David Peterson’s sudden resignation meant the immediate trigger of the race, on an informal basis, to replace him as leader of the Ontario Liberal Party (among other reasons, having just become the official opposition, the party needed someone to act as the leader in the legislature). Since being even interim leader ensures a profile and access to resources not available to the other leadership candidates, the party and caucus insisted that the interim leader agree to not run for the permanent position. The very experienced Robert Nixon was chosen to fill the role, but he resigned that summer to take an appointment from the federal Conservative government. Following Nixon’s departure, Murray Elston, a senior MPP from southwestern Ontario, was chosen to take on the interim leader responsibilities on the clear and explicit condition that he was not going to throw his hat in the ring.
It was not too long after Elston’s appointment that Lyn McLeod, an MPP from Thunder Bay and former cabinet minister, announced her decision to seek the leadership. Following a call from her former chief of staff and campaign chair Bob Richardson, I met with Lyn and she asked me to join the effort. I was on my way to Queen’s to finish my MBA, but I said yes. I did not know Lyn well at the time, but I knew this—if she were elected leader, Lyn would be the first woman to helm one of the three mainstream political parties in Ontario.
That mission called to me. I had been long involved in recruiting women to run for political office—and in general, getting more women to take on higher profile roles in politics, as campaign managers or presidents of local riding associations. A woman being elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party would put a pretty major crack in that thick glass ceiling. But as the campaign ramped up, I couldn’t actually contribute that much; the effort was being run out of Toronto and I was at university more than two hours away. Although it was killing me, I convinced myself I had to stay in Kingston and focus on grad school.
Lesson: Sometimes you just have to drop the gloves and fight for what you believe in, especially if it means advancement for a woman.
All that changed when Murray Elston announced he was running, breaking his commitment to stay out of the race when he was appointed interim leader. His stated reason was that he could not leave the leadership to such a weak field. That blatant arrogance and the broken commitment made me angry, but I still managed to keep my focus on my academics. After all, I had three semesters left to finish the MBA and return to the workforce. Surely to God I could stay away from politics for that long.
Wrong. I remember the phone ringing like it was yesterday. It was the landline at the place I had rented in Kingston (it would be years before cellphones became commonplace). It was late in the day and I was head down, working on a presentation due the next morning. For some reason I answered the phone. On the other end of the line was my friend Dave Gene, an experienced organizer and political staffer. He was a streetfighter who learned from some of the best in his home community of Windsor. Like me, he was a lifelong operative and proud of it.
Dave’s opening comment was along the lines of, “Well, your candidate should just drop out now.” When I asked why, given that Lyn was the frontrunner, Dave laughed. He stated that with Murray Elston now in the race, it was over. The province wasn’t ready to elect a woman, he said, and Elston would win in a landslide. I remember having to firmly hold onto the phone, as my rage at the audacity and presumptuousness of his statement had caused my hands to shake. I pulled it together long enough to provide a generalized response through gritted teeth, along the lines of, “We’ll see about that.” I thanked him for the call and hung up.
I would later joke that Lyn should send Dave a thank you note for making that call. Overnight my priorities shifted. I was not about to let the first woman positioned to succeed in a leadership race be waved aside because a middle-aged Caucasian male from southwestern Ontario had broken his word and entered the race at the last minute. What’s worse, he and his supporters had the nerve to believe he could win without a fight.
Refocusing my attention on Lyn’s campaign meant I had to find a way to spend as much time in Toronto as I could. Scott Reid, a Young Liberal from Brockville whom I had worked with during the 1990 Paul Martin leadership, was doing his undergraduate degree at Queen’s at the time and he was supporting Lyn. I approached Scott with my dilemma, and he was all in. He and I would drive into Toronto late Friday night or early on Saturday morning, returning late Sunday night. I worked full-out all weekend at my desk in the campaign office. When I could take a break from the campaign, or if I had an assignment due Monday, I did my homework at that same desk. Folks would often comment about the pile of books surrounding me (stacks of tomes in the areas of finance, statistics, international relations) as I barked out orders for the campaign. More than once during that leadership race, I silently thanked my large Italian family who had taught me the very valuable skill of holding two or three conversations at the same time.
Christmas break came, and I headed home as early as possible to aid in the race. Mark Munro, one of the young men working on the campaign, had worked with me when I was chief of staff to Ken Black at Tourism and Recreation, and he was well aware of my management style. He issued a memo to campaign staff joking that Christmas had been cancelled: Pat was coming home and there was work to do. While mostly a joke, with the delegate selection meetings taking place in mid-January and the convention happening February 7 to 9, 1992, in Hamilton, there was no time to lose. The office stayed open right through the Christmas break and anyone able to work on the campaign did so. (It also meant that I saw my family only briefly on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.)
At the end of the delegate selection meetings in mid-January, I gave Lyn a quick briefing about how the weekend had gone. In the middle of the discussion I noticed her getting a bit emotional. I realized she was quite relieved and surprised by how well we had done. It became clear to me that Lyn had prepared for the worst. I felt bad that I hadn’t ever briefed her on our plan to elect as many delegates as possible. It was a moment in which I was reminded that politicians are human beings, with their own uncertainties and fears. She had let us do our work and never second-guessed us, but I could have spared her the anxiety. I was sure to provide updates going forward (and it was something I was careful to remember in every campaign I ran thereafter).
Lesson: If you are confident you have a good idea, fight to be heard. If needed, stamp your feet to force the leadership to hear you out. And if you are that leader, don’t be so quick to dismiss someone fighting for your attention. They just might have an idea that can change the game.
The ground had been organized exceptionally well, with essentially a Lyn McLeod campaign manager in every riding. As importantly, we had spent a lot of time figuring out how best to work within the very complex delegate selection rules that had been put into place by the party executive. (Essentially, the number of delegates assigned to a candidate at the riding level was proportional to the percentage of the vote a candidate won in that riding. It meant you had to have enough people willing to run as delegates; otherwise you risked that a hard-won spot would be left unfilled.)
Bob Lopinski, a Liberal in his early twenties who had volunteered on the leadership campaign, had been after me for a few weekends in a row to sit down and discuss how to best work within the rules. I pushed him back more than once, citing more critical priorities. Finally, he refused to take no for an answer, and I heard him out. He had to walk me through it more than once, but I eventually realized that he’d found a way to make the rules work in our favour, given that we had the advantage of a lot of people seeking to become Lyn McLeod delegates.
We took the time to figure out which ridings would not have enough local people to fill their delegate slates—these were generally ridings where the Liberal Party did not have a strong base. We contacted the executives of those ridings and offered to submit enough out-of-riding memberships to ensure that the ratio of in-riding members to out-of-riding members was met (which in most cases was 10 percent, so for every ten local members we added one out-of-riding membership). Along with that, we made the commitment that we would not, without their express approval, run delegates who did not live in the riding.
Most ridings were grateful that we offered a way to ensure they did not get taken advantage of by campaigns willing to take their spots. As a result, when our competitors showed up on the day of