It’s journalistically undignified – no, lazy – to rise to this bait. Also I dislike old people maundering on about the past. I’m about to do both, and kill two sins with one stone.
Psychologists Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam looked at a London Times story noting that women leaders often break through the glass ceiling only when the organization – or political party – is terminal. The women then lead the group over what these thinkers call “the glass cliff.”
News editor tersely to reporter: “Get local angle.”
Which, in these parts, means: Premier Christy Clark as tired bullpen’s rookie relief pitcher for Gordon Campbell’s bad innings. Expect blowout.
Calgary reporter Gavin Young calls this “the Kim Campbell phenomenon,” currently threatening Alberta Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford, successor to Ed Stelmach, doomed when no one could spell (or remember) his name (or him).
It is well known that Vancouver’s own Kim Campbell was Canada’s June-to- October first female prime minister. Her predecessor, Brian Mulroney, was an easy act to follow, but her 1993 election campaign was fatally marred by her clumsily telling the truth, an unprecedented political folly that ended in a crash of just enough PC parliamentary seats to comfortably fill a Mazda Miata sports car.
She was blindingly intelligent but short of the intelligence to know when to hide it behind the 37-word cliché-filled vocabulary of the successful campaigner. Ask a question, expect an erudite 12,000-word answer. At a Vancouver Sun editorial board conference she was still in full flight as she was gently ushered out of the room.
Between newspaper engagements, I was briefly and badly a consultant in one of Campbell’s (successful) B.C. provincial campaigns, sat enraptured in her Fairview apartment as she played her viol (I believe it was), met her to exchange documents from her filthy VW on her way to UBC to write a law exam – she wrote six and unbelievably campaigned at the same time – and knew her well enough to scoop her dinner leavings into a doggy bag for my large yellow Lab, Sam, without taking my eyes off her. One takes one’s touch of the hem of the garment of Fame where one can.
I have just re-read my raw notes of a 1990 interview with Campbell, who, then federal justice minister, had just survived passing Bill C-43, the abortion bill. They reveal a woman of great fair-mindedness and generous spirit. A fuller profile will have to await my memoirs. Breathe easily.
Rita Johnston was another spring-and-autumn leader of a destroyed government, following the wealthy Social Credit businessman, devout Catholic and strong anti-abortionist Bill Vander Zalm, probably doomed by those qualities regardless of the scrapes he got into – who could forget then-Sun reporter Keith Baldrey charging through the newsroom brandishing a sheaf of evidently incriminating papers and triumphantly crying “We’re gonna bring down the government!”
Johnston, first B.C. (and Canadian) female premier, was a battleship of a woman, with the toughness that perhaps only the owner of a trailer park could hone. I liked her immensely. She succeeded the Zalm in April 1991.
In other times she might have been a stern, capable premier. But the party was shredding. And she did not suffer fools.
We talked the morning after an October 8, 1991, kickboxing debate pitting her against New Democrat Mike Harcourt and Liberal Gordon Wilson. Word was that she came off as a fishwife. Comment?
“I said that about myself,” Johnston steamed. “But that guy [Harcourt] frustrated me so much. I’ve gone through three weeks of lies and innuendoes and insinuations and accusations … and he’s standing there like some sanctimonious, perfect human being.”
She scorned eventual winner Harcourt’s campaign manifesto: “He didn’t miss anyone, I mean, he probably even hit fishwives.” But a gracious nod at her Liberal opponent: “Wilson came off good; he just hammered him [Harcourt].”
Another woman who inherited a party going for its own jugular: Alexa McDonough, leading the federal NDP burdened by the pantaloon sideshow of NDP Ontario and B.C. governments. Of our talk, I remember little. She shrewdly recognized a man fatally mesmerized by slim womanly legs, and for all I know read me the Halifax phone book.
Anyway, my take on the psychologists’ glass-cliff theory: All wrong. Wounded male-led corporations and injured political parties choose women leaders next out of unconscious infantile regression: “Let Mommy kiss it better.” •
