The Second Part of Chapter 23: A New Leaf

It was a Tuesday, and after Margaret arrived home early after finally hiring a better graphic designer, and with nothing better to do at home, she started cleaning the house. She began by wiping down all of the tabletops and counters, and she was thorough. She removed the pictures that she put on the buffet, and there were a lot of them; she had three married children and a grandson, after all. She then wiped the buffet top down until it was dully lustrous, not quite the same as when it was new, but close enough. She then went into the kitchen to dispose of the paper towel she had been using. Distracted by the time, she then filled the watering can and watered the plants, but had still managed to forget the small, neglected ivy plant that was perched on top of a tall bookshelf in the living room. She then went back to the kitchen via the dining room, but in a moment of clumsiness, knocked her hipbone against the buffet, where she had neglected to put the framed photographs back in one place, but instead left them stacked rather precariously. As her hipbone connected with the buffet, she grimaced in annoyance. At the same time, the top photo fell from its perch onto the floor, and the glass broke. It depicted James and Clarissa on their honeymoon. They were posing opposite Signal Hill in Saint John’s. When she saw this, she thought, oh great! Another mess for me to clean up! She put the empty watering can on the dinner table, and bent over to pick the frame up. The tips of her fingers were still wet, and without her noticing, she brushed the surface of the photograph with them, and then went and replaced the watering can beneath the kitchen sink.

The damage the water did to the photo escaped Margaret's notice until the evening, and Hyram rather than his wife pointed it out: “Say, Marge, what happened to the photo of Clarie and James?”

“Oh, that. I dropped it on the floor; we shall have to get a new frame.”

“Well, glass is cheap to repair, but it looks damaged in another way; it looks like part of it’s been erased,” said Hyram.

“What? Dammit!” She looked at the photo, which by now had been thoroughly damaged by the water, which had trickled down the left side of the photo and erased James’s face, replacing it with a dirty yellow and white area. She regretted doing this; it was bad enough that Clarie had lost a husband, but there was no need for their memory of James to erode as well; we might as well get on with it, and take the losses in stride, she thought. While the photo was a trivial loss, the real loss was not physical, it couldn’t be represented as a number or a figure on a piece of paper; the real loss came from inside the head when she forgot, and she was slowly forgetting: she could no longer recall what James’s favourite food had been.


That same day, Ryan was contemplating the headline after dinner, which proclaimed in banner letters the conservative victory. His reaction, unlike Margaret’s upon reading the same story, was of mild disappointment that the Liberals would not be carrying on their happy tradition of good governance at the helm of the country, as had been the case for a large part of the last century. Not that he had actually voted for the local candidate, Singha, but rather for Wakefield’s local representative; while he really liked the New Democrats, it was also the case that he did not mind the Liberals, and wasn’t sufficiently scared of Cameron Duff to help in some self-defeating effort to keep him out of office in the admittedly futile gesture of strategic voting. In this, he had principle, he said to himself. He still looked to the future with optimism, and thought after some reflection that the Liberals probably needed some time in opposition to get away from the temptations of patronage.

Katherine had just arrived home from school, to confront a pile of marking: she had three tests to give back, one for each class, and there was the assignment that her class had handed in the previous Friday. With luck and a lot of time, she thought, she would be able to finish marking one test, and would leave the rest for the next day. It was not so simple, though; her mother had left a message on her answering machine, in so many words wondering how long she would remain single, and urging her to find a man; she grimaced at her last words, “because I only want to be a grandmother, darling.” It was more than enough pressure to deal with; she would eventually find a boyfriend, she thought, but by no means with certainty. The divorce had left a bad taste in her mouth; must all men be so possessive? On the other hand, Jim had been nice enough before he died; maybe if there were someone similar to him that she could find, then her sister-in-law would be happy. If all else failed, there was still the school: there were enough decent men teaching there, she would eventually find a husband before they all went.

Her thoughts turned to dinner: what to make? Pasta would be too boring, as she had just had spaghetti last night, lasagne the previous Saturday, and fettuccine with Alfredo sauce two days ago. Perhaps she would roast a chicken. As she got the chicken out of the freezer and fetched the seasonings, her mind turned to the election: although she was disappointed by the results (she had voted for the New Democrats, who had failed to win in her riding by only 1,000 votes), she did acknowledge the fact that Meach and his cadre had grown too many of the warts of power, which included cronyism, a dissociation from their electoral base, and an increasingly out-of-touch attitude toward the populace; how else would one explain the bungling early on of the stimulus package that had been meant to create jobs? It was nearly three months overdue, and Duff had threatened to topple the government over that issue, before he actually did so in November.

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The First Part of Chapter 23: A New Leaf

On the morning after the election, Margaret rose early in anticipation of another productive day at work. While eating her bran, Margaret looked at the banner headline of the Globe and Mail, which proclaimed, in all-capital type: TORIES WIN ELECTION, DUFF TOASTS VICTORY. Below were two pictures: Duff standing before a cheering crowd of supporters, and Meach looking contrite. She read the article below, as written by Evan Robert Durmer, whom she doubted slept at all the previous night:

Last night, Canadians voted for a change in government, but by a narrow margin. Vote counts are incomplete at the time of printing, but the largest share of the vote went to Cameron Duff, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. The lead of victory was razor thin, 33% to 31%, but still enough for now Prime Minister-Elect Duff to unerringly claim victory.

Duff, in his victory speech last night, thanked “Bruce Meach, Patrick Wakefield, Georges Valence, and Abethey Mazli for a vigorous, professional, and hard-fought campaign”, and extended the thanks to the Canadian people. Meach claimed something of a victory in his concession speech, made at one o’clock this morning, just before this issue went to print: “I stand before you, chastened, but I promise to present a vigorous opposition to the incoming government, led by the Cameron Duff. I would like to thank all of our supporters in this hard-fought campaign,” The full contents of the speech are in our special Election section.

“No doubt, the defeat of Meach by Duff would be most devastating to him,” said Mark Gainly, of the polling and research agency Treiserd-Wiss. “He viewed the
election as a given, and up until nearly Christmas, he had believed himself invincible.”

Catherine Ness, a former cabinet Minister close to the Prime Minister, corroborated this: “Oh, I imagine he must be very disappointed,” she said. “He was very ambitious and possessive. He wanted to continue shaping Canada’s destiny for quite some time.”

Xavier Nolen, another former cabinet Minister, said, “Quite frankly, this election has been a repudiation of Meach and his way of running government. I will admit that we have grown rather complacent, and we I think we need to spend some time in the woods,”

Meach said he wouldn’t be resigning in his concession speech vowing to “fight the good fight,” but there are already calls for his resignation. Angus Ross, former Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, as well as of Natural Resources, said in a late-night interview, “the overriding theme of this election was of Bruce [Meach’s] lack of leadership skills and poor direction,”

Meach, upon receiving knowledge of this statement by a former Minister, said emotionally, “I vow to continue as the leader of the Liberal Party, and these desires expressed by certain unsavoury individuals are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,”

The election did not produce murmurs about the leadership skills of either Patrick Wakefield, of Winnipeg South, or of Georges Valence, of Shawinigan.

That would all be about expectations, thought Margaret. Nobody seriously expected either the Bloquistes or the socialists to form the government, thus there are no cloak-and-dagger moves within those parties. Meach got what he deserved; he and all those around him became complacent and corrupt, and now they need to spend some years in the political wilderness. It’s not complete exile, she thought; opposition parties are very powerful in minority governments, after all. All of this was the major reason for her, and Hyram, having cast their ballots for Fiona O’Brien. She and Hyram had both known her from her days working as the owner of the small restaurant chain O’Brien’s; Hyram had once been a major wholesale supplier, and the two got along quite well. A person like O’Brien should expect to do well, given luck, and it seemed like she had all the luck. It was also true that hardworking people like Fiona make their own luck, and this was certainly the case in the last election campaign, where she left nothing to chance. It was quite unfortunate, however that she had lost by a mere twelve votes to the Liberal incumbent, Peter Ronald Poores, the current President of the Treasury Board, whom Margaret viewed as a sycophant, particularly when seeking votes; she thought Poores’s kingly, regal stature and attitude had something to do with his re-election. There was still a ray of hope, however: the margin of victory for Poors was so narrow as to automatically trigger a recount.

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