Cub reporter finds first time on provincial campaign trail more fun than he imagined
Star reporter’s 9-year-old son saves ‘dad’s butt,’ scores private interview with Wynne
NIAGARA FALLS, ONT.— Wow. First time on a campaign bus and it’s pretty nice. Free stuff, nice people, what more could you ask for?
At around 9:30 a.m., on Saturday, we went to Waterdown Farmers’ Market.
Kathleen Wynne was there and she was talking to a vendor named Jens Gemmrich. He owns Frogpond Farm, a Canadian wine company of some kind.
Then we went to a rally and I interviewed a 6-year-old boy named Niam Bratch. He said he wanted Kathleen Wynne to win the election. I asked him why and he replied: “I don’t know, I just do.” Then I asked Kathleen Wynne about how her policies affected her and she replied: “I have three grandbabies and any time I feel tired I think of them and it gets me back on my feet.”
She was talking about how she was the go-to for voting. Then she spent a couple of minutes talking about how the other candidates had plans that could not be fulfilled. Then she did the scrum, which is basically just a question period for the media (including me). Anyway, somebody asked her about crime in the legislature.
I also saved my Dad’s butt because his tape recorder turned off halfway through the rally but mine kept going.
So far a political bus isn’t as bad as I thought. Going to the rallies gets kind of irritating but it’s fun when you get there. You meet new people and you get to interview them. I just finished a rally at a Niagara Falls sports shop that was probably the best one. I met a world-famous hockey player, Marcel Dionne. He was pretty nice to me and he’s also the fifth highest scorer in NHL history. So that pretty much made my day. But, no, it had to get better. I — and I only — got to have an exclusive interview with Kathleen Wynne on her bus and I got to ask her a couple of questions about how the campaign was going. She said to me it was going great and she wished she had “the magic wand that could get me to all 107 ridings — that’s the thing that would make this absolutely perfect. It’s really hard to get to all 107.” Her bus was different than the media bus though the kitchen was smaller and they had bigger tables. I like the media bus because it has interesting characters. I like them because they all have different attributes that set them apart. In general, they’re all-around nice people. I have to say that because they were generous and offered me a Brisk lemonade and Trident Very Berry gum. Reed Benzie is a Grade 4 student in Toronto and the son of the Star’s Robert Benzie. These are his first impressions of life on the campaign trail. He wrote this himself on his father’s iPad.