Scott Aitchison: Conservative hopeful ‘raised by Huntsville’
OTTAWA
Scott Aitchison started knocking on doors at a young age.
While other kids growing up in the beautiful Muskoka region of Ontario spent their Saturdays on the water, at soccer practice or watching cartoons, Aitchison went house to house making his case.
He was not, at the time, trying to convert neighbours to his political cause. He was speaking to them about the virtues of his parents’ faith group: Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“In many strange ways, my experience growing up and the training that I got as a public speaker came from this organization that actually is fundamentally opposed to what I do now,” Aitchison says in an interview.
Now 49 years old, he is one of five candidates hoping to be announced as the new leader of the federal Conservative party on Sept. 10.
The relationship between Aitchison, his family, their faith and their community in the town of Huntsville, Ont., laid the foundation of his political aspirations.
Jehovah’s Witnesses is a denomination of Christianity, but unlike other mainstream Christians, its adherents generally eschew political institutions and anything akin to nationalism.
As a young teen, Aitchison began to pull away from his parents’ religion as he questioned how only one belief system could be the right one. The conflict caused frequent fights with his father.
One evening in November, 1988, his father laid down the law.
“My dad said, ‘listen, I don’t want to fight anymore, but can you accept at least that it’s my house? It’s my home. There has to be rules, and you have to respect those rules in my house,”’ Aitchison recalls.
So, at 15 years old, he left home. Aitchison often says he was raised by Huntsville, a town in the heart of Muskoka, where his story spread quickly through the community. The young teen was taken in by the family of a friend. Others in the community also looked out for him and guided him as grew up.
As president of his student council in high school, Aitchison developed an early interest in running for office. His principal, the town’s former mayor Terry Clarke, encouraged him to run for town council.
He never expected to win, but at 21 years old, he was elected the youngest ever member of the council.
“People kept saying, ‘Oh my goodness, your dad must be so excited and so proud,”’ he said.
He said his father’s actual reaction was far more muted.
“He said, `Well, you know, I’ve voted only once in my life,”’ Aitchison remembers. “He said, ‘I’ve voted for God’s government, and everything else is in direct opposition to that.”’
Aitchison said that hardly fazed him.
But in a way, it was his foray into politics that helped bring Aitchison and his parents closer together again.
He still gets misty-eyed when he remembers the moment, a few days later, when his father congratulated him — something that he says must have been difficult for him to do.
“He was immensely proud that I had accomplished something like that,” says Aitchison.
Though he lost contact with many of his other relatives after leaving his home and faith community, he worked hard to maintain a relationship with his parents, even as the gulf between their world views widened.
“They have deeply held and profound beliefs, and I respect that. They respect me,” he says of their relationship now.
It’s the kind of reconciliation Aitchison has been preaching for the divided Conservative party to achieve.
After that moment of rapprochement with his father in 1994, Aitchison spent the majority of his political career in municipal politics in Huntsville. He worked as a councillor part time, which is typical in small towns, while also holding down full-time jobs elsewhere in the community before serving two terms as mayor from 2014 to 2019.