, which is useful for an aspiring politician. So were the lessons about maintaining good relations with customers and meeting a payroll and paying huge rent and commercial property taxes. But the gradual digitization of film in the late 1990s began to erode the business and eat into our profit margin. We finally closed it in 2001, one month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The experience has given me a lot of sympathy for the plight of the store owner today and important insights into the strength of retail-level relationships. My understanding of the power of those relationships later influenced government policies in areas such as pharmacy.

  * * *

  The 1990s were also marked by my introduction to the drug scene. For much of the decade, I was high, or I wanted to be, although I can vividly recall my disgust the time I first saw cocaine at a party, with my boyfriend of the time keen to partake. Fast forward less than two years to the period after my father’s death and my aversion to drugs like cocaine had diminished, shall we say. In the years that followed, I used a whole range of drugs, both ingested and inhaled, but I never injected anything other than a flu shot. Prescription drugs or over-the-counter pain relief pills have never been my thing, either. Somewhat surprisingly, I also refrained from using sleeping pills to hasten the transition to sleep after a night of bingeing on drugs. It was the druggie take on the advice my father once gave me about drinking: “If you are going to be a man at night, you’d better be a man in the morning.”

  The so-called gay party scene consisted of raves with hot-and-cold running nubile young men. Mostly everyone was egged on by ecstasy, the preferred drug of the scene. But for me cocaine was never too far away. Sadly, as much as I might try to conjure up some exciting notion of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, I have to admit that the lion’s share of all the cocaine I ever took was consumed alone in search of escape. Perhaps surprisingly, throughout this time I maintained a variety of day jobs that required me to function at a high level.

  Quitting anything can be tough, and cocaine had a real grip on me. The lowest point came when my cocaine tastes trended from powder to crack. (Ironically, this also turned out to be the drug of choice for my opponent in the 2010 mayoral campaign, Rob Ford, although he denied it even when he was caught smoking crack on video.) In my experience, the crack-cocaine high is unrivalled in its euphoria. Unfortunately, the other big characteristic of crack is that the high doesn’t last. So, while it might be true that you can get high cheap on crack, you can’t stay high cheap. “They should just call this stuff MORE,” a fellow user cracked to me. Crack has a decidedly addictive allure; the high comes quickly, and it puts the brain on notice for more, more, and still more. If you have the money, you could easily smoke through a thousand dollars a day chasing the euphoria of that first high.

  My good fortune came in the form of an intervention from my “little brother,” Sean Kirkey, whom I first met when we were matched through Big Brothers much, much earlier when he was eleven. As an adult in the 1990s, he reminded me that marijuana could be an off-ramp drug. While not coming anywhere close to matching the euphoria of crack, it could at least settle the brain’s restlessness. Kicking the powder cocaine habit was also difficult for me. I had many false starts on the path to sobriety, aided by professional help, willpower, and cardio exercise in numerous forms. I discovered running and realized a liberation previously unknown to me. For a period of more than half a year, I also refrained from alcohol, as a couple of martinis would prove to be triggers. For the first time in my life, I also found the appeal of religion, especially the concept of forgiveness. Although I never took to organized religion, I have to thank Rev. Brent Hawkes, senior pastor at Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, for his comfort and support and his abiding calm.

  While my drug usage was known somewhat to my friends and some of my family, it was a well-kept secret from the rest of the world until 2006, when, in my role as minister of health, I attended the annual Courage to Come Back awards ceremony, sponsored by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The awards honoured people in recovery from mental health issues and addiction. As I reviewed profiles of those to be honoured later that evening, I knew that, if I was going to be true to myself, I had to come out about my own past drug use. I knew it was a big moment because I got jumpy, a bit nervous in the way I always did before a hockey game but rarely ever before a speech. Sitting at the centre table and looking up at the stage and especially those giant letters spelling out COURAGE, I was nearly bouncing in my seat, at once excited and trepidatious about the great unburdening and wanting to get on with it. “As one who has seen the wrong side of too many sunrises,” I began. The declaration was admittedly obscure; to the untrained ear, it just blended in with the standard three or four minutes of political bumph that a fellow like me is expected to deliver in an opening act role. But since I was speaking to an audience of one thousand or more and the moment was captured live on Rogers 10, I fully expected the story to emerge. I just didn’t know quite how. Call it a soft launch, if you will.

  As it happened, one of those attending that night was veteran and savvy Toronto Star reporter Robin Harvey. So I wasn’t surprised — a bit nervous, yes, but not surprised — when she contacted me the next day. With a sensitivity rarely shown by the media, she asked if I would like to expand on my words the night before. In the interview, I admitted to her that I had used “party drugs” in the past, without being specific, and I added: “When I saw that word ‘COURAGE’ so large behind on the screen, it really made me realize it would really not be right to mount the podium and make the traditional greeting. So I said what was in my heart. I left the room a better person. It was liberating. If it comes back to haunt me, so be it.”

  I have frequentl
y told closeted gay people that they need to come out to feel the liberation that comes with it. Telling the world my secret about my past drug usage would prove no less cathartic. And it was all the more powerful because I did it entirely of my own accord, under no threat of exposure or innuendo.

  That was all fine and well for me. But what about my boss and his government? Luckily for me, Dalton McGuinty is one of the most decent and thoughtful people I have ever met. If people get bored of hearing that about him, too bad. It’s true. On this occasion and a couple of others where he might have been ticked off about my distracting disclosures or behaviour, he called me only to ask about my well-being. It was one of the fewer than ten phone conversations we ever had. Afterward, he issued this statement: “I hope that [Smitherman] will serve as an inspiration to others in Ontario and wherever else who find themselves in a grip of drug addiction.”

  The early reviews were for the most part positive, with journalists and others applauding my courage. But the greatest rewards for me were the very personal expressions from those who took strength from my story in their own battles with addiction, and since I had been down that road I was glad to help even one person. Each story of recovery nourishes mine.

  A certain cross-section of the media wasn’t satisfied with my use of the vague expression “party drugs” to define my choice of stimulants, but I took full advantage of the Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard to brush aside gnarly follow-up questions. Blizzard, not my biggest fan at the best of times, was pissed off about the sympathetic press I was getting. She said enough was enough and we didn’t need the gory details. Every time I was subsequently asked to elaborate on my drug usage, I merely told people I was with Christina Blizzard on this one.

  I recall one person getting in my grill because I had shaded my past drug use with a gay connection. It was at a small group session organized by my friend Andreas Souvalotis, at McKinsey’s Toronto headquarters. McKinsey, the multinational consulting firm, was hosting a reception for visitors to Toronto for a meeting of the Young Presidents Organization, and Andreas, an avid YPOer, brought a cluster of gay CEOs together. Among them was Joel Simkhai, founder of Grindr, the gay hook-up app. (He has since sold it and is now undoubtedly a gazillionaire.)

  “I see no reason why you had to hide behind the gay community to mask your addiction,” Simkhai said very pointedly. I enjoyed the exchange. I like to think I would have done a similar thing if I were in his shoes. He was right to note that in order to deflect attention from a conversation about specific substances I used language to define a scene. And, as I noted earlier, the reality is that I mostly used drugs alone.

  I certainly think my willingness to ask the unasked questions has been a valuable asset for me, and in turn I usually tried to answer penetrating questions with candour. But not in this case, where I was calculated and used vagueness and Christina Blizzard to neatly zip the bag back up. Calculating as it may have been, I still think it was the right thing to do. Other than feeding my enemies and providing a few minutes of chum for the press, if I had been more specific, I would have been subjected to unhelpful distractions and unwittingly exposed others. Worse yet, my mother would have had to live down a few more tough days.

  People speak about regrets, and elsewhere in this book I address some of mine. Indeed, there’s lots about my drug use that I wish I could undo, especially the pain I put myself and my loved ones through. But it must also be said that, by and large, even when dealing with people on the so-called margins of society, I found them to be honourable. As strange as it may seem, there were elements of the drug community that supported one another. There is, after all, a lot of trust involved when a mobile drug delivery service drops by your house, sometimes twice in the same evening.

  * * *

  Even while I was helping to run a small business in the 1990s, politics was never far from my mind. One of my sideline efforts, with Gordon Floyd, was Liberals for Equality Rights, the group we started in response to the Legislature debate over same-sex benefits and Lyn McLeod’s flip-flop from support to opposition on the equality principle. Premier Bob Rae’s government had introduced Bill 167, which would accord the same benefits, rights, and obligations to gay couples as were already enjoyed by straight couples; yet Rae cynically chose not to whip his majority behind the bill because he saw an opportunity to blame its failure on McLeod’s Liberals. At that point in his mandate (near the end of his fourth year), Rae was more interested in stopping the then-ascendant Liberals than in advancing the cause of equality. And he succeeded.

  McLeod had campaigned in favour of gay rights during a by-election in Ian Scott’s downtown Toronto riding, which would later become my riding. (Tim Murphy was elected to replace Scott, keeping the riding for the Liberals.) But McLeod’s resolve softened under terrible attacks from various old-timers in her caucus. These attacks intensified after the Conservatives used gay equality as a wedge issue to pummel the Liberals in another by-election in Victoria-Haliburton.

  At a public meeting on Valentine’s Day 1994 convened by NDP gay activist Bob Gallagher, who was working with Rae on the bill, I stood and made the point plainly to all of those who had gathered: “There are no Liberal votes in this bill.” I was giving them fair warning that, if the government wasn’t committed to passing its own bill and subjected it to a free vote in the Legislature instead, it was destined to fail.

  Bob Rae’s political calculations aside, I was of course deeply disappointed, both in my own party and its leader. But I also learned a valuable lesson about how communities can be cynically exploited even when the matter at hand is a question of principle. During the gay-rights debate, I went to Queen’s Park to lobby Liberal MPPs on the bill, including Murray Elston, health minister in Peterson’s government and one of a bunch of “grumpy old men” who actively undermined McLeod within the caucus. Elston didn’t take kindly to my commentary about what was going on. He angrily pulled me into his office, where we engaged in a forceful back-and-forth. I think I called him a “fucker,” and I sure hope he remembers it like that, too. The bill was defeated on second reading in the Legislature on June 9, 1994, with only three Liberal MPPs in support of it. I will always remember the tension in the air when Hugh O’Neil, my old mentor, visited me that day in the members’ gallery only minutes before he would cast a No vote. “Sorry, I can’t be there for you on this one, brother,” O’Neil said.

  After the bill’s defeat, thousands of gay people took to the streets of Toronto, egged on at least in part by their mistreatment inside Queen’s Park. (To this day, I am rankled by the image of Legislative security staff putting on rubber gloves before clearing the galleries.) The Liberals, having failed to put the onus on Rae and the New Democrats to use their majority to pass the bill, were the target of the crowd’s rage. Cries of “Equality Now, Lyn’s a Cow” rang out from the corner of Bay and Wellesley streets.

  At the annual Pride Parade, the Liberal presence included me, Bill Graham, Dr. Carolyn Bennett, and Sheila Copps.

  I seriously considered quitting the party after that, but I first called David Peterson to explain my dilemma. He urged me to stay in the party and fight the good fight from inside. “You’ve been a member of the party long before Lyn and will be a member long after her,” he said. I took the advice and put my energy to work as election day chair for Dr. Carolyn Bennett, then involved in a by-election that got rolled into the 1995 general election, which swept Mike Harris and the Conservatives to power. Bennett lost. So did Tim Murphy in Toronto Centre–Rosedale, which opened the door to my own debut as a candidate four years later.

  Just prior to this, I had also gotten very involved in Bill Graham’s successful campaign for Parliament in 1993. (Finally, after two tries — a drubbing at the hands of David Crombie in 1984, and a heartbreaking squeaker loss in the free trade election of 1988 — Graham beat the Conservative incumbent, Hon. David MacDonald, by almost fifteen thousand votes.) I had high hopes I would get an offer to move to Ottawa afterward as Gra
ham’s executive assistant. But, not too surprisingly, that job went to one of Graham’s former law students, the talented Bill Charnetski.

  * * *

  Luckily for me, however, in a similar time frame, John Webster, a prominent Liberal whom I had known during the Peterson days, introduced me to Barbara Hall, a city councillor who was planning to run for mayor in 1994 against the incumbent, June Rowlands. I knew Hall’s husband, Max Beck; he and I had worked together as co-chairs of the From All Walks of Life fundraising event for AIDS. But I had not met Hall herself before then. Indeed, as a New Democrat, she was on the other team. She had run against Ian Scott in the 1985 provincial election.

  But for the 1994 mayoral election, she was trying to build a bigger tent, encompassing Liberals and Conservatives as well as New Democrats. “Everyone tells me I have to do things differently if I am going to run for mayor,” she said during our first meeting, in her warm and comfortable Cabbagetown home. “And you’re part of the different way of doing things.”

  I signed on as her campaign aide, a combination of scheduler, driver, and psychologist. It was an immersive experience in local politics, and I learned a lot from her. We were like participants in an arranged marriage where each of us knew our place. But, by good fortune, our very different personalities managed to click. It helped that Barbara and I have two things in common: a taste for hard work and for jujubes. Otherwise, we couldn’t have been more different. Until today, I still struggle while waiting for Barbara to finish her sentences. But when she does offer her thoughts, they are always considered, caring, and wise. I think of Barbara as a big sister. She and Max have been a consistent and loving presence in my life and in the lives of my children. Max was also my husband Christopher’s most treasured resource in figuring out the role of the politician’s spouse.