CANADA'S MOST PROFANE HOSTILE UNFILTERED APOLOGETIC MP
PAT MARTIN HAS REPRESENTED THE SECONDPOOREST RIDING IN THE COUNTRY FOR 18 YEARS. BUT THE OUTSPOKEN NDP MP IS IN A BATTLE THIS TIME. “I LIKE A GOOD RHUBARB. WHO WANTS TO PLAY CHESS WITH AN IDIOT?”
“I’m not ‘worked up’ so much as ‘fed up’ with the rat-faced whores in the (Conservative party) who neglect to invite me to announcements in my riding,” A Dec. 19, 2012, Twitter rant. “I apologize for my regrettable and inappropriate language yesterday. It seems some people shouldn’t tweet so with this, I sign off.” On Twitter the next day.
“I’ve always said racism is ignorance masturbating. Combating racism is all about education. People don’t trust the culture until a family of that culture moves next door to them.” Oct. 6, 2015 in an interview with the CBC . “I can blame it on a sale that was down at the Hudson’s Bay — they had men’s underwear on for half price. I bought a bunch that was clearly too small for me and I find it difficult to sit for any length of time.” Feb. 19, 2015 in the House of Comm ons, explaining why he mi ssed a vote.
“My question is simple, and I ask it through you, Mr. Speaker. Has the minister lost his freaking mind?” Dec. 2, 2014 in the House of Comm ons, on the government’s plan to sell the Canadi an Wheat Board.
Coast to Coast: National Post columnist John Ivison is travelling across Canada to chronicle how election battles are unfolding by region. Today, he examines Winnipeg Centre.
This is an article about Pat Martin — reader discretion is advised.
The NDP candidate for the riding of Winnipeg Centre is standing in his campaign office, proudly sporting a lapel pin that reads Opto Civilitas – civility caucus. He says he and former Conservative pitbull, John Baird, started the club.
Perhaps it was intended to signal he has turned the page on an 18 year political career that has been marked by outbursts of incivility.
He recently told the local paper that he regrets some of his more colourful tirades – in this campaign alone, he has been caught on camera mouthing the words “f***ing prick” at his Green Party rival, Don Woodstock, and he called his Liberal Party challenger, Robert-Falcon Ouellette, a “political slut.” When Martin’s use of profanity was raised with Tom Mulcair, the NDP leader dismissed it as a “dog bites man” story.
But if Martin’s intent is to run a blue pencil through his own performance, it lasts precisely three minutes. I asked him if he felt angry that the Liberals were presenting themselves as more progressive than the NDP in this election – and then took two steps back.
“Liberals should be judged by what they do, not what they say,” he says, warming to his theme.
In a riding where natives make up 20 per cent of voters, he is particularly critical of the Liberal record on First Nations. “They brought in a two per cent cap in 1994 when the population was growing by swix per cent. Twenty years of that led to Third World conditions. The Kelowna Accord was a cynical insult. Paul Martin had a conversion on the road to Damascus after leaving office but he was the f***ing prime minister and f***king finance minister through seven or eight surplus budgets.
“People have short attention spans. Of course, there is the unbelievable celebrity of Justin and his lovely family – that Kennedyesque-Camelot feeling. But my challenge is to remind people that life under Liberal governments was rough for the riding of Winnipeg Centre.”
Martin was first elected in 1997 and has seen his share of the vote increase steadily in every election, winning 53 per cent last time. By his own admission, he has been “mailing it in” in recent electoral tilts. But not this time. In Ouellette, he faces a genuine Liberal star – a 38-year-old native Cree, who was born in Saskatechewan, grew up in poverty in Calgary and spent 19 years in the military in Quebec. During that time he earned a Phd in anthropology, before taking up a position at the University of Manitoba five years ago. An abortive mayoral bid last year earned him a degree of respect and name recognition in the city.
“I have got a good challenger this time, but that just ups our game,” Martin says. “I like a good rhubarb. Who wants to play chess with an idiot?”
Earlier in the campaign, the two men sparred over rumours that Martin actually lives at a hobby farm he owns on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. The New Democrat threatened to sue anyone who propogated the false rumour, which prompted Ouellette to issue a cheeky press release saying he wished to make it absolutely clear it was his official position that Pat Martin does not live on Salt Spring Island.
“I won’t be bullied or intimidated by anyone but I will be respectful,” says Ouellette. “At the end of the day, if you are going to exercise a position of leadership, you have to be careful of the words you use. A lot of younger people look up to me and follow what I say and how I act. If I do things that are not honourable or are unbecoming, I dishonour them,” he says.
The barb is veiled but aimed at Martin.
Despite the contempt in which he holds the Liberal Party, Martin says he is disappointed there was no tacit agreement between the left of centre parties. “It couldn’t have been formal but on an informal basis we could have pulled our punches around the country. We’re wasting time and resources fighting each other. The only way Stephen Harper sleeps at night is the knowledge that we will beat the s**t out of each other.”
He says Ouellette will be a loss to the progressive left “once I defeat him handily.”
Yet what once might have been a foregone conclusion looks far from that as you drive around a riding that ranks as one of the poorest in Canada. There are lots and lots of red Ouellette signs.
If the Liberal candidate is to dislodge the institution that is Pat Martin, he is going to have to mobilize First Nations voters who have often not turned out in the past. Less than half the registered voters showed up in 2011, enabling Martin to win with just 14,000 votes. His Liberal challenger says if he can get indigenous and Filipino voters to the polls, he’s looking at a “massive win.”
That is a weighty conditional clause. But Ouellette has focused on what he calls “the great divide” between native and non-native Canadians, trawling for votes in rooming houses, where mothers are raising three kids in one room while an addict is sniffing gas one floor up.
“It’s not a racial divide, it’s a socio-economic divide,” he says. Like many Liberal candidates, he is enthusiastic about the party’s free-spending platform. “The child benefit commitment will have a profound impact on Winnipeg Centre,” he says. “It will give that single mother $18,000 a year and allow her to do something with her life.”
For his part, Martin points out that in the past four years, he has helped to secure $146-million of federal government spending, over and above the normal transfers – the 14th highest amount of all the 308 ridings. “For better or worse, people know who I am and answer my calls,” he says.
He points to Gordon Bell High School’s “field of dreams” on Portage – an artificial soccer field a stone’s throw from his campaign office. The land was owned by Canada Post and was being developed as a mail processing centre when Martin called Conservative minister John Baird. He ordered the mail centre to be re-located and funds committed to a new field that appears to be in near constant use by the large African community in the neighbourhood. It is the kind of project that creates goodwill and gets MPs re-elected.
Ouellette says he respects Martin’s 17 years of service “but look around the riding – it’s still the second poorest riding in the country. I don’t think a soccer field is going to change the fundamentals of Winnipeg Centre. There are greater forces at work here.”
“They are absolutely carpet bombing my riding with them, they’re just blanketing my riding with these things. Dirty, rotten b*****ds.” March 2014 interview with iPolitics. “I do not need to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that zombies do not recognize borders and that a zombie invasion in the United States could easily turn into a continent wide pandemic if it is not contained.” Feb. 13, 2013 in the House of Comm ons. “Mr. Speaker, folklore has it that the Canadian beaver will bite off its own testicles when it is threatened and offer them up to its tormentors. I think that is a fitting metaphor for the way our Canadian government reacts to bullying on trade issues, by carving off pieces of our nation and offering them to the Americans.” Oct. 19, 2011 in the House of Comm ons. “Having lobbyists is like having bats in the attic. They cannot stand the light of day, are almost impossible to get rid of and if they are left there too long, they rot the timbers of the building.” May 4, 2010 in the House of Comm ons.