From homelessness to cabinet table
Who was most elated at last week’s swearing-in ceremony for the re-jigged Liberal government?
Iain Rankin, fresh from his second-ballot victory as Grit leader, making him Nova Scotia’s 29th premier?
Or Labi Kousoulis, his leadership rival, now catapulted into the all-important finance ministry?
Maybe Keith Irving or Ben Jessome, elevated from the backbenches into Rankin’s 17-person cabinet?
Perhaps one of the veteran cabinet ministers asked to help lead this province through this challenging time?
My money, on the other other hand, was on Brendan Maguire, Nova Scotia’s new minister of municipal affairs, not because he too is a first-time cabinet minister, but due to the improbable, inspiring journey that, at age 45, brought him to the front benches.
“Holy bleep I’m here,” he said when I asked about his reaction upon learning that he is in cabinet. “I just wanted to scream that anything was possible.”
Which sounds, melodramatic, even corny, until you know his story.
ABANDONED
His biological parents came from Northern Ireland, via England to Canada with five children in tow. His mother, he said, “lived a hard life,” “grew up very poor … in abusive situations” but “did the best that she could.”
His father, on the other hand, “just was not a good person and he never was.”
“Any memory of them is not a positive memory,” he said of his late parents. “My experience with them as a young person was that of just abuse and alcoholism. All of us felt that.”
Maguire was just four when they abandoned the children at the Halifax Shopping Centre.
He and his siblings were split up. At age six, Maguire’s then-foster family told him they were moving to Ontario. He could join them if he chose, but that would probably mean never seeing his siblings again. So, he stayed.
Maguire could not tell me precisely how many foster homes he has lived in, other than that it is in the double figures. He did say his experiences inside of them “were both positive and negative” and “all helped shape who I am today.”
He has never forgotten how the communities of Spryfield and Herring Cove took him under their collective wing.
“There was a lot of couch surfing. A lot of moving in with friends and their family,” he said. “There were times that I struggled for food and a friend’s parent would find out about it and have me over.”
Maguire, by his own admission, “was not the easiest child.” He was headstrong, got into fights, struggled in school and ran away from his foster homes.
Even so, it is hard to think of him as a teenager, still bearing “the scars of some adults who were messed up,” sleeping in the lobbies of apartment buildings, in camps out in the woods and, from time to time, a Dumpster.
TURNING POINT
Moving into the Phoenix House youth residence at 18 was a turning point in his life.
“It was the first time in a long time that an adult had said ‘no’ and ‘enough,’” he said. “The first time in a long time that they cared and believed in me and loved me.”
Not all his siblings’ lives have such an uplifting narrative. In 2010, a brother, Desmond, with whom he has never had a relationship, was sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of a co-worker at a senior’s home.
Maguire, on the other hand, went to college, graduated with a diploma in computer studies, then worked in telecommunications before joining the Halifax Water Commission as a sales representative and technician.
He’s been lucky along the way, he said, meeting people who had faith in him, and finding a partner like his wife Rena, who makes corporate videos, whom he calls his “partner and best friend.”
A trip to England in his late 20s allowed him to meet, for the first time, some extended relatives.
“I saw what could have been and was happy where I was,” he explained.
But from the start he had a drive that came from hearing, over and over again, “you’re just a foster child” and realizing the world had lower expectations for him than it did for people with conventional upbringings.
“I don’t forget,” he said. “I just wanted to prove all those people wrong.”
ELECTED IN 2013
He was first elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly as MLA for Halifax Atlantic in 2013, as part of the McNeil wave, and was reelected four years later.
When we spoke, he admitted to having sometimes felt out of place inside the legislature.
“I look around the room sometimes and I see all of these super-qualified individuals and I think, Oh My God it took me four-and-ahalf years to get through high school, I lived on the streets … I did some really dumb things along the way.”
As a two-term MLA, he was hoping to be part of Rankin’s team. Nevertheless, when the premier’s call came, there was probably a 10-second pause on Maguire’s part.
“It was surreal, you are excited, you are scared,” he said.
A lot was running through his mind as he processed the news. His wife and three children, but also everyone who helped him long before politics, who showed him how to walk and dress, who “believed in him before he believed in himself.”
And, of course, he thought about how he grew up, where he came from and how he got where he is now. It has been such a long journey he thought.
Then Maguire hung up, told his wife that he was in cabinet and the both of them started to cry.