The High Road (41 page)

“You’re fucked now, Danny boy. You have no idea …”

“Really. Well, don’t look now, but I see cameras and sun guns heading your way.”

In an instant Bradley Stanton, the Prime Minister’s top adviser, was engulfed in a sea of microphones and jockeying cameras.

“What does the PM think of Angus’s report?”

“Are you going to cough up the dough?”

“What about the tax cuts? Are they history?”

Bradley put up his hands in surrender.

“Hold on. I’m not here to respond to questions about the report. That would be premature. I’ll say only this. The Prime Minister has received the final report on the Alexandra Bridge collapse from the Member for Cumberland-Prescott and is carefully reviewing it. We’ll respond to the recommendations at the earliest possible opportunity and the Prime Minister thanks Professor McLintock for his thoughtful and comprehensive examination of the incident.”

With that, Bradley delivered a smilingly deadly glare my way, then turned and headed out the door with several reporters in hot pursuit.

Angus helped Harold Silverberg move to the front of the room to sit at the table. Microphones were placed in front of him and the reporters scrummed him for fifteen minutes. They were gentle and he was forceful, articulate, and detailed in his responses. Angus stood with him for support and answered many more questions himself. By force of habit, I monitored his responses from a few feet away. He put not a foot wrong.

“You are a wonder,” gushed Muriel as she embraced Angus when the reporters had moved on and we were left by ourselves.

Lindsay was holding on to my hand and beaming. It had all gone according to plan. I pressed my lips to her ear.

“We couldn’t have pulled this off without your clandestine work. It was an honour sneaking around with you.”

Angus brought us back to earth.

“Let’s not get too carried away. We’re not yet home,” cautioned Angus. “Tomorrow will tell whether this was all twaddle and puffery.”

Every front page of every major daily in the country had it, most in full colour. Angus at the news conference in full rhetorical flight, with eyes ablaze, mouth agape, and finger cocked and pointing. It was a wonderful photo that I thought seemed to capture the real Angus McLintock – proud, honest, opinionated, and completely oblivious to the ancient art of hair styling. He must have been moving his head at the instant the shot was snapped as his beard was not resting on his chest as usual, but seemed to be floating in the air of its own accord. This made Angus seem quite dynamic, in the original sense of the word, as in not static. Thankfully, there was no visible projectile spittle and his beard seemed free of any foreign objects. Perhaps they’d already been shaken loose in the vigour of his informal address.

I was sitting at our kitchen table in my pyjamas with the papers spread out before me. My laptop was open so I could scan media outlets across the country by moving my mouse across the table. Lindsay had headed in to campus for an early class she was teaching.

The news coverage of the McLintock Report struck me as balanced and accurate. There were even quotations from Emile Coulombe, who dismissed the recommendations for infrastructure investment with a blithe “We’ll get to infrastructure after we’ve fulfilled our campaign promises.” The PM was a little more circumspect. He was quoted saying, “Angus has done just what I asked him to do and even a little more. His report is important
and challenges us as a government to make some very difficult decisions, at a very difficult time.” Nice.

More importantly to me, and perhaps to the Prime Minister as well, the editorials ran about 75 per cent for Angus and 25 per cent for Coulombe. I expected the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister both had long nights in anticipation of a very long day. The Budget was to be presented in the House of Commons at four o’clock. I had no idea what to expect and honoured my promise to Angus not to speak to anyone. Given the hoopla of yesterday, we decided to stay in Cumberland until it was time to head in for the Budget speech. I was just about to turn off my BlackBerry when it buzzed. I was expecting to see B. Stanton appear in the window. After all, it had been several minutes since he’d last torn a strip off me. I had very few strips left. But it wasn’t Bradley. Curiosity trampled my pledge to Angus.

“Daniel Addison.”

“Hi Daniel, it’s Michael Zaleski.”

“Z-man! Nice to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m fine. More to the point, how are you?”

“Well, it’s been an eventful day or so, but we’re surviving,” I replied. “It really does help when you actually believe you’re doing the right thing.”

“I hear you. Listen, I’m calling unofficially, so this is just between us.”

“No problem, Michael, I’m in your hands.”

“After your little media play yesterday, the PMO asked me to do a quick and dirty overnighter on how Canadians felt about trading off tax cuts to invest in infrastructure,” the party’s pollster said.

“I figured the centre might do that. Makes sense.”

“Unfortunately, most Canadians really wouldn’t have heard about it until today when the newspapers could dig into the issue. So we couldn’t go the quantitative route and do a telephone survey. There just wasn’t time. So instead, we pulled together a few fast focus groups last night. To simulate how Canadians might
feel after reading this morning’s papers, we played video from your news conference and then the 6:00 p.m. TV news pieces from CBC, CTV, and Global for all focus group participants.”

“Right, I’m with you. Then you started the discussion,” I said. “What did you find?”

“Well, I thought you’d like to know that there was consistency across all three focus groups. They were all evenly split. It’s tough to pull back the tax cuts when people have been counting on them. But Angus convinced half the group that infrastructure investments were more important right now than tax cuts.”

“That’s encouraging. Did you ask why they felt that way?”

“We did. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but they actually believe Angus when he speaks. They seem to trust him. And as you well know, that’s not the typical voter reaction to politicians. Canadians usually consider used car salesmen to be paragons of virtue in comparison.”

“Wow.
The Angus Effect
strikes again.”

“Right. Even most of those who favoured the tax cuts admitted that they were just looking out for themselves and that Angus had made a compelling and convincing case,” Michael noted. “One more thing. We set up an Internet survey for our regular online panel to complete just to see if we could get a large enough sample for the numbers to be real. I just checked the rolling results and we still only have about 350 respondents, skewing heavily urban. This doesn’t really give us a solid national read but for what it’s worth, the numbers are splitting fifty-fifty there, too.”

“Interesting, Michael. Thanks for letting me know. Have you briefed Bradley yet?”

“He was there for the focus groups. We didn’t wrap up last night until close to eleven. He was heading right back to brief the PM. I gather it was a long night.”

“Thanks again, Michael. I’m grateful.”

He hung up, and I turned off my BlackBerry.

Angus was already at the board when I saw him through the deck
window waving me in the back door. Chess seemed to calm Angus down a bit, even as it elevated my blood pressure. Angus’s relentless pummelling, interspersed with timely, self-inflicted blunders seemed to have that physiological effect. But I suppose if dismembering me game after game left Angus more serene and relaxed, then there was at least one benefit to my shoddy and inferior play. Yes, that’s it. That’s why I only rarely won. I was subconsciously trying to manage Angus and his moods. Right.

Other than the games we played on Monday night, we’d had little time in the previous month to face off on the sixty-four squares. It was quite diverting to be angry and upset about my chess performance rather than be angry and upset over Bradley Stanton’s politics. A change is as good as a rest, they say.

Angus looked good. He’d obviously dragged a rake through his hair and beard, so you could almost see where one ended and the other began. He’d put on his grey pinstripe suit that he’d bought off the rack. It was the wrong rack, but he looked quite reasonable with a white shirt and understated tartan tie, of course. He’d polished his shoes, several years ago, but they still looked quite presentable. I figured most observers could not take their eyes off his chaotic coiffure, so I seldom worried about the state of his shoes.

I had white again. I actually played quite well in the first two games, and even succeeded in claiming his queen in our second game, in exchange for my rook when I pinned her to his king. Angus was not happy and proceeded to make me pay. Despite playing queenless, he systematically destroyed me, resurrecting his queen when I was forced to promote one of his pawns in the end-game. It was all over then. I kept one eye on the clock but we had plenty of time.

We were several moves into our third game, deep enough that Angus was already up a knight and a pawn, when the doorbell sounded.

“Right on time” was all Angus said as he pushed himself back from the board.

“Who’s on time?” I asked, but Angus said nothing and headed to the front door.

I heard him welcome the guest, who sounded very familiar when he spoke. I was still trying to connect the voice to a face when Emerson Fox strode into the living room, with Angus close behind. I knocked over my rook in surprise as I got up. He looked much more relaxed than when I’d last seen him on election night.

“Don’t let me interrupt the battle,” Fox said when he saw the chess board.

“No worries. I was about to surrender anyway, as usual,” I replied offering my hand. “I’m Daniel Addison.”

“Oh, I know who you are,” replied Fox. “It’s good to meet you in peacetime.”

“Rest yourself, Mr. Fox,” instructed Angus as he pointed to the chintz couch. “Can I get you a shot of courage as we welcome high noon?”

“No thanks, Angus. I know you’ve got a lot on your platter today so I won’t be long,” Fox responded.

I returned to my chair at the chess table while Angus dropped into the chintz chair across from the couch.

“I confess I was surprised to receive your call this morning,” Angus opened. “Not displeased, just surprised.”

“I can understand that after what I put you through in the campaign,” said Fox. “I wanted to let some water flow under the bridge before I visited so that we were both at peace with the outcome. It took me a little longer than I’d expected, but peace is coming to me.”

“Well, the water is still flowin’ but the bridge I’ve been examinin’ is no longer where it’s supposed to be,” Angus observed.

“Indeed. Well, you delivered on your assignment, but I suspect the Prime Minister was hoping you’d not have dug quite as deep as you did.”

“Aye, that may be, but I’m not bothered.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one advising the PM to renege on the tax cuts. But for the first time in my political experience
I see politics coexisting with common sense. I think he might just pull it off, thanks to you. You have risen above it all. Canadians trust you in a way they could never trust me.”

Angus just nodded and let the silence hang there, I think to try to force Fox to his point. I said nothing at all.

“This is the kind of call I don’t often make. I’m not accustomed to giving an inch when I’m in battle, or even when it’s over and I’ve been defeated. I haven’t lost very often, you know,” Emerson Fox said as he looked at the floor. “But I don’t feel I can close this chapter of my political career without having spoken at least once more to you. Professor McLintock, I’ve invested much of my life in developing and perfecting a style of campaigning that, while not for those with faint hearts and weak stomachs, has consistently delivered victories to my candidates. Until I crossed you.”

“I cannae say I’m troubled by upsettin’ your theory. You’ll know that I’m not a supporter of slingin’ mud and exchangin’ insults. Somebody does win in the end, I concede, but in my mind, the country loses in the main.”

“Regardless, I learned that there may be another way. Don’t get me wrong. The negative campaign, I think, is still the way to go, but I wanted you to know that you’d opened the eyes of an aging warrior at least to the possibility of other approaches. And I never thought that would happen in my lifetime.”

“I find that admission, sir, to be perhaps as rewarding as the election result,” Angus replied with a smile.