Unconventional Candour

by George Smitherman

  Long before my new relationship, I had been very open to Barbara Hall and others that I surely didn’t intend to carry on alone forever in my family mission. Fact is that my kids needed to have a new family unit formed even more than I did. Not that there could be any replacement for Christopher, but commensurate levels of energy and creativity and nurturing remain much needed for these lively little kids to prosper. Daunting prospect, though, this dating thing in the online age, especially when your Google and Wiki profiles are hot even before you are asked to share your dick pic.

  I spent a fair bit of time as an online voyeur, posting a profile without a photo just to gain access to what was on the market. Some of those sites were all about instant gratification and hook-ups, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Others targeted the more long-term-relationship-oriented person.

  Excitedly I pursued the paths toward those indicating they wanted to be part of a family. And I found nothing, and I mean nothing, that appealed to me. Even where a profile indicated that the person was interested in a partner with kids, it seemed mostly upon further evaluation that they had an ambivalence rather than a preference.

  For my fifty-third birthday weekend in February 2017, I ventured to Havana for a brief trip. I knew from having visited Havana in 2004 with my friend Jason Grier that a good time could be had by all. Jason and I found an undercover gay scene that included a party at the Castillo fortress, which protects that harbour entrance; a rooftop drag show surely not sanctioned by the state; and an array of beautiful men lining the Malecón seawall who were keen to practise their English.

  By 2017, a combination of gay-rights progress and economic reforms allowing private business to operate had created a burgeoning gay scene in Havana, complete with clubs. On my first night in Havana, my host arranged for a group of us to go to Club Las Vegas, located just metres from the Malecón meeting spot that was familiar from my earlier visit. There our party of five sat on a wall alongside the Ministry of Economics, downing a beer and delighting in the lovely evening sea breeze. It was at this very moment that I first made eye contact with Rolando Salomon Laurencio, and it was love at first sight. But it didn’t play itself out quite the way one might have anticipated.

  By the time I made eye contact with Rolando we had walked in a group a few kilometres along the Malecón en route to the club. During this walk, I learned that Rolando was a dentist and he learned that I was a former provincial minister of health. I will never forget the pride with which he showed me pictures from his cellphone of a tooth reconstruction he had completed earlier in the day.

  Rolando arrived that evening with a friend to join our party, and I still don’t know and don’t care who the friend was. That’s only important because, later in the evening, after having been thoroughly entertained by a great drag and traditional dance show, and after having consumed a lot of rum with everybody else, I picked up a very cute man who also wanted to practise his English.

  Shortly thereafter our group, now numbering six, piled into a huge 1950s taxi. (Some of those 1950s cars in Havana are fixed up and featured in travel mags, but the majority of the fleet is much less glamorous.) We rambled through the deserted backstreets of Centro Habana until the driver’s front tires proved no match for the patchwork replacement of water lines and accompanying ruts. Forced to disembark, we rocked this huge car out of the deep rut, Canadian snow-bank style. It was then that I made clear to Rolando that it was him and not my English student companion that I truly desired. I kissed him on the cheek and said, “I wish I was going home with you.”

  The next night, my evening plan was pretty much the same, but this time I travelled solo. The same scenario ensued: too much rum, a few English lessons, and a quick ride home. But on this night my BlackBerry outmatched my wits and didn’t complete the journey. That is a bad enough scenario at the best of times, but it was made worse because I hadn’t brought a computer with me. Very early the next morning, with my phone gone and utterly lacking the means to contact the network of people caring for my kids, I scrambled to get home. I rushed to a hotel on Central Park, where I confirmed that I could use a computer in the lobby. Then I diverted to get the internet access card essential in Cuba, paid a fee to skip the horrendous line, ran back to the hotel, logged onto the Air Canada site, and found I had nearly two hours until Air Canada’s daily direct flight home. I bought a ticket and hailed a taxi, stopped by my accommodation, quickly packed, and headed home without hardly a word or a trace until I reached my computer in Toronto. It was February 11, the eve of my birthday, and I was home in Toronto safe and sound with my kids but feeling utterly depressed by the stupidity that led to the loss of my BlackBerry and cut short my brief liberation.

  My fifty-third birthday hit me in a ho-hum kind of a way — that is, until I got an email from Rolando. None of my family members had reached out to share birthday greetings with me, but he did, to tell me that he had hoped to meet up and show me around Havana. “I’ll take a rain check,” I quickly told him. For days that followed, I ran up a massive phone bill as Rolando and I took up over the phone and on email. Many days, he and I would email back and forth as he was between patients; access to the internet for him was much better while he was at work. Remarkably, Cuba is mostly running the internet through some four hundred hotspots, mainly situated in parks.

  Several weeks into our fledgling long-distance relationship, I made a bold move. I recognized that it was one thing for me to meet a man and be happy, but for practical purposes he needed to fall in love with my whole team. Without Rolando’s permission, I booked a flight for me and the kids to spend March break in Cuba rather than have them go to the planned program at the local Boys and Girls Club. The kids were naturally ecstatic and seemed okay with my answer to their question, “Where will we stay?” I simply said: “I don’t know yet, but I guarantee you a pool or the ocean.” Good enough for them, but how would Rolando respond?

  His first reaction was to immediately commit to taking the time off of work, which I had hoped for but not counted on. His second was to use all of his resources (stretching them) to help find the perfect accommodation for our fledgling family. He travelled to the eastern beaches of Havana and, after a few failed attempts, secured a beach house in Guanabo.

  The kids and I are quite accustomed to rolling with whatever hand we are dealt, so we weren’t nervous or trepidatious as we set off for Havana. I guess we should have been, but I told myself we were going to step off the plane and enter the terminal, meet Rolando, and continue as if it were day one thousand and one, not day one.

  The strategy worked perfectly. Rolando, sitting in the middle of the back seat, was soon experiencing the double-cuddle effect that Michael and Kayla specialize in. The perfection was rounded out by the arrival of Rolando’s spirited and lovely Chihuahua, Doby. In fact, the competition among the three of us for the dog’s affections was significant.

  Within minutes of our arrival, the kids witnessed a bit of the chaos that’s possible when various forms of transport use a roadway at different speeds: a fast-charging motorcycle rider rode into the back of a slowing pickup truck taxi laden with passengers. Luckily the injuries, while very productive in terms of blood flow, weren’t life-threatening.

  The more challenging part of the whole visit was on the adult side of the equation, where the normal gay precaution of a “test drive” to ensure sexual compatibility hadn’t transpired. Among the barriers to intimacy is lack of privacy, but the spacious casa, walled grounds, and plunge pool met everyone’s needs.

  Rolando, Michael, and Kayla in Havana within days of our forming as a family in March 2017.

  Leaving Rolando at the airport was a very tough experience for all of us, especially Kayla. She benefited so much from the attention Rolando heaped on her. Rolando’s fine motor skills produced results that have forever rendered me “useless at nails” in Kayla’s eyes.

  After a couple of more visits and having walked Havana very extensively, we found a modest a
partmentio in Centro Havana, just a few minutes’ walk from Old Havana or the Malecón. I provided Rolando with the funds to make a home for us there. The kids travelled to Havana four times in 2017, and have made great friends with two of Rolando’s cousins. They also met Rolando’s mother, who lives a long way from Havana.

  Our wedding day, December 23, 2017. Rolando and me with my stepmother, Marilyn Smitherman.

  We tried numerous times to get a visa for Rolando to come and visit us in Canada but were denied over and over again. The system seemed biased toward the idea that every temporary visitor from Cuba is going to disappear upon arrival. However, we finally managed to get a temporary visa for Rolando to come to Toronto in December 2017 for a hastily planned wedding. The wedding came off without a hitch and was a joyous affair, with about eighty guests representing a broad cross-section of our lives, including our many new Cuban friends.

  We didn’t immediately head off on a honeymoon, but delayed that until the following March. But we did schedule a quick visit to Ottawa for a dinner with the Liberal caucus and a chance to meet and have our picture taken with the prime minister. Rolando also got to enjoy our cold winter. He probably won’t ever forget the reading of minus thirty-four degrees as we travelled through Smiths Falls on a train at 6:00 a.m. Back in Toronto, it was most delightful watching Rolando trudge up and down our outdoor stairs to the laundry room wearing his flip-flops and walking in several inches of snow. We were very surprised that a Cuban would take so readily to walking with bare feet in snow.

  Unfortunately the honeymoon was a completely different matter, on account of one of the biggest brain farts of my life. After weeks of intensive planning and an investment of well over $10,000, Rolando and I, accompan-ied by Michael and Kayla, arrived in China only to discover that I, who had travelled there about ten times prior, had arrived with an expired Chinese visa. More unsettling was that Chinese officials, instead of seeking to assist us in any way, gave us the bum’s rush, with Air Canada’s co-operation, and put all of us back on a return flight within two hours of landing in China after a thirteen-hour flight from Montreal.

  Luckily for me, love prevailed. After a brief stopover in Toronto, which we pretended was Shanghai, and a visit to the CN Tower and the Ripley’s Aquarium, we all departed for Cuba to make the best of the rest of the time that we had booked off. And while it’s difficult to replace the kinds of things you can see in China, with its long and rich history, we thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to travel outside of our home in Havana to the wonderful province of Pinar del Río and to spend several days of five-star living at Varadero.

  Of course I couldn’t stop kicking myself about the financial cost and the stupidity of my mistake, but on the other hand it proved to me the depth of the love of my family and their tremendous capability for forgiveness. What might have been an even more traumatic event for me I got over relatively easily because of their ceaseless love.

  I really love China and had worked so hard to plan the perfect trip, all to culminate on the final day at Shanghai Disney. Until this day I can’t help feeling sad about the lack of compassion shown to us in China. Neither Air Canada nor the Chinese government sought to aid us in any way. Rather, they collaborated to get us back on the airplane as fast as they could. All of this despite the fact that Shanghai is a place where one can land without a visa and be granted the privilege of staying for at least a few days. None of that was on offer to us, however.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Life After Politics?

  After I left politics following the 2010 mayoral race, when people asked me what I was doing, I would say: a lot of parenting. That was simply to remind them that I was a solo parent, which is to say I was living life on the edge all the time. But to keep the lights on at my home and to broaden my own knowledge of the world, I began working in a variety of areas, including the recruitment of students from China to a private high school in Scarborough (New Oriental International College). The school is geared toward helping Chinese students gain admission to world-class universities. More than 80 percent of them end up going to the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo.

  This recruiting role enabled me to visit at least twenty cities in China during ten different trips. I picked up a little Mandarin along the way, but I also gained a much deeper appreciation of Chinese culture and politics. At a gay night club in Shanghai after Christopher’s passing, for example, I met a young gay man, an Uighur, from the primarily Muslim community in northwestern China. He was the son of a peasant family who had been sent to a technical institute in Shanghai. So he was a minority in various ways: cultural, religious, economic, and sexual. It was a most interesting conversation, and I enjoyed it so much that I had a secret rendezvous with him in Shanghai before he returned home.

  Touring the Great Wall of China, where I worked on conquering my fear of heights, in March 2013.

  China is very complex, with almost three hundred living languages and fifty-six officially recognized ethnic minorities. If that is not enough, there is the sheer scale of the place. China has twenty-two cities bigger than Toronto. And the buildings and other structures are awe-inspiring. Take, for instance, the Terracotta Army, located in Xi’an at the end of the Silk Road. It is estimated that the “army” of sculptures contains more than eight thousand figures guarding the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Or consider the Great Wall, which is some six thousand kilometres long, or more than double Trump’s proposed Mexico wall. Construction on the wall began almost three thousand years ago.

  Equally impressive is the modern rebirth of China, with massive investment in its infrastructure and cities. In Shanghai, now a city of twenty-five million people, a whole new district (Pudong) has been built to serve as the city’s financial centre. Where once stood rice paddies and warehouses, there are now skyscrapers over one hundred storeys high.

  All this has come with a price, of course. Civic life in China is constrained by restrictions on free association, free speech, internet access, and the rule of law. But what seems restrictive to us is normal for the average Chinese citizen.

  Another pursuit for me was business start-ups. This interest sprang from Sheldon Levy, then president of Ryerson University and the only person who threw me a bone in my post-political life. He got me involved in the Digital Media Zone (DMZ), Ryerson’s incubator for technology start-ups. While working there I helped the students prove their concepts, offered business model suggestions, and prodded their market concepts, including their various financing models. Truth is, I am sure I gained as much as I offered and sought to apply some of this learning to my own benefit. Looking back at my time at Ryerson, I can say that it informed my own business model and especially the desire to make income in nuggets or chunks rather than by the hour. In this way, I have been able to make a living without having to rely on becoming a lobbyist and begging for the attention of policy-makers on behalf of clients. Or, put another way, I have been able to maintain my independence.

  Among the start-ups I can claim to having input at their infancy is Carrot Rewards, the successful behaviour-influencing app that is growing across Canada in leaps and bounds. I co-founded Social Change Rewards, Carrot’s corporate predecessor.

  Media presentation with Ryerson University president Sheldon Levy (left) and Tony Clement to announce infrastructure stimulus funds for Ryerson University.

  Over the years I also served on the boards of public companies in sectors as distinct as medical marijuana and graphite mining. On several occasions, I provided witness support in various legal matters. The greatest fun of all was the chance to do a retrospective deep dive into areas where I had been legislatively active, especially Bill 102, Ontario’s drug reform legislation.

  * * *

  While I found these pursuits rewarding, both financially and intellectually, the truth is that I missed politics almost every single day. And pretend as I might, it seemed to be what was expected of me. A lot of people still approached me even if I
didn’t know them, so I got asked a lot: “What have you been up to, George?” At an earlier stage in my life, I might have answered by saying, “240 pounds.” But those days, I said, “A lot of parenting.” (In the early years it was, “A lot of diaper changing.”) I also got comments from people who hadn’t seen me for a while and had concluded I must have been busy up in Ottawa. (Or enjoying my pension, another common misconception!) As I wrote earlier about my identity shift and the challenges that came with it for Christopher when he stopped working to raise our family, I, too, experienced quite a swirl of changes in those years after I left politics. But what I discovered is that, while I can do other things, I am and will forever be a politician.

  I had a conversation with my son, Michael, who told me, surprisingly, that he wanted to be a politician when he grew up. “What does being a politician mean to you?” I asked. “Helping people,” he said. This confirmed my thinking. Politics, at its best, involves helping individuals and communities reach their potential. Being a cabinet minister was a huge honour, but helping bring renewal to Regent Park, which I largely started during my time as an opposition MPP, is what remains with me as most satisfying. And helping to launch the careers of MPs Salma Zahid and Ahmed Hussen is an awesome reward, as well.

  * * *

  After losing to Ford in 2010, I mostly kept my views to myself. I did not spend time chirping against Rob Ford from the sidelines, even though there was a lot to chirp about. I tried hard to be a good father, experienced the joy of family, and endured the trauma of the deaths of my husband, my mother, and four cats. And I made a good enough living in the private sector. So why did I decide to get back in? There are many answers to this question, but the truth is that in my heart I never left.