I SHOULD NOT have been surprised when Julian told me, over a Sunday lunch with the kids, that he wanted to be a provincial candidate in our Ontario riding in 1985. I knew Julian had been involved in party politics since he was a child. His dad, a lifelong Tory, had served in nine Ontario portfolios, including Minister of Education, Treasurer, and Attorney General. Premier Leslie Frost had been a regular visitor at the Porter home on Pine Hill in Rosedale. Julian had been on Wallace McCutcheon’s 1963 campaign team and was with him at the 1967 leadership convention when McCutcheon lost to Robert Stanfield. Apart from shared Conservative sympathies, Wallace was, at the time, also Julian’s father-in-law.
In 1968 Julian had handled the advertising for Bob Stanfield’s hopeless campaign against Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals. He travelled across the country with Stanfield and managed (not very well, he thought) the Leadership Debate anchored by Charles Templeton. The country was wild about Trudeau. Crowds followed wherever he went. Stanfield’s strengths—thoughtfulness, stability, consideration for others—did not have a chance. Julian used to tell stories about Stanfield’s good humour, his self-deprecating wit no matter how discouraging the situation. Once, when the small plane had just made a hazardous landing somewhere in the Maritimes, Stanfield asked, “Have I spoken here before?” When he was told yes, he said, “In that case, I hope you rented a small hall.”
During the mid-1970s Julian was one of Peter Lougheed’s speechwriters, a late-night drinking companion of former premier John Robarts, and later an occasional member of Premier Davis’s famous breakfast club at the Park Plaza Hotel.
Julian was, no doubt, the reason why Key Porter was chosen to publish the big blue Ontario sesquicentennial book in 1984. I have a photograph from the launch: Bill Davis and me, sitting side by side but looking in opposite directions. He is very handsome and I seem very uneasy. In another photograph, likely taken at the same event, a grinning Brian Mulroney is holding up Ontario so that the camera can record his delight with the book. He dedicated it to me “with admiration and warm wishes.” Three years later, when we published Claire Hoy’s Friends in High Places, he would not have held up any book published by Key Porter.
In 1984 Julian seemed to spend more time on the phone with Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, and Dalton Camp—not at the same time—than usual, and he did mention that he thought if he didn’t run now, he never would. Dalton was the ultimate Conservative Party insider. He had helped John Diefenbaker win the 1957 federal election against Lester Pearson and ten years later manoeuvred the end of the Diefenbaker era by insisting that party leaders had to be subject to the membership’s vote. At the ensuing leadership review, an outraged Diefenbaker was denied another automatic term as leader.I
Dalton then switched to provincial politics in Ontario. He and his brother-in-law Norman Atkins were part of the Big Blue Machine that had managed four elections for the provincial Conservatives and won them all. Dalton and Bill Davis, Julian told me, thought that he should take a chance now, but I was so busy with publishing that I was astonished when he asked me to join him at the nomination meeting.
It was a grand occasion with band music and balloons in the Royal York’s Canadian Room, Julian looking impressive in a charcoal-grey suit and me smiling fixedly at everyone who came by. He was thrilled with winning the nomination and fairly confident that he would do well in the elections. Though I had watched Jeanne Lougheed be pleasant and charming, laugh at the right times, and look solemn when called upon, I didn’t know how political wives were supposed to behave.
Once he was declared the Progressive Conservative Party’s candidate for our riding of St. David in Toronto, he got organized. By then Bill Davis had left his party with the dubious gift of one of the most divisive issues of the day in Ontario: publicly funded education at Catholic schools. The Anglican bishop had Julian stand in his living room while he delivered a verbal assault that my husband thought lasted a full three minutes. Undeterred, Julian made stirring speeches, jogged along all the area’s streets from house to house and from apartment to apartment, including in the Jamestown area south of Bloor Street, where residents seemed to have more existential concerns than who would win the next election. Catherine, Jessica, and Julia posed with us for photographs, our journalist friends wrote flattering columns, while we tried to imagine how our lives would change if he won. It was not a comforting picture.
Our friends in the media wrote glowing columns about Julian. Margaret Atwood mentioned his “integrity,” Roy Peterson drew a flattering picture of him roller skating in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Fotheringham called him “a heavy,” and Bob Fulford weighed in with praise for “the sort of man who makes the room he enters a better place to be.” June Callwood said, “I would trust him with my life.” Peter Lougheed sent an encouraging note: “The first twenty years are the hardest.”
“Julian Porter for St. David” signs went up on lawns; brochures and posters were distributed. We wore our Julian Porter buttons.
Then, on the first weekend of April 1985, there was a terrorist threat in Toronto: a self-styled Armenian Army threatened to blow up the subway system to draw attention to the Armenians suffering under Turkish rule. The police made the deeply unpopular decision to shut down fifty-nine kilometres of track. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the stunt, Julian, chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, decided to ride the trains during the rush hour. Fortunately, the bomb threat turned out to be a hoax.
On April 19, we hosted a dinner for Peter and Jeanne Lougheed, and everybody came. There were politicians (both federal and provincial), novelists, journalists, broadcasters, moguls, artists, and Susan, Julian’s first wife, and her brothers. The press sent photographers and gossip columnists.
By election day, May 2, 1985, the provincial Conservative Party had enjoyed forty-two years in office. It would have been a proud record even for Albania, Julian said, trying to be philosophical about his loss to Liberal lawyer Ian Scott. We held hands on the way to Ian’s victory party central, they said all the right words to each other, hugged, and that was the end of Julian’s political ambitions and of the PCs’ uninterrupted rule in Ontario.
Julian called his six major clients, including the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and told them he would never run for political office again. We went to Rome for a week, stayed in the Teatro di Pompei on Campo de Fiori, Julian’s favourite small hotel, enjoyed the outdoor market noises in the mornings while drinking our lattes, then walked to Julian’s favourite churches to see his favourite frescoes, ate in his favourite restaurants near Piazza Navona, and absolutely did not talk about politics. Always a choice after-dinner and book launch party speaker, Julian now added Pierre Trudeau and Bob Stanfield to his John Diefenbaker and Robert Kennedy impressions.
I returned to my office and commissioned a bunch of political books, including Larry Zolf’s Survival of the Fattest: An Irreverent View of the SenateII and Eddie Goodman’s Life of the Party, which was launched in that fusty old Tory hangout, the Albany Club. Everybody who was anybody in the Conservative world came—some of them just to look themselves up in the index, others to take home a signed book.
I. Dalton remained, forever after, a pariah in Conservative territory west of Toronto, and even in Toronto he was regarded with suspicion.
II. Larry had the endearing habit of phoning late in the day to read me long passages in his manuscript to make sure I would find them funny when presented with the complete work. One person who did not find them funny was Senator Anne Cools, who sued us both for libel and won.