WINNIPEG – Life as a Liberal in Western Canada has its ups and downs but, lately at least, mostly just the latter.
There’s a scene in the movie “Jurassic Park” where Sam Neill pulls child-actor Joseph Mazzello out of a wrecked Land Rover at the top of a tree and the pair scramble down, the vehicle lurching from branch to branch behind them.
At the very bottom it crashes down on the two, but they are OK as it miraculously falls so they enter the open roof and a somewhat breathless Mazzello says, “Well, we’re back, in the car again.”
As he gets ready to enter his fourth election campaign as Manitoba Liberal leader, Jon Gerrard must know the feeling.
Leader since 1998, he’s still standing. But once again he’s back to where he started – as a party of one. Not that he really got that far, but in the past at least he had some company.
Now, however, his longtime partner in the legislature, Kevin Lamoureux, is the MP for Winnipeg North and Lamoureux’s old provincial seat of Inkster, vacant since he stepped down last year to run federally, is up for grabs.
In the last decade or so, provincial Liberals have enjoyed brief bursts of popularity in Manitoba polls, but never when it counts at election time.
In the 13 years Gerrard has led them, they’ve never drawn much more than about 13 per cent of the popular vote. Last time, in 2007, they managed just over 12 per cent. The latest polls show support sliding into single-digit territory.
Ever the positive thinker, the party leader refuses to accept those bleak numbers as a harbinger of Oct. 4’s election results.
“I guess I’m an incurable optimist but I’d rather be that than the other way.”
Gerrard, a pediatrician, is certainly not a quitter. Lean and fit and looking younger than the 64 he will turn Oct. 13, he has spent most of the last 20 years as an elected member of either the House of Commons or the Manitoba legislature, working only briefly as a doctor during the transition.
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He was the MP for Portage-Interlake from 1993-97 and has been member of the legislature for the old-money Winnipeg riding of River Heights since 1999.
He’s been a politician almost as long as he was a practising physician. But he hasn’t had a sniff of power since the fall of most western Liberals over the gun registry in 1997. That’s when he lost his one-term federal seat to the Reform party after redistribution changed the boundaries and the name to Selkirk-Interlake.
His daily routine when the Manitoba legislature sits includes asking for permission to speak when announcements are made. With just one member – or even when it had two – the Liberal party has no standing and no automatic right of response. In fact, it hasn’t had official party status since 1995, when the shooting star that was Sharon Carstairs started to fizzle.
Gerrard hasn’t been able to change that but things could be worse. There were no Liberals at all in the Manitoba legislature from 1981 to 1986.
Why does he keep at it? It certainly isn’t the money. As a doctor, he took a pay cut to enter politics and his hours didn’t improve much..
“I did not get in this to make money, that’s for sure,” he says in his rather cramped, steamy office in the legislature, where a surprising number of staff for a party of one mill about preparing for the campaign. Just five or six make his cramped suite of tiny rooms a crowded office space.
“I’m here because I truly believe in the people of Manitoba and our province of Manitoba. I think we need a government that looks after people better.”
It was what he felt needed doing in health care that drew him in.
“This is the reason that I got in initially. The critical decisions in terms of the future of health care in Manitoba and in Canada are made at the political level.”
He stays because he thinks it’s important that the Liberal voice continue to be heard.
“It may be falling out of favour in some areas, but it’s the kind of approach I believe we need in Manitoba … There have been four major Liberal governments in this province in the past 150 years and I believe it’s time for one again.”
While technically true, the last was a coalition led by Doug Campbell from 1948 to 1958. Since then, either Progressive Conservatives or New Democrats have held power.
The closest Liberals have come in the last few decades is when Carstairs formed the official Opposition in 1988. That lasted for two years until the next election.
Born in England and raised in Saskatoon, Gerrard has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Saskatchewan, a medical degree from McGill and a PhD from the University of Minnesota.
He stays fit swimming and jogging and once ran the Boston Marathon.
If only hard work were able to guarantee success, he might do a lot better than most pundits expect on election night. Under his hand, Liberals have rebuilt their membership, more than tripling it to around 7,000 since the last election, and also refilled the campaign warchest.
He defines liberalism more by what it isn’t – the heavy-handed law-and-order approach of the Conservatives or the top-down bureaucratic style of the NDP.
He laughs when asked what he does in his spare time, since he has so little, but for 40 years he and his wife, Naomi, have returned for a few weeks to their cabin in northern Saskatchewan, where they reunite with family. The couple has three adult children.
The fishing is good and the lake has a large population of bald eagles. Gerrard once co-authored a book on the bird. But he only gets a couple of weeks a year in the wilderness. His life revolves around politics.
People poke fun at the Liberals in Manitoba. There are jokes about meetings in telephone booths, but the party still manages to attract credible candidates.
And people take jabs at Gerrard for his somewhat awkward speaking style.
“I believe if you do something like this you’ve got to have fun. You’ve got to have a good sense of humour. You’re the target of a lot of jokes.”
Even his wife wonders why he stays at it, he admits, but Gerrard can’t even speculate on what he might do after he leaves politics.
“At this point, I’m 100 per cent focused on doing the best we can Oct. 4 … The people will tell me what I’m doing after Oct. 4 and we’ll go from there.”
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