Council is much less colourful with Lorje’s exit

Saskatoon city council just got a lot more boring.

Perhaps the most stunning news from this week’s thrilling election arrived when Pat Lorje lost a close battle to retain the Ward 2 seat she has held for 22 years.

Add in her 12 years as an NDP MLA and cabinet minister (1991 to 2003) and she has served Saskatoon in an elected office for 34 years. That probably makes her the city’s most popular politician in history.

The flip side of such longevity is that she may also be regarded as the most unpopular politician. Wednesday night, her fearless approach to representing the people — her candour, her colourfulness, her controversy — finally caught up to her. She failed to exit on her own terms, as voters narrowly denied her a 12th straight electoral victory in Saskatoon.

If journalists alone were voting, Lorje would have returned to council with a unanimous mandate — so skilled was she at turning a boring meeting into an event worth covering. The city council left behind will struggle as a group to manufacture as many compelling quotes as Lorje did on her own.

The good news for her — and this is, of course, deeply sarcastic — is that, free of the shackles of elected office, she can finally speak her mind. Lorje did not just court controversy during three decades of public life, she seemed married to it.

Saskatoon’s city council would be highly dysfunctional with 10 Lorjes — or maybe even two or three — but surely there was room for one of her.

It became commonplace for council votes to break down with 10 members on one side and Lorje alone on the other. Compromise rarely ranked as important for her; it may have been her greatest flaw, and in the end, it likely cost her the council seat.

In the legislature, after she was passed over numerous times by premier Roy Romanow for a cabinet spot despite being an obvious choice as a woman from Saskatoon, Lorje finally got a shot under Lorne Calvert. Her short, tumultuous stint in cabinet ended when Calvert fired her for leaking details of a harassment investigation into a claim by an employee against Lorje.

When she announced she was leaving provincial politics, she blasted the news media and blamed “prudish judgmentalism.”

“My style of politician is currently not fashionable,” she said in 2003.

Lorje, 69, clearly regards her time in partisan provincial politics without much fondness. She had little trouble regaining her old Ward 2 council seat in 2006. She relished her return to the role — the position was still called “alderman” when she was first elected in 1979 — and nobody worked harder for constituents.

As for her political style not being in fashion, perhaps she never was and never will be — but three decades ranks as an amazingly long time in politics. Had she won this week and served her term, she would have become the longest-serving city councillor in Saskatoon’s history.

One of the most entertaining and insightful Lorje stories came from her first stint on council, when she drove a city bus 11 blocks to mark the 75th anniversary of Saskatoon Transit in 1988. She was fined $55. She eventually paid it in loonies, calling it “ludicrous.” What a ride it’s been. Lorje’s leaky ways surfaced again during her last term on council when she sent a confidential report to former provincial cabinet colleague Eric Cline. She was sanctioned by the rest of council for the leak and resisted pressure to resign.

Did this incident help end her political career? It probably played little role on its own, since many voters probably think city hall operates too secretly as it is. But it might have ranked as just one more controversy on a great big pile of them.

The official record will say that Hilary Gough defeated Lorje in the 2016 election. The truth, however, is that Lorje likely beat herself.