It might be the dog days of summer but we have some catching up to do. We were out of town recently and while you might think we write a new commentary every day for this web site, we sometimes have as much as a week ahead set to automatically roll out each day. Even if some people consider us writers to be narcissistic blow-hards, we believe that one succinct opinion a day is enough.
But you do miss breaking stories and the death of Mel Hurtig on August 3 was a major loss for our country.
It has always been our opinion that Mel Hurtig deserved better from Canadians. As a fellow member of the Liberal Party in the 1970s, we believed that he had a nascent political career in the offing. We were also very supportive of the Council of Canadians that he helped get off the ground.
But we spent the most time with him when trying to get the National Party into shape to fight an election. That was Mel’s last stand. We spent a lot of time talking to each other in washrooms. Mel had this thing about germs and when he had to shake hands with people, he spent an inordinate amount of time washing his. We wrote some of his best lines for him while sitting on an adjacent sink.
But as leader of a political party, Mel was something of a nightmare. Mind you he was less than pleased when some of us Toronto wise-asses referred to his new party as the National Socialist Party of Canada. There is a fond memory though of giving Mel a serious lecture on the sidewalk at St. Clair and Yonge Streets in Toronto. We had just left an important live interview at Radio Station CFRB and we told him that he had to give the same answer to the same question each time it was asked. He liked displaying his knowledge of facts and figures but he had a bad habit of shooting from the lip.
But we did not split with Mel’s new party until the first day of the 1993 campaign. Mel wanted this writer as a candidate (they were obviously desperate). He had a very weak ‘yes’ on that until Mel insulted the Toronto news media by showing up more than a half hour late for his opening news conference. Enough was enough and when telling our friend, the Conservative returning officer, that we were not running, she convinced us to come and work the election with her. (It helped her look more impartial in a hard-fought riding. And the alternative was to run the campaign for the Liberals in the only riding in Ontario they lost.)
Maybe it is best to remember Mel for his Canadian Encyclopedia. He used every trick in the publisher’s book of tricks to get those books published and he even came up with some new ones. The encyclopedia probably never made a nickel for him but it is unlikely he cared. Mel was a great Canadian.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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