Free political advice: always look both ways.

It’s a sunny, warm June day in 1990 in Calgary.  Along with Eleanor McMahon – one of Jean Chretien’s press assistants, and a future Ontario cabinet minister – I’m on the sidewalk outside the Delta Hotel on Fourth Avenue.  Eleanor and I are on our way somewhere, to prep for another successful Chretien leadership campaign event.  Eleanor behind me, I step off the sidewalk.

And I step into the path of a yellow Calgary cab, moving fast.  

Tires screeched.  Horns blared.  Eleanor screamed.

Later on, in a room at the Calgary General Hospital, Eleanor told me that I had flipped through the air “like a rag doll,” and landed, hard, on the pavement in front of the Delta.  “I thought you were going to die,” she said.

Later on, while recuperating at my parents’ Calgary home, Jean Chretien phoned.  “So, young man,” he said, “was Paul Martin driving that taxi?”

It hurt to laugh, but I laughed anyway.  The leadership vote was a day or so away, and we were going to win it, big time.  Some days before, before my appointment with the bumper of a taxi cab, I had asked Chretien advisor Eddie Goldenberg about “our second ballot strategy.”

Goldenberg laughed.  “We don’t have one,” he said.  “We’re going to win on the first ballot.”

And we did, we did.  Sitting in the Chretien campaign box in Calgary’s Olympic Saddledome with my Dad – surrounded by Chretien loyalists like Keith Davey, Sheila Finestone, Sergio Marchi, Beryl Gaffney, Lawrence MacAulay, Shirley Maheu, Dennis Mills and many, many others – we got the results of the first ballot on June 23, 1990.

Chretien had won the Liberal Party leadership with almost 60 per cent of the delegated vote.  His nearest rival, Paul Martin, took only 25 per cent.  The also-rans – Shela Copps, Tom Wappel and John Nunziata – secured only 15 per cent of the vote put together.

I struggled to my feet using my crutches, overjoyed.  I had been volunteering for Chretien for many months, writing speeches, overseeing his campaign correspondence, assisting in low-level strategy.  Now that the leadership campaign was over, I would return to my legal practice.

Chretien had other plans.  Back in Ottawa, reaching me again on the phone, he told me he wanted me to work for him.  I was shocked.  I never wanted a job, I told him.  I was always planning to return to my litigation practice.

“You can be a lawyer anytime, young man,” the newly-minted Liberal leader said.  “I’m offering a chance to work for me and have some fun.”

So I took him up on his offer, as his Special Assistant, but it wasn’t a lot of fun at the start.  We ran headlong into the Meech Lake Accord, the Oka crisis, and Martin-friendly Liberal MPs quitting caucus to join the nascent Bloc Quebecois.

Chretien would experience a health scare, staff churn, and caucus rumblings, and – later – the Persian Gulf crisis.  Other Opposition leaders may experience a honeymoon in the wake of their win.  But we didn’t.

“You’ve made a big mistake throwing away your legal career to work for Chretien,” some legal and political friends would tell me.  “He’ll never be Prime Minister.”

Well, as I would later delight in telling those Chretien critics, he did okay, didn’t he?

Forty years of never losing an election.  Wrestling the deficit and debt to the ground.  Defeating a burgeoning separatist movement in a nail-biter.  Keeping Canada out of the ill-considered Iraq conflict.  And, along the way, doing what no other leader had done: winning three back-to-back majority governments.

He was – and always will be, to me – the best Prime Minister.  Since he retired in 2003, I’ve seen it many times when I’ve walked on the street with him, in Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa: Canadians mostly love Jean Chretien.  “Come back,” they say to him, asking for selfies.  “You’d win!”

And he would, he would.  His successors, as Chretienites like to say, always make him look good.

Oh, and as I walked with him on one of those streets one sunny day, Chretien laughed and pointed at me.

“Look both ways this time, young man!”

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More reasons why, seen in Licia Corbella’s important column today, found here.

My post on Raworth, which you should also read, is here.

In January 2018, an Alberta woman said on Twitter that 10 years earlier, while working at the Alberta legislature — when Hehr was an MLA for the opposition Alberta Liberals between the years of 2008 and 2015 — he called her “yummy” while in an elevator together.She said he made similar remarks or tried to brush up against her in later encounters.The feeding frenzy on Twitter by many thousands of people was swift and near-unanimous. The next day he resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet as sport and disabilities minister.

The Prime Minister’s Office commissioned an independent investigation, which found the woman’s claims were legitimate, but details of the review were kept under wraps by the PMO due to privacy concerns — even though the accuser wanted them made public.

Hehr said then and maintains today that he doesn’t recall meeting the woman at the legislature or calling her or anyone else “yummy” — ever...

It’s vital to point out that Hehr has zero feeling in his hands or forearms. He relies on his shoulder muscles to move his arms and can’t fully control where his arms end up. Indeed, Hehr has received third-degree burns to his hands from a hot cup of coffee offered to him by a well-meaning person — feeling nothing as layers of skin peeled away, requiring medical treatment.

At the age of 21, on Oct. 3, 1991, Hehr, a bystander, was shot in a drive-by shooting in Calgary. The resulting spinal cord injury rendered him a quadriplegic, with no feeling below his breastbone.

In Hehr’s Facebook post, which has received more than 2,500 likes, 610 overwhelmingly positive comments and 346 shares, he writes that what he went through came into “sharp focus” on April 30 “when the woman who accused me of sexual harassment in 2018 apologized for making libellous statements about Canadian public figure Warren Kinsella.” She made false claims, was forced to retract her statements, apologize and pay his legal bills. “Kinsella wrote an article that provided some context for all of this …. Here’s how he closed it: ‘ … to Kent Hehr, wherever you are: I now wonder whether you deserved better. I wonder that a lot.’”

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