A POLITICAL PARADOX
Depending on who you talk to, Lisa MacLeod is either a hard-working MPP who cares deeply about her community or a partisan attack dog whose loyalty is first to the Progressive Conservative party. MATTHEW PEARSON reports.
During her time in office, MPP Lisa MacLeod has become loved by voters, loathed by opponents.
On the day Lisa MacLeod learned her ailing father’s cancer treatment was no longer working, Liberal provocateur Warren Kinsella posted a picture to his blog of the young MPP with a thought bubble suggesting she would rather be baking cookies than attending a political rally alongside party leader John Tory. This was back in 2007, late July. MacLeod was mad about the sexist prank, but she was devastated by the news about her beloved father, Danny, a longtime municipal politician and her mentor. When she got around to telling him about the incident, the avowed partisan’s advice was unequivocal: “Step on his throat,” he urged.
But Kinsella’s juvenile dig was not MacLeod’s biggest concern: On top of worrying about her father in Nova Scotia, she had a young daughter in Ottawa and an election on the horizon.
Much of that summer was spent shuttling between her professional and personal lives — strategizing with her PC colleagues in the lead-up to the campaign and visiting her father on his deathbed, from where he counselled her to go home and start knocking on voters’ doors.
She would go on to win re-election handily, but lost her father before the writ was even dropped.
Still, the political lessons he passed on have stayed with her.
“His view,” she says, “was always that if you can provide assistance, you got to do it.”
In some ways, MacLeod seemed destined to follow in her father’s footsteps. His tenure on New Glasgow’s town council spanned three decades. His cousin was once premier of Nova Scotia; his uncle a member of the provincial legislature.
With a political science degree in hand and $200 in her pocket, MacLeod left Nova Scotia in 1998 to work for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. It had been a lifelong dream.
She later worked for Barrhaven city councillor Jan Harder and Pierre Poilievre, her federal counterpart in Nepean-Carleton, and counts as friends several other influential Conservatives on the federal scene, including Justice Minister Peter MacKay (her husband Joe Varner’s boss) and Jenni Byrne, deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
She took to the local airwaves as a political pundit and says she was comfortable working in the background on other people’s election campaigns. But the experience of not having a doctor at the outset of her pregnancy nagged at MacLeod and she decided to do something about it.
“I felt the best way to make some change was actually be part of it,” she says, sitting in her Fallowfield Road constituency office. “So that’s why I did it.”
A simple enough motivation, perhaps, but MacLeod’s years at Queen’s Park have revealed a much more complicated reality. She has emerged as a polarizing figure — an MPP loved by voters and party loyalists, loathed by opponents who claim she is aggressive and partisan to the core.
‘If somebody’s going to criticize me for speaking my mind and bringing passion to it, I think that’s incredibly myopic and I think they’re actually doing themselves a disservice because they’re discounting the contributions I do make, not only in the legislature but in my community.’
At the same time, she has also become someone insiders suggest will play a central role in cabinet should Tim Hudak and the Tories cross the next election’s finish line first.
“The word to describe Lisa is ‘genuine.’ Warts and all, that’s Lisa,” says Tim Powers, a Conservative strategist who worked on Parliament Hill with her in the late ’ 90s and has donated to her campaigns.
“She’s a genuine person who genuinely gives a s--t about community service and wants to be involved in it. She’s chosen politics as her route.”
Yet several others familiar with her career declined when approached for comment, citing the old chestnut that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
And therein lies the competing narratives. Depending on your perspective, MacLeod is either a partisan attack dog or she’s a hard-working MPP who hugs freely and has a charming, self-deprecating sense of humour.
There is a third possibility: Perhaps she’s both.
Take, for instance, the day she rose in the legislature to speak eloquently about Jamie Hubley, a Kanata teen who took his life in October 2011 after struggling with bullying and depression.
MacLeod committed herself to working with Ottawa Centre Liberal MPP Yasir Naqvi — who had crossed the floor momentarily to sit beside her on the Tory side of the legislature as she spoke — to ensure that the federal government had a suicide prevention plan.
“Because one teen suicide — or one suicide — is one too many,” she said. “Because kids in a dark place and parents with innumerable questions expect us to work together to prevent suicide, whether we are right or left, gay or straight; regardless of our culture, our religion or our economic circumstances.”
Recalling the moment nearly two years later reduces MacLeod to tears.
“I remember turning to my left and seeing the NDP rise, and I had tears in my eyes, and I looked up and the education minister (Laurel Broten) had crossed the floor to hug me,” she says.
“And although the three of us have great debates, that was probably my most proud moment.”
Liberals interpreted her powerful words as a clear indication that the Tories wanted to collaborate on tough anti-bullying measures, but that co-operation failed to materialize and the parties tabled competing legislation.
Liberal sources say MacLeod said all the right things, but stuck with the party line when it actually came down to combining the two bills into one. And such behaviour, they say, speaks volumes about who she really is — a partisan who can be difficult to work with.
MacLeod doesn’t deny her loyalty to the party, but maintains the Tory bill was better.
“If you’re going to pass legislation and you’re going to make a personal commitment as a government, then you have to do it the whole way, you have to do it right,” she says. “You can’t just try to trap parties in a public policy debate and pretend you’re doing something about it when you haven’t dealt with it in its entirety.”
And so it was that several months after first speaking about Jamie Hubley in the legislature, MacLeod would rise again to vote against the government’s anti-bullying legislation.
Painting MacLeod simply as a partisan hack, however, runs the risk of producing an incomplete portrait. At least that’s what George Weber thinks.
He’s the president and CEO of The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre and says he has seen a different side of the MPP.
In addition to supporting the hospital’s efforts to create a suicide prevention network in Ottawa, MacLeod has also put her energy behind a new treatment program for people with addictions to opioids, such as OxyContin and Fentanyl.
MacLeod approached Weber to see if something could be done after learning last fall about an escalating drug problem in Manotick, where some addicted teens had reportedly resorted to residential break-ins in search of electronics, jewelry or anything else they could sell to finance their addictions.
The Royal was developing a program, which MacLeod soon became a champion for, proudly attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Naqvi and other stakeholders earlier this year.
“She’s been a very positive influence,” Weber says. “In order to get things done, you’ve got to be seen as a player in the community and be a positive influence for the community good.”
He added that MacLeod has kept abreast of what’s happening with the program, even paying him a visit last month to get an update. “I’m glad to have her on our side.” Teen suicide, mental health, drug addiction — these may not seem like typical issues for a Tory MPP to get behind, but MacLeod has raised them because they come directly from the mouths of concerned constituents.
And the added fact she personally followed up with Weber months after the microphones and flashbulbs of the media corps had moved on sheds light on her diligence and dedication.
It may also explain why she has a legion of loyal fans, many of whom attended her annual BBQ on a stormy July evening.
The PCs were knee-deep in a byelection battle in Ottawa South, the neighbouring riding, and party leader Tim Hudak was in town.
Folks ate their hamburgers and hotdogs at picnic tables set up on the asphalt beside the track at Rideau Carleton Raceway, while the Sheryl Crow song A Change Would Do You Good blared out of nearby speakers.
As the skies grew ever more ominous, MacLeod acted fast to get the show on the road before the rain came. A bagpiper led the procession to a small stage, where she took the microphone and introduced Hudak and a collection of MPPs and nominated candidates from Eastern Ontario.
Hudak did his best to rev up the crowd of several hundred party loyalists, but it was MacLeod who charmed them. These were her people, as much as they were his. Her personal popularity, particularly in Nepean-Carleton — where she captured a whopping 55 per cent of the vote in 2011 — cannot be denied.
In fact, it has probably helped cement her as a key player in the PC party, which is gathering this weekend for its biennial policy convention in London.
Although MacLeod is widely seen by Liberals and Tories alike at Queen’s Park as someone who has leadership ambitions, she won’t entertain such speculation.
She was the first person in caucus to support Hudak when he sought the leader’s job and the first to defend him during the recent round of “shenanigans” — her word for the headache caused by an amendment that seeks to create a new leadership review process that was proposed last month by a small group of jilted party members and supported by two caucus members, including Randy Hillier (Lanark, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington). It will be debated this weekend.
“I liked him the minute I met him,” she says of Hudak.
He was approachable, closer in age to her than other caucus members, and is also a parent to a young daughter and understands the tough balance between career and home responsibilities.
Finding that balance is even tougher when MacLeod is in Toronto during the weeks when the legislature is sitting (Victoria, 8, stays in Ottawa with her father).
“We make the most of the time we have together when we’re together,” he says.
Then there are the added pressures that come on the campaign trail, though it’s unclear how long Premier Kathleen Wynne’s minority Liberal government will hold on to power and when those might come.
That hasn’t stopped MacLeod from focusing on winning the next provincial election, whenever it comes, and she hopes a PC government could catapult her into cabinet. “I’d like to sit on the other side of the aisle and hopefully that happens within the next five years.”
She says she doesn’t rely on speaking notes as much these days and has become more engaged in caucus and house debates. She’s moved from the backbenches of opposition to the front bench, a few seats away from Hudak, and is the most visible Tory in Eastern Ontario.
But her often fiery outspokenness, that Celtic heritage she wears with pride, remains strong.
“If somebody’s going to criticize me for speaking my mind and bringing passion to it, I think that’s incredibly myopic and I think they’re actually doing themselves a disservice because they’re discounting the contributions I do make, not only in the legislature but in my community.”
Now 38, MacLeod has matured politically and left behind some of the youthful exuberance that defined her early days, says Norm Sterling.
The former MPP is a close friend and mentor to her and says he advised his young protégé a few years back to approach issues with greater depth and be more thoughtful in her approach.
“I thought she was operating on the political surface too often,” he says.
But she’s grown more comfortable in the job and shown leadership as the party’s education critic.
“If I were Tim, I’d make her deputy premier because I think she’s got the depth and the political ability to deal with the press, to deal with issues, and to deal with them quickly.”
Powers, the Conservative strategist, agrees that his old friend has become wiser with age, and adds that it’s often tough for opposition members to showcase their substance on issues.
“You get attention in opposition by being loud, by being creative, by often being in the face of your opponent so the media has something to write about and the partisans have something to cheer about,” he says.
“Lisa’s understood that very well, but I think she’s got a long game there and that long game is to move into a senior role in government.”