S
scarberiankhatru
Guest
But they might (sort of, but not really) get the chance to if Bob Rae keeps pace in the leadership race.
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Who deserves to be the Federal Liberal Leader?
A
Abeja de Almirante
Guest
I wondered if someone would catch that. Okay, to clarify in 1990, more people voted NDP than any other party, and a majority of Ontario ridings (74 of 130) voted NDP.
R
rbtaylor
Guest
I'm not sure the western vote is all that important. The Liberals at best in the next election would get about 20 seats between the praries and BC. Winning back 50% or more of Quebec is far more valuable.
B
bizorky
Guest
Dion is not all that popular in Quebec.
G
garden of evil
Guest
that is an understatement. I would go as far as to say that he is quite hated in most of Quebec.
D
Darkstar416
Guest
Although so was Chretien.
M
Mark Dowling
Guest
If I were a Liberal (there's no party which I can currently feel support of enough to join it) I'd want Ignatieff - he has the brains and the courage to make tough calls rather than popular ones. (Unlike the Martin era MPs who found "doubts" about the Afghanistan mission but not until Martin had left office)
Failing that I'd go for Dion.
Bevilacqua I know nothing about bar his pandering immigration policy. A Rae leadership will always be hobbled by his NDP past. Hall Findlay seems interesting but seeing her on TV she didn't strike me as leadership material (but maybe cabinet if she can get elected). Dryden - couldn't inspire his way out of a wet paper bag. Volpe - I'm too old (over 18) to find him compelling. Kennedy - lightweight, and should have stayed at provincial level until the schools were properly sorted out. Bennett - her swipe at the anti-childcare lobby will follow her, even though you could see what she was getting at. Fry - useless. Brison - should bide his time considering he's only just in the door from the Tories.
Failing that I'd go for Dion.
Bevilacqua I know nothing about bar his pandering immigration policy. A Rae leadership will always be hobbled by his NDP past. Hall Findlay seems interesting but seeing her on TV she didn't strike me as leadership material (but maybe cabinet if she can get elected). Dryden - couldn't inspire his way out of a wet paper bag. Volpe - I'm too old (over 18) to find him compelling. Kennedy - lightweight, and should have stayed at provincial level until the schools were properly sorted out. Bennett - her swipe at the anti-childcare lobby will follow her, even though you could see what she was getting at. Fry - useless. Brison - should bide his time considering he's only just in the door from the Tories.
S
scarberiankhatru
Guest
"Dryden - couldn't inspire his way out of a wet paper bag."
Just curious...have you heard him speak in person?
Just curious...have you heard him speak in person?
B
bizorky
Guest
Dryden is very intelligent and interesting, and it is unfortunate that media-oriented perceptions are what hobble him. He does not fit into the sound bite model very well.
Findlay is also quite interesting and has gotten very solid notice from the party. She would have made a far better MP for her constituents than Stronach. I hope she stays in public life.
Findlay is also quite interesting and has gotten very solid notice from the party. She would have made a far better MP for her constituents than Stronach. I hope she stays in public life.
S
scarberiankhatru
Guest
^ Which is a shame because I (and others) wouldn't be surprised if Dryden (or Rae, for that matter) mopped the floor with Harper in a televised debate, not that either has the best chance of being selected leader. I guess that's a main dilemma - select the candidate that's best for the party or select the candidate that'll beat Harper? I don't know if any of the 11 fits both criteria.
Hall Findlay may have made a better MP, but for her constituents? Had she ever even been to Aurora before that election? Maybe not in the media soundbites, but in person she came across as total packaged fluff - yet, oddly legitimate fluff, unlike Volpe, Bennett, Fry...
Hall Findlay may have made a better MP, but for her constituents? Had she ever even been to Aurora before that election? Maybe not in the media soundbites, but in person she came across as total packaged fluff - yet, oddly legitimate fluff, unlike Volpe, Bennett, Fry...
A
afransen TO
Guest
A Star article about Martha Hall-Findlay... I found it interesting, and learned a fair bit about this relative unknown. I think it's a bit of a fan-boy piece, however.
Anyway,
----------------------------
Martha's the one to watch
Jul. 9, 2006. 01:28 PM
LINDA DIEBEL
There's something about an underdog and, above all else, this is the story of an underdog. An underdog on a political journey.
Our protagonist is Martha Hall Findlay, who jumped into the race to lead the Liberal party without a seat in Parliament, a political base, organization, money, name recognition or even a credible plan. Instead, with the leadership vote five months away, she's largely relying on touring the country in a big, red bus with her son Everett, 23, at the wheel.
The ending has yet to unfold but the low point of this story — and in a strange way, its beginning — came on the evening of May 16, 2005, when two important and interconnected events occurred in two cities. There was a winner and a loser that night and Hall Findlay was most definitely on the losing end, or so it seemed at the time.
Both events were dinners. Over venison and mango terrine at 24 Sussex Dr., former prime minister Paul Martin celebrated a deal with Belinda Stronach which resulted, the next day, in the announcement she would cross the floor from Conservative to Liberal benches, be sworn in as human resources minister, vote for the government's budget (thereby saving it) and run as a Liberal in the next election.
There was one small obstacle, which, that same evening, was being quietly handled over dinner at Reds bistro in the Toronto financial district.
That obstacle was Hall Findlay, a 5-foot-7, reed-thin brunette with a big brain and an impressive record as a lawyer and consultant, who had come out of nowhere to lose by 687 votes to Stronach in Newmarket-Aurora in June 2004. It was a huge achievement for a political neophyte who ran after the party's first choice, John Taylor, sent out an email saying he no longer had the stomach to run for the scandal-plagued Liberals. So dedicated was Hall Findlay to winning the riding the next time, she left her home in Collingwood, moved to Newmarket, bought a house and, in the spring of 2005, was acclaimed as the Liberal candidate.
You can see the problem. There couldn't be two Liberal candidates in Newmarket-Aurora, and Stronach ... well, let's just say she wanted to keep her riding, if not her party.
What to do, what to do?
The official problem-solver was Karl Littler, senior aide in the PMO. He delivered the news to Hall Findlay that May evening at a Liberal reception at Reds. Or, as she recalls: "Technically, Karl told my friend Liana Turrin who was with me, who then took me aside (into the women's washroom, to be precise) to tell me that `Belinda is crossing the floor.'
"It was pretty crowded and that was a more private place to absorb the news. I had just been introduced earlier by (then-cabinet member) Bill Graham to the crowd as one of `our key candidates' getting ready for what we felt was an imminent election, so you can imagine it was a tough message to deliver. Then, we went to dinner."
They went upstairs, where they were joined by party president Michael Eizenga, who remembers Littler telling him: "We may need somebody with soft hands." Hall Findlay didn't need to be told what was coming: they asked her to step aside. Stronach was the bride — rich, well-known, glamorous, daughter of auto-parts magnate Frank, linked to Bill Clinton — and who was Hall Findlay but a bridesmaid?
It was devastating because Hall Findlay could taste victory. She remembers that "there was a lot of polling going on in the riding and we knew it was going to go Liberal." Without her. Moreover, nominations were wrapped up, too late for Hall Findlay to seek a spot in another GTA riding.
Still, without a fight, over red wine and the rare steak she suddenly craved, she acquiesced, asking for nothing.
She was hugely disappointed. Some were quick to surmise she was naïve, too pliable and no match for the sophisticated Liberal establishment. Collateral damage. But is that true? Or, in light of subsequent events, was her reaction that night not a shrewd move in a lifetime of canny choices?
On a recent Monday afternoon, as her Damon DayBreak six-wheeler rolled out of a Mississauga parking lot, Hall Findlay settled back on board to talk about her life.
During the day of campaigning — a Federation of Portuguese Canadian Business & Professionals of Toronto luncheon teeming with Liberals and an evening meeting with members of various Liberal women's clubs in Newmarket — the traffic-stopping, tomato-red bus was a hit, tootling along to a backbeat of beep-beeps and friendly shouts.
Somehow it suits her. She's the antithesis of conventional.
Born in Toronto 46 years ago, the fifth of six children (three girls, three boys), Hall Findlay lived comfortably in York Mills, attending Toronto French School until Grade 8 when she was 13 and her parents separated. She moved with her mother in vastly reduced circumstances to Thornbury, at the base of the Blue Mountains, northwest of Toronto.
She skipped three grades (9, 10 and 11) to enter Grade 12 at nearby Meaford High School, juggling extracurricular activities — she was a competitive downhill racer and a star on Canada's National Training Squad — with classes.
She graduated from high school at 15.
"She's the smartest one in the family. They did all the IQ testing and called my mother," says older sister Dr. Betsy Hall Findlay, a Banff plastic surgeon. (The Hall sisters, both now divorced, married brothers.) "She can read something once and take in the whole thing. She's amazing. The rest of us had to work."
Unsure of her future, Hall Findlay coached skiing and worked in construction, mainly as a carpenter on new housing projects, using skills her father taught her and on-the-job training. She enrolled in the International Relations Program at the University of Toronto, married Doug Findlay and, in her second year in 1981, gave birth to her first child, Katie. At Osgoode Hall Law School, she had two more children, Everett in '83 and Patrick in '85, while running a children's clothing business with her husband and living above their Yonge St. store.
Patrick was born the day after her final exams: "I was like a house. I waddled in and my prof was so, `Oh my God, hang on for another three hours.'"
She applied to article at the Bay St. offices of Baker & McKenzie. Under summer employment on the application, she wrote: "Having babies."
She spent six years at the firm before being lured by BCE Mobile and, then, The Rider Group, where she was vice-president, corporate development and general counsel. In 1999, she founded a management consulting company, the General Counsel Group, specializing in telecommunications and high-Tech industries.
She has lived in Toronto, Newmarket, Collingwood, Calgary and the Czech Republic (on a six-month telecommunications contract) and, in addition to French, speaks varying degrees of Czech, Russian, German, Spanish and Italian. She has served on countless boards, including the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs, sailed from Bonaire in the Caribbean to Panama, skippered a circumnavigation of Georgian Bay and helped raise three kids.
But what has she done? people ask. She's never been elected, whine the naysayers. What skills could she possibly have?
It drives her supporters crazy. They point out that Liberal leadership front-runner Michael Ignatieff, journalist, author and human rights professor, has been an MP for only five months.
"I'm a huge fan of Martha's," says David McGown, president of the non-partisan Couchiching Institute and a CIBC vice-president. A former Tory, he says Hall Findlay inspired him to join the Liberals and work for her campaign.
"She has demonstrated leadership skills which, I argue, are transferable to politics .... There is a window of opportunity for the Liberal party to look not just within its usual ranks but at absolutely the best and brightest the country has to offer."
Hall Findlay is blasé about her achievements, tossing off: "It's in the genes to do stuff."
Evidently.
`I'm not a critic of the other candidates, but some are pushing 60. Whoever wins has to be able to commit for at least a decade'
Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal leadership candidate
One grandmother bought three islands on sight for $5, while on a U of T canoe trip around Georgian Bay in the early 1900s. A grandfather flew in World War I when pilots could barely avoid shooting off their own propellers.
Her father, Hugh Hall, landed in France with the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders on D-Day, taking part in the liberation of Holland and winning the Military Cross. With a Harvard MBA, he started a laboratory supply business, sold it, divorced his wife and died just shy of 70, essentially from (his daughter says matter-of-factly) alcoholism. Besides carpentry, he taught her to defend her opinions in a loud, scrappy family and she loved him.
But her mother, Betty, is her hero. "She's the single best-read person I've ever known. She made all three of her daughters very independent," she says of a woman who went back for her university degree at 60 and, as a trustee, stood up to school-board colleagues over the issue of the Lord's Prayer (she thought it had no place in public schools) despite their disapproval. "At every school board meeting, there was my little shy mother standing out in the hallway (during the prayer) just to make a point," says Hall Findlay. "She was pretty tough, with a lot of good lessons for a daughter to learn."
Hall Findlay has been the early surprise of a protracted leadership contest, which will run until the Nov. 29-Dec. 3 convention in Montreal. With no expectations, she impressed with strong performances at the recent leaders' debates in Winnipeg and Moncton, getting good reviews in the English and French media. Fluidly bilingual, she was at ease on stage, showing flashes of humour and grit, and comfort with policy issues.
The Winnipeg audience cheered her response after Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison worried about what The New York Times might have said had Ottawa not extended the Canadian Forces' mission in Afghanistan to 2009. Says Hall Findlay: "We do not establish foreign policy in this country because we're worried about what the headline in The New York Times is going to be."
She doesn't particularly stand out from her 10 competitors on policy — they are all Liberals, after all — and argues that substantive agreement on, say, the primacy of environmental and health issues is a plus.
(Ignatieff and Brison differ from the others in supporting the extended Afghan mission.) She says she's running because she's a "doer," wants to energize the grassroots and is "serious about the renewal of the Liberal party."
Sounds apple pie-ish but supporters say she's sincere and she is logging the hard kilometres coast to coast. "It's time," say the slogans on her bus. "Saisons le moment."
She believes she's surmounting the tough "Martha Hall Who?'' stage and picking up support, though not a single MP. Michelle Simson, president of the Ontario Women's Liberal Commission and Scarborough Rouge River riding president, personally endorsed Hall Findlay, explaining she "brings excitement to an otherwise ho-hum leadership campaign."
Then comes the clanger. "It's too bad," adds Simson, "she doesn't have a chance."
That's the take on Hall Findlay. Smart, appealing, dynamic, refreshing, blah-blah-blah — and not a snowball's chance. You don't take on powerful campaigns with substantial depth (Ignatieff's, for one) with a red bus and a prayer and think you can blaze through a convention of 5,500 Liberal delegates to win.
That's exactly what she thinks. It's the M.O. of the achiever used to setting and achieving seemingly impossible goals. Classic underdog.
She's starting to hear the magic words from a few Liberals that she could be their second choice and recites what she says Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty recently told her: "Martha, there's nothing wrong with being everybody's second choice." (He won the provincial Liberal leadership in 1996, on the fifth ballot against Gerard Kennedy, now in the federal race against Hall Findlay.)
She argues she's the only choice because her competitors either aren't bilingual or can't offer generational change, or both. As she sees it: "With all due respect, I'm not a critic of the other candidates, but some of them are pushing 60. Whoever wins has to be able to commit for at least a decade."
She's ready. Always interested in politics, she waited until her children were grown to think about running for office. She began to get the word out in Liberal circles in 2003. Soon came the 2004 election, the 2005 nomination and that disheartening dinner at Reds, when she was suddenly off the ticket in Newmarket-Aurora.
But let's look at that evening again.
Hall Findlay bristles at being labelled naïve. "I am so far from naïve, you have no idea. People kept asking me, `What did you get promised?' But I didn't ask for anything in return because I didn't want it to be about quid pro quo. I have to sleep at night and I didn't want to act like a jerk. What happened, happened."
Besides, what could she have gotten?
"No one was in a position to offer her anything. No one would have done that anyway," says party president Eizenga. "I thought Martha was a real class act that night ... She said that on many issues she and Belinda had similar views so she was comfortable with Belinda being a member of the party ... But we knew it was difficult for her. She was ambitious and this was something she had worked for and committed herself to. I only learned about Belinda myself very shortly before the dinner."
Across Newmarket-Aurora, Liberals were stunned, with some bitterness lingering even after Stronach's impressive win last January. "I just found the whole situation very disappointing," says one senior Liberal in the riding. "I didn't campaign the last time, it was so problematic for me."
Local newspaper editor Ron Wallace, from The Auroran, was flabbergasted. Hall Findlay had proven herself; here was an example of everything people detested about Liberal party politics. Big-footing.
"With all due respect, the shit hit the fan," says Wallace. "I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I wanted Martha to come out screaming and yelling and pulling out Belinda's hair and gouging her eyes out. A lot of people thought, `Well, okay, the Liberals will take care of Martha,' but they didn't. They just said, `Too bad.' I had a chance to sit down with Paul Martin after that and I had just one question for him. I asked him point-blank what they did for Martha Hall Findlay, and he said, `Nothing.'"
Not quite true. Martin telephoned Hall Findlay the morning of May 17, 2005, after the press conference with his newest Liberal. So did Stronach. Of the two phone calls, Hall Findlay felt "Paul Martin had a better understanding of what it meant to me. But that's just from experience."
Hall Findlay didn't see herself as a loser. From her perspective, an ugly, internecine bloodletting — she would have lost and it would have looked like a catfight — would have served neither the party nor her own far-from-extinguished political ambitions.
"In an ironic way, it has been good," she says. "So many people are saying to me now, `Boy, did you ever handle that beautifully.' It has reflected well on me, I think."
She left the dinner, without enemies, all options open for her political future, when Martin resigned and, one by one, his expected successors announced they wouldn't be seeking the leadership."
Arguably, she is standing where Stronach would like to be. The political lives of these two women appear intertwined and, this time, Hall Findlay, not Stronach, has the shot at the leadership. Some Liberals are already wagering bottles of fine wine that Stronach has tired of politics and will not seek re-election (though with Hall Findlay now living in Toronto with her partner, Rogers executive Randy Reynolds, it's unlikely she would ever run again in Newmarket-Aurora).
"Baloney!" Stronach told the Sunday Star about the rumour. "Not true. Maybe it's wishful thinking."
Stronach said she bowed out, after building an organization and "strongly considering" a leadership bid, because the party is not democratic (she favours one member, one vote, instead of delegates) and "my principles are important to me."
Others challenge that explanation, arguing Stronach was not ready for prime time, particularly with her poor French. After the January election, she had to stand in front of the cameras on the Hill and ask a reporter to repeat a question in English. So embarrassing.
Nevertheless, she apparently pushed hard to run and had to be talked out of it by, among others, David Peterson, who masterminded her deal to cross the floor. It's thought he told her she couldn't win, wouldn't show well and would humiliate herself. "She wanted to run badly because she enjoys being at the centre of everything, but she's got to let others take centre stage right now," says one Liberal source who believes Stronach is in a league by herself — "This is not a politician. This is a celebrity at the nexus of rock `n' roll and politics" — and could, with work, take the Liberal crown one day.
In the meantime, let's see what the self-professed policy wonk can do. While the bilingual Hall Findlay switches from English to French on the Liberal barbecue circuit this summer, Stronach plans to spend a couple of weeks in French immersion in Quebec City, as well as practising in Montreal where she has a condo. What role she will play at the leadership convention is unclear and she won't say whom she likes among the candidates.
We shall assume it's not Hall Findlay.
Stronach limited herself to a written statement about the candidate who stepped aside for her last May: "Martha is a smart and talented person and I wish her luck."
Additional articles by Linda Diebel
Anyway,
----------------------------
Martha's the one to watch
Jul. 9, 2006. 01:28 PM
LINDA DIEBEL
There's something about an underdog and, above all else, this is the story of an underdog. An underdog on a political journey.
Our protagonist is Martha Hall Findlay, who jumped into the race to lead the Liberal party without a seat in Parliament, a political base, organization, money, name recognition or even a credible plan. Instead, with the leadership vote five months away, she's largely relying on touring the country in a big, red bus with her son Everett, 23, at the wheel.
The ending has yet to unfold but the low point of this story — and in a strange way, its beginning — came on the evening of May 16, 2005, when two important and interconnected events occurred in two cities. There was a winner and a loser that night and Hall Findlay was most definitely on the losing end, or so it seemed at the time.
Both events were dinners. Over venison and mango terrine at 24 Sussex Dr., former prime minister Paul Martin celebrated a deal with Belinda Stronach which resulted, the next day, in the announcement she would cross the floor from Conservative to Liberal benches, be sworn in as human resources minister, vote for the government's budget (thereby saving it) and run as a Liberal in the next election.
There was one small obstacle, which, that same evening, was being quietly handled over dinner at Reds bistro in the Toronto financial district.
That obstacle was Hall Findlay, a 5-foot-7, reed-thin brunette with a big brain and an impressive record as a lawyer and consultant, who had come out of nowhere to lose by 687 votes to Stronach in Newmarket-Aurora in June 2004. It was a huge achievement for a political neophyte who ran after the party's first choice, John Taylor, sent out an email saying he no longer had the stomach to run for the scandal-plagued Liberals. So dedicated was Hall Findlay to winning the riding the next time, she left her home in Collingwood, moved to Newmarket, bought a house and, in the spring of 2005, was acclaimed as the Liberal candidate.
You can see the problem. There couldn't be two Liberal candidates in Newmarket-Aurora, and Stronach ... well, let's just say she wanted to keep her riding, if not her party.
What to do, what to do?
The official problem-solver was Karl Littler, senior aide in the PMO. He delivered the news to Hall Findlay that May evening at a Liberal reception at Reds. Or, as she recalls: "Technically, Karl told my friend Liana Turrin who was with me, who then took me aside (into the women's washroom, to be precise) to tell me that `Belinda is crossing the floor.'
"It was pretty crowded and that was a more private place to absorb the news. I had just been introduced earlier by (then-cabinet member) Bill Graham to the crowd as one of `our key candidates' getting ready for what we felt was an imminent election, so you can imagine it was a tough message to deliver. Then, we went to dinner."
They went upstairs, where they were joined by party president Michael Eizenga, who remembers Littler telling him: "We may need somebody with soft hands." Hall Findlay didn't need to be told what was coming: they asked her to step aside. Stronach was the bride — rich, well-known, glamorous, daughter of auto-parts magnate Frank, linked to Bill Clinton — and who was Hall Findlay but a bridesmaid?
It was devastating because Hall Findlay could taste victory. She remembers that "there was a lot of polling going on in the riding and we knew it was going to go Liberal." Without her. Moreover, nominations were wrapped up, too late for Hall Findlay to seek a spot in another GTA riding.
Still, without a fight, over red wine and the rare steak she suddenly craved, she acquiesced, asking for nothing.
She was hugely disappointed. Some were quick to surmise she was naïve, too pliable and no match for the sophisticated Liberal establishment. Collateral damage. But is that true? Or, in light of subsequent events, was her reaction that night not a shrewd move in a lifetime of canny choices?
On a recent Monday afternoon, as her Damon DayBreak six-wheeler rolled out of a Mississauga parking lot, Hall Findlay settled back on board to talk about her life.
During the day of campaigning — a Federation of Portuguese Canadian Business & Professionals of Toronto luncheon teeming with Liberals and an evening meeting with members of various Liberal women's clubs in Newmarket — the traffic-stopping, tomato-red bus was a hit, tootling along to a backbeat of beep-beeps and friendly shouts.
Somehow it suits her. She's the antithesis of conventional.
Born in Toronto 46 years ago, the fifth of six children (three girls, three boys), Hall Findlay lived comfortably in York Mills, attending Toronto French School until Grade 8 when she was 13 and her parents separated. She moved with her mother in vastly reduced circumstances to Thornbury, at the base of the Blue Mountains, northwest of Toronto.
She skipped three grades (9, 10 and 11) to enter Grade 12 at nearby Meaford High School, juggling extracurricular activities — she was a competitive downhill racer and a star on Canada's National Training Squad — with classes.
She graduated from high school at 15.
"She's the smartest one in the family. They did all the IQ testing and called my mother," says older sister Dr. Betsy Hall Findlay, a Banff plastic surgeon. (The Hall sisters, both now divorced, married brothers.) "She can read something once and take in the whole thing. She's amazing. The rest of us had to work."
Unsure of her future, Hall Findlay coached skiing and worked in construction, mainly as a carpenter on new housing projects, using skills her father taught her and on-the-job training. She enrolled in the International Relations Program at the University of Toronto, married Doug Findlay and, in her second year in 1981, gave birth to her first child, Katie. At Osgoode Hall Law School, she had two more children, Everett in '83 and Patrick in '85, while running a children's clothing business with her husband and living above their Yonge St. store.
Patrick was born the day after her final exams: "I was like a house. I waddled in and my prof was so, `Oh my God, hang on for another three hours.'"
She applied to article at the Bay St. offices of Baker & McKenzie. Under summer employment on the application, she wrote: "Having babies."
She spent six years at the firm before being lured by BCE Mobile and, then, The Rider Group, where she was vice-president, corporate development and general counsel. In 1999, she founded a management consulting company, the General Counsel Group, specializing in telecommunications and high-Tech industries.
She has lived in Toronto, Newmarket, Collingwood, Calgary and the Czech Republic (on a six-month telecommunications contract) and, in addition to French, speaks varying degrees of Czech, Russian, German, Spanish and Italian. She has served on countless boards, including the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs, sailed from Bonaire in the Caribbean to Panama, skippered a circumnavigation of Georgian Bay and helped raise three kids.
But what has she done? people ask. She's never been elected, whine the naysayers. What skills could she possibly have?
It drives her supporters crazy. They point out that Liberal leadership front-runner Michael Ignatieff, journalist, author and human rights professor, has been an MP for only five months.
"I'm a huge fan of Martha's," says David McGown, president of the non-partisan Couchiching Institute and a CIBC vice-president. A former Tory, he says Hall Findlay inspired him to join the Liberals and work for her campaign.
"She has demonstrated leadership skills which, I argue, are transferable to politics .... There is a window of opportunity for the Liberal party to look not just within its usual ranks but at absolutely the best and brightest the country has to offer."
Hall Findlay is blasé about her achievements, tossing off: "It's in the genes to do stuff."
Evidently.
`I'm not a critic of the other candidates, but some are pushing 60. Whoever wins has to be able to commit for at least a decade'
Martha Hall Findlay, Liberal leadership candidate
One grandmother bought three islands on sight for $5, while on a U of T canoe trip around Georgian Bay in the early 1900s. A grandfather flew in World War I when pilots could barely avoid shooting off their own propellers.
Her father, Hugh Hall, landed in France with the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders on D-Day, taking part in the liberation of Holland and winning the Military Cross. With a Harvard MBA, he started a laboratory supply business, sold it, divorced his wife and died just shy of 70, essentially from (his daughter says matter-of-factly) alcoholism. Besides carpentry, he taught her to defend her opinions in a loud, scrappy family and she loved him.
But her mother, Betty, is her hero. "She's the single best-read person I've ever known. She made all three of her daughters very independent," she says of a woman who went back for her university degree at 60 and, as a trustee, stood up to school-board colleagues over the issue of the Lord's Prayer (she thought it had no place in public schools) despite their disapproval. "At every school board meeting, there was my little shy mother standing out in the hallway (during the prayer) just to make a point," says Hall Findlay. "She was pretty tough, with a lot of good lessons for a daughter to learn."
Hall Findlay has been the early surprise of a protracted leadership contest, which will run until the Nov. 29-Dec. 3 convention in Montreal. With no expectations, she impressed with strong performances at the recent leaders' debates in Winnipeg and Moncton, getting good reviews in the English and French media. Fluidly bilingual, she was at ease on stage, showing flashes of humour and grit, and comfort with policy issues.
The Winnipeg audience cheered her response after Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison worried about what The New York Times might have said had Ottawa not extended the Canadian Forces' mission in Afghanistan to 2009. Says Hall Findlay: "We do not establish foreign policy in this country because we're worried about what the headline in The New York Times is going to be."
She doesn't particularly stand out from her 10 competitors on policy — they are all Liberals, after all — and argues that substantive agreement on, say, the primacy of environmental and health issues is a plus.
(Ignatieff and Brison differ from the others in supporting the extended Afghan mission.) She says she's running because she's a "doer," wants to energize the grassroots and is "serious about the renewal of the Liberal party."
Sounds apple pie-ish but supporters say she's sincere and she is logging the hard kilometres coast to coast. "It's time," say the slogans on her bus. "Saisons le moment."
She believes she's surmounting the tough "Martha Hall Who?'' stage and picking up support, though not a single MP. Michelle Simson, president of the Ontario Women's Liberal Commission and Scarborough Rouge River riding president, personally endorsed Hall Findlay, explaining she "brings excitement to an otherwise ho-hum leadership campaign."
Then comes the clanger. "It's too bad," adds Simson, "she doesn't have a chance."
That's the take on Hall Findlay. Smart, appealing, dynamic, refreshing, blah-blah-blah — and not a snowball's chance. You don't take on powerful campaigns with substantial depth (Ignatieff's, for one) with a red bus and a prayer and think you can blaze through a convention of 5,500 Liberal delegates to win.
That's exactly what she thinks. It's the M.O. of the achiever used to setting and achieving seemingly impossible goals. Classic underdog.
She's starting to hear the magic words from a few Liberals that she could be their second choice and recites what she says Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty recently told her: "Martha, there's nothing wrong with being everybody's second choice." (He won the provincial Liberal leadership in 1996, on the fifth ballot against Gerard Kennedy, now in the federal race against Hall Findlay.)
She argues she's the only choice because her competitors either aren't bilingual or can't offer generational change, or both. As she sees it: "With all due respect, I'm not a critic of the other candidates, but some of them are pushing 60. Whoever wins has to be able to commit for at least a decade."
She's ready. Always interested in politics, she waited until her children were grown to think about running for office. She began to get the word out in Liberal circles in 2003. Soon came the 2004 election, the 2005 nomination and that disheartening dinner at Reds, when she was suddenly off the ticket in Newmarket-Aurora.
But let's look at that evening again.
Hall Findlay bristles at being labelled naïve. "I am so far from naïve, you have no idea. People kept asking me, `What did you get promised?' But I didn't ask for anything in return because I didn't want it to be about quid pro quo. I have to sleep at night and I didn't want to act like a jerk. What happened, happened."
Besides, what could she have gotten?
"No one was in a position to offer her anything. No one would have done that anyway," says party president Eizenga. "I thought Martha was a real class act that night ... She said that on many issues she and Belinda had similar views so she was comfortable with Belinda being a member of the party ... But we knew it was difficult for her. She was ambitious and this was something she had worked for and committed herself to. I only learned about Belinda myself very shortly before the dinner."
Across Newmarket-Aurora, Liberals were stunned, with some bitterness lingering even after Stronach's impressive win last January. "I just found the whole situation very disappointing," says one senior Liberal in the riding. "I didn't campaign the last time, it was so problematic for me."
Local newspaper editor Ron Wallace, from The Auroran, was flabbergasted. Hall Findlay had proven herself; here was an example of everything people detested about Liberal party politics. Big-footing.
"With all due respect, the shit hit the fan," says Wallace. "I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. I wanted Martha to come out screaming and yelling and pulling out Belinda's hair and gouging her eyes out. A lot of people thought, `Well, okay, the Liberals will take care of Martha,' but they didn't. They just said, `Too bad.' I had a chance to sit down with Paul Martin after that and I had just one question for him. I asked him point-blank what they did for Martha Hall Findlay, and he said, `Nothing.'"
Not quite true. Martin telephoned Hall Findlay the morning of May 17, 2005, after the press conference with his newest Liberal. So did Stronach. Of the two phone calls, Hall Findlay felt "Paul Martin had a better understanding of what it meant to me. But that's just from experience."
Hall Findlay didn't see herself as a loser. From her perspective, an ugly, internecine bloodletting — she would have lost and it would have looked like a catfight — would have served neither the party nor her own far-from-extinguished political ambitions.
"In an ironic way, it has been good," she says. "So many people are saying to me now, `Boy, did you ever handle that beautifully.' It has reflected well on me, I think."
She left the dinner, without enemies, all options open for her political future, when Martin resigned and, one by one, his expected successors announced they wouldn't be seeking the leadership."
Arguably, she is standing where Stronach would like to be. The political lives of these two women appear intertwined and, this time, Hall Findlay, not Stronach, has the shot at the leadership. Some Liberals are already wagering bottles of fine wine that Stronach has tired of politics and will not seek re-election (though with Hall Findlay now living in Toronto with her partner, Rogers executive Randy Reynolds, it's unlikely she would ever run again in Newmarket-Aurora).
"Baloney!" Stronach told the Sunday Star about the rumour. "Not true. Maybe it's wishful thinking."
Stronach said she bowed out, after building an organization and "strongly considering" a leadership bid, because the party is not democratic (she favours one member, one vote, instead of delegates) and "my principles are important to me."
Others challenge that explanation, arguing Stronach was not ready for prime time, particularly with her poor French. After the January election, she had to stand in front of the cameras on the Hill and ask a reporter to repeat a question in English. So embarrassing.
Nevertheless, she apparently pushed hard to run and had to be talked out of it by, among others, David Peterson, who masterminded her deal to cross the floor. It's thought he told her she couldn't win, wouldn't show well and would humiliate herself. "She wanted to run badly because she enjoys being at the centre of everything, but she's got to let others take centre stage right now," says one Liberal source who believes Stronach is in a league by herself — "This is not a politician. This is a celebrity at the nexus of rock `n' roll and politics" — and could, with work, take the Liberal crown one day.
In the meantime, let's see what the self-professed policy wonk can do. While the bilingual Hall Findlay switches from English to French on the Liberal barbecue circuit this summer, Stronach plans to spend a couple of weeks in French immersion in Quebec City, as well as practising in Montreal where she has a condo. What role she will play at the leadership convention is unclear and she won't say whom she likes among the candidates.
We shall assume it's not Hall Findlay.
Stronach limited herself to a written statement about the candidate who stepped aside for her last May: "Martha is a smart and talented person and I wish her luck."
Additional articles by Linda Diebel
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