As frontbencher Ministers, thanks to House of Commons’ protocol Roméo Leblanc and I shared the same desk for close to five years. He could be quite sarcastic, which suits me well, and we giggled a lot during dull moments. Roméo LeBlanc was my friend.

Roméo was a complex and, yes, a complicated human being. Humble and modest like Gérard Pelletier, he told me a few times about his father who worked on the trains, and the life he lived in Acadian New Brunswick. He was very proud of having attended University, even studied abroad (in Paris). As well, although he never said it directly, one had a sense that he had been a good journalist. His loyalty to Prime Ministers Pearson and Trudeau, as Press Secretary to each, was total.

Not a wealthy man, he kept from his childhood a constant worry about finance and wanting to provide well for his family.  No doubt he had some feeling of insecurity. A person of principles, he was the conscience of Cabinet, not afraid to question, or oppose the fads of the day, or misguided proposals. Overall, he was a wise and prudent man, and one with a great sensibility/sensitivity to the plight of others.

I am very found of him — always was. He was a close friend of the social scientist for whom I had worked in Montreal: Fernand Cadieux. So once elected, both in October 1972, I felt we were of the same family. We shared the same set of values and went into politics basically for more equity and social justice and for a more open and better society at home and abroad. Always a bit professorial when sharing with me what he thought of this or that, as soon as I joined Cabinet in 1976, he gave me lessons in Power 101 that drove my public life. It went something like this:

“Figure out if you have a power base and of what it’s made up. Build it. Don’t owe it to PMO and other political elites. Your role is that of a privileged spokesperson, a voice, for the clienteles your Department is all about. You work for them. So develop ongoing conversations with them. They are your power base. It’s the most solid of all. It’s for whom you work, from the ground up. Decide once and for all on whose side you are. You represent them, which is not to say that you do not exercise leadership nor not show solidarity with the government nor belong to lobby groups.”

He would also “instruct” me in media relations, also in the same vein: 

“Always speak to local journalists, no matter how small the newspaper, wherever you are in the country.  And don’t forget the Canadian Press!  Much more important than Toronto and Ottawa.”

When I first became a Minister (National Revenue), he made me read Dick Crossman’s Diary of a Cabinet Minister, and when I became Minister of Health and Welfare, the biography of the father of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, by Michael Foot.

Roméo would often comment on what was going on in the fisheries industry, his beloved portfolio. He loved fishermen and knew them and their lives on both coasts, but his heart was in the Atlantic. He truly suffered when he saw that the battle against early globalization in the canneries would put thousands out of work. 

He also fought bureaucracy all the way. I still hear him explaining to senior players the “mysteries of life” of unemployment for all the seasonal workers of his part of Canada.  Did he fight for realistic rules of the game in applying unemployment insurance! He won some; he lost others. But “les petites gens”, “les gens ordinaires”, were always on his mind. He couldn’t stand the elite accommodation typical of Canadian politics.

In theory, he was one with direct access to Prime Minister Trudeau. In practice, I don’t know. Although profoundly committed to Trudeau and respectful of him and his vision for the country, I sensed, especially in the last years, that he felt somehow a distance. I suppose he must have reflected on the limits of political action and of power. But I don’t really know.

Power in his field of responsibility? Surely. Influence on other issues? I presume. He didn’t miss anything in the games that were going around us; he was a very lucid observer. There are times I wished he had been less respectful of others and more “pushy,” even aggressive, but that was not him. He was a person of reason above all, and of moral anger. He had class all the way.

When he was appointed Governor General, he confided to me the first thing he would do would be to reopen the gates and the grounds of Rideau Hall for the community and visitors to walk by and to come and skate in the winter. And he said it with a grin of revenge!

 

Monique Bégin was research director for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women; M.P. and then Minister In the Liberal government; and Dean of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa. She brought forward the Canada Health Act.

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