Booze and politicians a toxic mix, even for teetotallers,
There’s a joke that used to circulate around Parliament Hill about what to expect at political party conventions, and it went something like this:
You go to a Conservative convention to get drunk, a Liberal convention to get laid, and a New Democratic Party convention to get pamphlets.
In the current climate, that is less of a joke than an ad for the NDP. Alcohol and sex used to be standard features of the political trade — workplace perks or occupational hazards, depending on your perspective. In 2018, though, it’s smart to stick with the pamphlets.
The exploded career of Patrick Brown, former leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, is also another lurid illustration of how things can go terribly wrong when you mix politics and alcohol — even when the politician, like Brown, is a teetotaller.
Actually, that’s not a rare thing for a political leader these days, either. U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t drink at all; former prime minister Stephen Harper also was an abstainer. The current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, enjoys the occasional glass of bourbon, but isn’t a big imbiber of alcohol. “We were never people who were attracted to drugs and stuff that made us disconnect from our state of mind,” Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, his wife, told me in an interview back in 2013.
Though the prime minister was featured drinking wine in a recent National Post interview, bars aren’t his natural habitat. The same is true for Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh (a non-drinker, too).
It’s little wonder that the bar scene around Parliament Hill is a mere shadow of what it used to be: the old hangouts, like the Press Club or Hy’s, are long gone. Beer machines disappeared from the Press Gallery offices in the 1990s, along with the little store in the basement of Parliament Hill where you could pick up a bottle of wine to bring home or back to the office. The old Press Gallery dinner, once a drunken blur for politician and journalist attendees, is now really about the speeches — hard to distinguish from another day at the office.
Yes, a lot of the modern age of political temperance is due to the crackdown on MPs’ expense accounts, and the new era of public transparency around bar and restaurant bills. The two-martini lunch died with the 20th century, with smoking in restaurants. Social media also has threatened to shine a spotlight on politicians who spend too much time in bars.
But it’s also because alcohol and power, each addictive on their own, are a toxic combination when mixed with politics and sex. This coming age of zero tolerance for sexual harassment soon may be combined with zero tolerance for alcohol around politics — if we aren’t there already.
We’ve already come to see alcohol as an obstacle on the Canadian political career ladder; something you need to refuse regularly if you plan to get ahead.
Two high-profile members of Trudeau’s team have sought treatment for alcohol abuse, we’ll recall, since the Liberals came to power. For one, Hunter Toooo, it was part of his journey out of cabinet. For the other, Seamus O’Regan, it led to a recovery that earned him a ministerial promotion last summer.
Apart from everything else we learned about Brown’s downfall this week, one thing is clear: he’d probably still be in his job if he had not frequented the drinks-fuelled scenes where his alleged misdeeds with young women took place.
According to CTV News, one misadventure began when Brown, then an MP, gave a young woman “his phone number and the names of Barrie bars that he’d be at that night, offering her help to skip any lineups, even though she was 18 at the time — below Ontario’s legal drinking age.”
It’s hard to imagine Brown thinking this would end well, though if he hadn’t become a party leader, he might have just been seen as another kind of sketchy politician who preferred to date women younger, and drunker, than himself.
In the last century, that was common. In the past decade, it was kind of icky. In the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, it’s a career-killer.
Someday, politicians may even recall the times when alcohol was a big part of their events — kind of like how older folks talk now about the days when drinking and driving was a common practice.
Or maybe we’ll see warnings like the ones we have now for operating heavy machinery — do not commit politics after consuming more than a glass or two alcohol. (That would apply to politicians and those who deal with them, by the way.)
The warnings could even be printed up in pamphlets — and handed out at party conventions instead of all those free drinks. sdelacourt@bell.net
We’ve come to see alcohol as an obstacle on the political career ladder