HOUSE-TRAINED
MP Kim Rudd is adjusting to the hectic pace of political life, but hasn’t embraced its adversarial side.
Kim Rudd has spent a lot of time in the middle of crowds over the past year, running and getting elected as the rookie MP for Northumberland—Peterborough South.
In fact, it’s been amid the noisy roar of crowds that Rudd has experienced some of her best and worst moments since the launch of last year’s election campaign.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Rudd was asked whether she could round up 250 people to greet Leader Justin Trudeau on a scheduled campaign stop in Port Hope. Rudd has lived in the area for nearly 40 years, as an entrepreneur and activist in child care and post-secondary education. She thought she could probably find more people.
As it turned out, more than 1,000 turned up to greet Trudeau on Thanksgiving Monday and the event had to be moved into the street.
Trudeau arrived, looked around and said to Rudd: “This is unbelievable.” It was at that moment, Rudd says, that she suddenly realized the Liberals were going to win the election the next week.
She said to Trudeau: “That’s because we’re going to do it.”
Victory was a long time coming for Rudd, 59, who first took the plunge into elected politics back in 2009, when she became the nominated candidate in the old riding of Northumberland—Quinte West. Defeated in the 2011 election but undeterred, she put herself forward once again in 2015 in one of the new ridings carved out in the communities around her hometown of Cobourg.
Today, Rudd has a seat on the government benches in the Commons, serving as parliamentary secretary for natural resources. Always organized in her prepolitical life, Rudd has kicked up those skills another notch to handle the hectic and unpredictable schedule of an MP.
“I go to bed at night and look at my calendar, and when I get up in the morning . . . it’s completely different,” she says.
Unusually, Rudd has no staff in Ottawa. Everyone who works for her is based in the riding. Her executive assistant does the three-hour commute with her by train, and stays in the two-bedroom condo Rudd has rented for the times she needs to be in the capital. Rudd keeps a set of clothes, personal items and suitcases in each home and a passport on her at all times. Twice in the past few months, she’s flown to China to represent Canada at international energy meetings.
Rudd knew she was signing up for a busy life, but the pace of it sometimes surprises her.
“Certainly I knew that the time commitment was huge. I think that the surprise to me was the amount of work that we can put into the days that we are in Ottawa,” she says. “There’s no social life. Every once in a while there is a group of us who get together to have a glass of wine or two. But it really is 7 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night.”
Rudd quickly adds, though: “No one is complaining.”
Over the course of an hour-long interview in a Cobourg café, Rudd shows a decided preference to answer questions with “we” rather than “me,” talking about what the government has accomplished or how her family — husband Tom, her two grown daughters, her grandchildren — are coping with political life.
Her tales of best and worst moments of the past year almost always include a crowd scene — for instance, on election night, when she looked down at her family and wished her mother, who died in 1998, could have been there. (Rudd’s mother, a steelworker, ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in Ontario in the 1970s.)
Rudd contrasted the sense of victory she felt in 2015 with the defeat of 2011: “When I didn’t win — it wasn’t about me. It was about all those people who were helping out along the road.”
As for her worst moment so far, Rudd talks about that now-infamous day in the Commons in May — the Trudeau “elbowing” incident, which was preceded by a raucous display of angry deskbanging by the opposition.
“It was so loud in there. And I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t leave and it was an awful feeling,” Rudd recalls. “When I left, I was emotional and I was not the only one.”
She admits that the adversarial aspect of political life is not her favourite part, seeing a lot of it as an organized person would — as a waste of time.
“I don’t do confrontation well. That’s just who I am. Everybody has their own space in life,” she says.
In the team sport of politics, finding one’s own space isn’t easy. This rookie MP, for the past year at least, seems to have found hers in the midst of a crowd. House-trained is a summer series on new Ontario MPs. sdelacourt@bell.net