The Fundamental Things Apply by MacLaren Roy;

Author:MacLaren, Roy; [MacLaren, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Thatcher beamed at my little jokes but did not detect anything amusing about Trudeau, whom she regarded as “wet,” her ultimate condemnation of all those who did not share her particular approach to public policy. Lord Moran, the British high commissioner, is to her right and David Smith, Minister of State (Small Business), is at my left.

The visit of the Iron Lady was followed by a hurried partisan visit to my ancestral province, Prince Edward Island, and the fulfillment of various non-Ottawa activities.

28 OCTOBER 1983: Vernon River. I speak – badly again – at Bennett Campbell’s annual fund-raising dinner, a rural meeting which, in the homogeneity of the 200 or so guests attending, seems about as far from the multifarious Etobicoke North as one could get. After attempting in vain to be stridently partisan, I invite questions which go better. However, best of all was a question asked when the meeting was almost over. A woman, peering at me intently, enquired … “When did you buy that suit?” After hastily checking the date tag which my tailor sews into an inside breast pocket, I replied, “Sixteen years ago in July.” Long pause, then: “Oh well, I guess that you could keep it in case it comes into fashion again.” Vernon River?

5 NOVEMBER 1983: Hamilton. I speak about CBEL at a dinner of Japanese-Canadian war veterans. During the First World War, the Army accepted Japanese-Canadian volunteers in Vancouver only when the dearth of other volunteers became increasingly worrisome (I recall from my childhood the pillar monument in Stanley Park to their subsequent valour on the Western Front). During the Second World War, the army was even less eager to have them (the RCN wouldn’t have them at all, requiring “white men” only). One of the very few Japanese-Canadians who made it into the army during the early years of the war did so only after riding box cars from Vancouver to Calgary to Winnipeg to Toronto to Montreal, vainly volunteering at recruiting centres all along the way, until finally he was accepted by the RCEs in Quebec City!

12 NOVEMBER 1983: Toronto. All Saturday mornings – which begin at nine – bring their varied supplicants, frequently constituents who, having exhausted all the usual channels for redress, regard their MP as the panacea for their woes.

Today was fertile: an inventor with a sort of water wheel – which, like an incontinent puppy, much dampened my office carpet – to provide perpetual energy; an illegal immigrant who has been here for four years but cannot get a better job without a SIN, and cannot get a SIN without an immigrant visa, hence is condemned to being exploited by her present employer; an Italo-Canadian who wants a telephone pole removed from the front of his house; a lugubrious Sikh who, for the third time, has applied to bring his ineligible older brother from India; and a sort of folle de Chaillot who asked me to arrange to have her cremated – free – upon her supposedly imminent demise.

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