— Musings —01.07.2014 10:03 PM
Jim Coutts
When I was I shit-disturbing Young Liberal – before I became a shit-disturbing Old Liberal – I was on the Carleton U. Grit club executive. I decided to stir things up by inviting every Liberal and liberal I could think of to come and speak.
So I called up Jim Coutts, then the primus inter pares in Trudeau’s PMO, and asked him to come. He said okay.
Apparently, that was a big deal. Liberals told me he had never, ever agreed to something like that before.
So, when he showed up, I went to greet him. “Why’d you come?” I asked him.
“Because you asked me, that’s why,” said he.
There’s a great little line from Coutts in the first bit of the third part of the NFB documentary “Champions”, about how he tried (unsuccessfully) to get Trudeau to call a snap election in 1977, while he was riding high in the polls, to make sure he would be around for Levesque’s referendum — “it was three-and-a-half years since the last election, or it would have been, and I always believe in having elections when you can win them…”