Federal cabinet A-team makes parsley out of me
Post-Christmas I was casually reading the Canadian Medical Association Journal, as one does, and went into shock. For there was a profile of federal Health Minister Jane Philpott containing this paragraph, which is just a sample, not a totality.
“So in 1998, the family settled in the Ontario town of Stouffville, where Philpott would practise family medicine for more than 15 years . . . she would go on to lead a family health team, complete a master of public health, run a hospital family medicine department, start an HIV/AIDS charity, open a family medicine teaching unit in Markham and help a university in Ethiopia develop the country’s first family medicine training program.”
A feeling swept over me like wind on the steppes, the treeless plains of Low Achievement Land, where now I live. What had I done with my life?
Rigid as a frozen green bean, I walked into the kitchen and did what I always do under stress. I cleaned. As I pulled a huge hank of wet parsley out of a sink drain and scraped the dishwasher hinges with a knife — lots of gunk on the blade, big success — I thought about my accomplishments and how they compared to Philpott’s.
My new screensaver is pretty fabulous. This year, we will not run out of driveway salt. I roll all my sweaters instead of stacking them. I’m reading Patrick Modiano in French (Nobel Prize, brush with greatness there) and Zola, so that’s two centuries covered. I write fast. I have high hopes for my new hair dryer, it has a revolving barrel and 2016 is looking good.
Philpott’s local medical achievements are braced on two sides. After becoming a doctor, she spent years working in rural Niger, where she and her husband lost their 2-yearold daughter, Emily, to a sudden bacterial infection. Their 8-monthold, Bethany, barely survived the same illness. Instead of despairing, they returned to Niger to work.
Closer to the present, in 2010 Philpott, who has four children, all gorgeous, chatted with former PM Paul Martin about whether she should run for office. He said yes, she did, she won and she is now health minister with responsibility for my health, and possibly my death if I need assistance with that.
If I sever a digit with my knife, her financing decisions may well decide if they’re able to reattach it, and it isn’t easy, I have a family member with a short finger so I know.
Nearer home, Chrystia Freeland, my former boss and now international trade minister, is so larded with accomplishment I think she had to tone it down for her campaign website in case it looked like fantasizing. She has degrees from Harvard and Oxford, held senior positions at the Financial Times of London, the Globe, and Thomson Reuters, and has written two books, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, two revelatory bestsellers that left me in permanent awe of Russian suffering.
Freeland, who has three children, speaks Ukrainian, Russian, Italian and French. Need I mention she also speaks English? Five. Languages. Born into a regular family, she is a non-snob. Did I mention her husband is clever and super-nice? Yeah.
A few weeks into her new job she won a massive U.S. trade concession on meat labelling. It was a triumph that slipped past most journalists because the subject was too obscure, but enjoy your meat tonight, people, we still have a protein industry.
A lot of the federal cabinet is like this. Does Trudeau have some kind of smart fetish? He’s playing with fire, I say. We’re not used to brilliant people entering politics. Under Stephen Harper, the stolid used politics as a stepping stone to corporate salaries and the nasty — hi there Dean Del Mastro, hey Jason Kenney — just plain used it.
The idea that people might take a pay cut to enter politics? That’s new, that’s Finance Minister Bill Morneau. That people might do it out of love for the country that welcomed them as a refugee? That’s new, that’s Minister for Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef.
I honestly think some of Harper’s people ran for office just so they could be mean to girls.
Back to admirable politicians. The late art critic Robert Hughes, who was a hard man to please, called great art “the spectacle of skill,” and it mightily annoyed the plodders.
Speaking of plodders, I still have this parsley in my hand. Having tweeted my despair, I see Philpott and Freeland have kindly reached out to say they too have had parsleylevel problems. But come on.
I looked it up. “Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) is a species in the family Apiaceae, native to the central Mediterranean region, and is widely cultivated as a herb, a spice, and a vegetable.”
What? Even parsley has three jobs now?
It used to be a jumped-up garnish, now it’s a high achiever with a will to win. Our world has changed, infinitely for the better of course, but one day as God is my witness, I shall outdo this soggy lump of green matter. hmallick@thestar.ca