Aug. 13, 2006. 07:25 AM
LINDA DIEBEL
TORONTO STAR
Early evening on Georgian Bay, a recent summer, two chums fishing. The heat of the day has burned away, the fish are stirring, and they're anchored offshore, little outboard pulled up, sound of water slapping the boat, call of loon and whippoorwill and, between two men, silence.
A fishing story; life as good as it gets. A golden time for friends of 20 years — Quebecer Stéphane Dion and Peter Russell from Ontario — and about to get a whole lot better when one wins bragging rights that stand to this day.
Dion snaps his wrist back and flicks out his line, reeling it in slowly in the choppy water. He is using a worm and a small silver spinner.
He gets a hit and plays it, throwing out a little action, gently, gently, locking the tension with his thumb, releasing, waiting for what Russell calls that "magic moment" when you feel the weight on the line and the hook is set. Twenty minutes later, Dion pulls in the biggest smallmouth black bass either had ever caught, six pounds of eating pleasure.
"Stéphane is a wonderful fisherman. He's brilliant. He outfished me (pause) that day," recalls Russell, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto and constitutional expert. He was also a colleague of Dion's late father, Léon, the much-acclaimed academic who founded the political science department at Laval University in Quebec City and went on to advise Quebec Liberal premiers Jean Lesage and Robert Bourassa. Friendship with father passed to son.
Russell is one of those people who thinks fishing says a lot about a person. "Stéphane's very patient," he said last Thursday over a crackling phone line from his Georgian Bay cottage. "He's got a very nice feel. If you don't have the right feel, you're going to pull too fast and not let him take (the hook)."
Dion had said much the same thing the day before in Quebec City. The former cabinet minister from the recently defeated Liberal government is running for the leadership of his party and, over the course of a long day, fishing wasn't his first topic. But he lit up when asked about hobbies, enthusing about his camp in the Laurentians and fishing. In the front seat of the campaign van, communications director André Lamarre and supporter Yves Picard were killing themselves laughing over his "goofy" fishing attire. Hat, vest, the dangling lures — the works.
Dion was serious. "Fishing," he said, "is the only moment in my life when I am patient."
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He's not patient about politics, or so one is to believe. Leery of Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling a snap election this fall, he pushed unsuccessfully for a leadership convention in September, rather than the end of November. He's not patient about the leadership or what he wants to do with the country if he gets the chance. It's a big if.
Sure, there's buzz about Dion, and it's growing in the late bloom of summer. What are his chances? Can he slip in between frontrunners Michael Ignatieff, the MP from Etobicoke-Lakeshore, and former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae? At Queen's Park, he has become the betting choice for Liberal backroomers who couldn't find him on their radar even six weeks ago, despite successful terms as federal minister of intergovernmental affairs and the environment under two prime ministers, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. As any veteran of their particular civil war can tell you, there's a feat.
In one of the few, albeit imperfect, gauges of how the 11 candidates are faring, Dion scored reasonably well, according to an early July Star survey, in recruiting new members for the party — better, of course, in some places (British Columbia, Nova Scotia) than others (Saskatchewan). He was fifth in Ontario and, in his own province, only third, but that's another issue to come later in this story.
On the other hand, his fundraising efforts to June 30 were pallid, according to figures released by Elections Canada, with only $32,250 in his campaign coffers. In his Cerberus political blog Aug. 4, Toronto lawyer Ted Betts describes Dion's numbers as "the most surprising and disappointing of them all."
In his analysis of early fundraising, Betts (an "Iggy man" who helps Ignatieff's campaign) says Dion's "momentum only recently started to build in June, and so focus was no doubt almost exclusively on getting his organization together and scrambling hard for new members."
That was indeed the order of business, according to Dion. He started from scratch with his decision to run at the beginning of March. "I discovered some had been campaigning for months, if not more," he says, if perhaps a trifle fey.
Moreover, Betts underscores the much-heralded "consensus" factor. "Whenever most talk about him being a front-runner, it is in the context of being a consensus second choice of many, with later ballot vote growth. So he's running a very different campaign than the others."
Still, money talks. Betts figures if it's not coming in by the end of August, the campaign should be worried about having "legs." Dion officials insist the total has since risen to $100,000 and "is growing at a good rate," due in part to website contributions; $10,000 was raised in a day last week.
Betts may well be right. "He'll be there in the later rounds of the balloting" to elect a new leader, Saturday, Dec. 2, at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal.
In the words of Laurent Arsenault, Montreal structural and forensic engineer and long-time Dion friend: "He grows on you."
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Writing about Dion, one itches to describe him. He is, in some ways, an odd-looking man. The camera loves the sharp angles of his face, then finds itself focusing on the thick lenses that obscure his eyes. At 50, he's tall and thin, and his bony shoulders positively heave when he laughs. A loud guffaw. His is a face that will look the same at 80 as it did at 20.
He lunges to the edge of a polite, seated audience at a recent candidates' debate in Quebec City, as if ready to plunge right in, striding and bouncing on thick soles, cordless mike in hand, practising his crowd technique. He almost seems to be wearing his father's suit, too big and too small, pinching across the chest, pant legs too short, belt hiked too high.
Old man, young man. Most odd.
And yet, there is something tremendously appealing about Stéphane Dion. The contradictions, perhaps. Grey hair against almost unlined face. Awkward, slightly stooped, yet comfortable in his skin.
(If he were ever prime minister, Canada's photographic corps would be salivating for his first encounter with a football.)
He can seem lost, standing alone at the conference table after a meeting last Wednesday with Toronto-area CEOs, waiting, almost poignantly, for someone to approach him. Yet he seems a natural loner — an academic and intellectual from a culture where to call yourself that is not to be derided.
Lacking in charisma — "most of your colleagues who say that haven't heard me speak" — but not concerned about it. Not really. The ultimate grey man. Who talks with passion about his life and purpose.
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That life began in Quebec, was shaped by Quebec and is forever anchored in Quebec. His raison d'être is to keep Canada together.
The modest family home on Boulevard Liègeois was full of books. There was fun, but work was the ethic. "I am unable not to work hard," he says. "And so it has no merit for me... If you are lazy and you have to convince yourself to work, then you have a lot of merit. I am not lazy."
He was second of five children — four boys and a girl. His mother, Denise, still living at home in Quebec City, is Parisian and met his father when he studied at the Sorbonne. From a small Quebec village, Léon Dion was the first generation to be educated. The original Dion — Johan de Guyon — arrived in Quebec in 1634 with an expedition organized by Robert Gifford, who would become a famous seigneur.
"Boy, isn't that interesting?" asks the reporter of a family history so well absorbed.
"No," replies Dion. Starkly. Nothing more. Long pause.
"I don't believe it shapes who I am today. I don't believe in genetic transmission." (Fine, but it's highly likely there was a replica of Dion's archetypal Gallic face among those early Guyons, just as someone resembling Marc Lalonde surely stood in the court of Cardinal Richelieu.
Denise Dion is a "strong character," according to Arsenault, who went to parties as a teenager at her house. "She won't leave you indifferent. She's not self-effacing."
Occasionally one hears a Parisian inflection in Dion's French. In English, too. There can be a rise, the singsong lilt of Par-eee, at the end of a sentence.
His father was a towering figure in Quebec political life, a committed federalist and foremost liberal academic in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, de Tocqueville. Robert Bourassa's black limo would sit idling on the street, as the instantly recognizable "Bou" (tall, stooped, awkward) would nip inside to confer with Léon Dion. His son flirted with separatism, campaigning for the Parti Québécois while a teenager at a Jesuit college in Quebec City.
"Because the party was there," he explains. "I wanted to challenge my father... the way to become an adult sometimes is to say the contrary to your father. Each evening, I would try out a new argument I had heard on the separatist network and my father was demolishing it... My father very quietly and very respectfully was refuting me, without insulting me."
He tells an anecdote about his conversion to federalism. Going door-to-door for the PQ, he was invited in by a man, a federalist, whose wife kept bringing rum-and-cokes. "I came at 5, I left at 10 and I was completely drunk. I said to him, `Well, maybe you're right.' I don't know how I found my way home. I went to sleep right away. Since then, I've never been an activist for the separatist cause — and I never drank rum-and-coke. A double healing."
In real life, the transition was more gradual. He took a B.A. and M.A. in political science at Laval and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the Institut d'etudes politiques in Paris. Even then, watching the first Quebec referendum from afar in 1980, with its comfortable win for federalism, he felt aloof, still an analyst.
But in 1990, back in Quebec teaching at the University of Montreal, he watched the Meech Lake constitutional talks fall apart and listened to the Péquiste argument Quebec paid too much for federalism. Un gouvernement de trop. One government too many. Federalism meant fiscal imbalance for Quebec.
This was his field, public administration, and, "I was waiting for the experts to jump in and destroy this stupid theory but nobody did — so I did." He laid out an analysis postulating the theory "we could have all the services, pay much less and be rich, was wrong."
There was immediate outrage. "I thought they would say, `Yeah, that's right, good,'" he says. "But they hammered me. I went against the so-called consensus. It was the first time, but not the last. They said I was not a good Quebecer. "
And so began the long, lonely crusade of Stéphane Dion, fédéraliste.
It was the beginning of his role as self-styled champion of Canada, on news shows like Radio-Canada's popular Le Point, at international conferences, as a visiting professor at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.
He took on PQ premiers Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry and his separatist-thinking colleagues and students. He was the pariah, the man Quebecers loved to hate.
"He had real courage," says Russell, who became literary agent for Dion's book on federalism, Straight Talk. "He's taken them all on. He doesn't lose his head. He'd be a great leader."
Dion is talking over lunch at L'Entrecôte Saint-Jean in the beautiful Old City, near the stone ramparts, maybe 100,000 metres from the Plains of Abraham where Montcalm fell to an English bullet. The battle ended, the struggle — la lutte — began.
"You have no idea what it was like in Quebec," adds Yves Picard, over the clatter of plates. "It took real guts in those days."
Soon, Dion was on the parliamentary stage. Chrétien's wife, Aline, liked him on Le Point and, in the scary days for federalists after the referendum of Oct. 30, 1995 (No, 50.58 per cent; Yes, 49.42), urged her husband to recruit Dion. The PM called him, they met at 24 Sussex and Dion said he would think about it.
He wasn't keen. His wife, Janine Krieber, a professor at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu Military College near Montreal, thought he should accept. At first. They'd taken risks before, living cheaply in Montmarte and Washington, never the conventional couple. They waited for a decade to get married and then only because they wanted to adopt a toddler from Peru, their daughter Jeanne, 18. "We didn't need recognition from others," says Dion. "The legal advantage came with adoption."
With Chrétien's offer in mind, he left on a speaking tour of Europe, where he witnessed constitutional conflict in Belgium, the separatist movement in Spain, and Germany struggling for post-war reconciliation between its two peoples. His choice became clear. "As long as you are asking yourself where you stand in the order, you are preventing yourself from giving all your energy to solving your problems — and we need to solve them if we want to focus on the real problems."
In early 1996, he joined the Chrétien cabinet as intergovernmental affairs minister, winning a by-election in the Montreal riding of Saint-Laurent-Cartierville and going on to deliver the Clarity Act, which sets out strict conditions under which Quebec can separate.
He sees it simply: "I had a duty to make sure my country, at the end of the century, would not give a bad signal to the planet. If Canadians are unable to stay united, which country will?"
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But, again, here's the rub. What about Quebec? His reputation leaves a huge question mark over whether he can deliver for the battered Liberals against Stephen Harper and, at the least, a Quebec leader should offer that. Last January, the once-mighty Rouges slipped another seven seats to 14, with the Bloc Québécois at 50, the Conservatives at 10 and one Independent.
One would have thought Dion's goose was cooked. But there are signs he is redeeming himself, especially for his performance as environment minister. He chaired the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal last December, winning modest success where failure was predicted.
While Canadian climate sociologist John Stone, for one, criticized summiteers for failing to grasp that "time is running out," most environmentalists praised an outcome that offered a moderately improved timetable for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Significantly, Dion was applauded in Quebec. Graham Fraser, national affairs writer for the Star, noted that acerbic La Presse cartoonist Serge Chapleau, who liked to draw Dion as a rat, showed him trimming his whiskers. For Fraser, it was "as close as a cartoonist comes to a grudging apology."
Moreover, Dion says he has toughened up as a politician. He was temporarily dropped from cabinet when Martin took over as PM and, in the lead-up to the 2004 election, Dion thought Martin's people would try to run one of their own in his riding. He fought back and won.
"I learned the street part of politics after being a minister for seven years. I was fighting other Liberals... I discovered skills within myself."
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He says he's ready to be leader. The decision took the month of February, agonizing and asking himself if he was good enough to take on Harper. There is a refreshing humility about Dion — not necessarily a political asset.
"I was not ready 10 years ago," he says as lunch winds down. "To succeed in politics you need to have two things: clear ideas about what you want to do — otherwise the political and bureaucratic machine will eat you — and a capacity to listen and work as a team because you will achieve nothing alone.
"Usually when you know what to do, you don't want to listen. I have seen strong ministers unable to go anywhere because they were unable to be collegial. I have seen collegial ministers unable to go anywhere because they had no views of their own. I know I have both."
He wants to focus on his three pillars: economic growth, combined with environmental sustainability and social justice. He fears a Conservative government that rushed to remove references to climate change from its website.
"If I am able to articulate this goal in every region of Canada, I will bring together this nation," he says. "I know the people of Quebec will embrace it if I am good enough to make it concrete and show how it can work."
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The day's politicking is done. The candidate and daughter Jeanne, arm-in-arm, prepare to head out for dinner, father beaming proudly. A respite.
There are still more than three months to the vote. Dion could be an also-ran. It's been said before: it probably comes down to Rae and Ignatieff's people and how their guys do on the first ballot.
Dion says he's an impatient man. Should we believe him? If he triumphs in December, one will be tempted to look back and see the serene and wily fisherman on the water, baiting his hook, casting his line and waiting patiently, doing everything right until he lands the prize.
