May 21, 2006. 07:47 AM
LINDA DIEBEL

John Tory was flustered as he dashed into a conference room in his Queen's Park offices one day last week and settled into a chair for an interview. His ruddy face was ruddier than usual under his shock of chestnut hair, and he explained he'd lost a file he needed and, more importantly, misplaced one of the most important political tools in the country these days: his BlackBerry. 

Aides hustled; Tory scowled. It was already noon, the leader of Ontario's Official Opposition had a heavy schedule, and he'd looked everywhere for his electronic buddy. On the road, it's his lifeline to the loosely knit group of backroom political operators — John Laschinger, Vic Gupta, Rod Phillips, John Matheson and Michael Daniher, among others — dedicated to seeing Tory move down a floor at Queen's Park to the suite reserved for the premier. His advisers seem confident of just such an outcome.

At age 52, John Tory is very much the man of the moment in Ontario.

He has seldom put a foot wrong since taking over the party leadership in September 2004, and winning a by-election (Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey) the following spring. There's a buzz around Tory, helped perhaps by his peripatetic nature, coupled with a coterie of Tory zealots. Arguably, he has out-mayored the mayor and out-premiered the premier

Take the mayor. Tory considers David Miller a friend even though he lost to him in the Toronto municipal election in the fall of 2003. Since then, and notably during last year's horrific gun violence in the GTA, it was Tory, not Miller, who was perceived more often as being in the thick of trying to find a solution. Tory visited several communities, not always with cameras in tow.

He accepted an invitation from the Toronto Community Housing Corp. to spend a night in a public housing complex where he experienced cockroaches, broken locks and windows, crumbling walls, the stench, and the frustrated and fearful residents first-hand.

"I don't need to spend a night in Toronto Community Housing to know what it's like," said Miller. But Tory took the view: "How else are you going to understand the problem?"

By the end of the year, he was able to publish his findings — "Time for Action: A report on violence affecting youth" — to favourable editorial review and a sense that his views really were shaped by listening to and absorbing, as he puts it, "the insights of people who feel marginalized in those communities."

He sent a copy of his report to Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty but received no reply. Neither was there a response to his request for an all-party summit on youth crime. What he did receive, however, was a lot of press attention.

In March, Tory was less tolerant than Miller appeared to be about the provincial decision to spend $200 million to ease Toronto's chronic budget problems.

"It's the first provincial budget in at least a decade that has significantly addressed Toronto's financial position," said Miller, calling the money "a good start on next year's budget."

Thundered Tory (who plans to run in a Toronto riding in 2007): "I don't know how anybody who is running the City of Toronto could possibly plan ahead, because you're going to be back to the same old story next year."

He's done well against McGuinty. His adviser, the wily Laschinger, is most pleased. A senior associate at Northstar Research Partners, the "Lash" likely has run more political campaigns than any other strategist in Canada, working for everyone from Brian Mulroney and David Miller to Tory himself. The main issue in the next provincial election is shaping up to be leadership for the Tory camp and, while Laschinger won't reveal the polling numbers he's getting, he said his man has overtaken McGuinty in terms of best leadership qualities.

Tory's people are ramming home that message, to the extent that his Queen's Park personnel make snide comments about what they perceive to be McGuinty's lighter schedule, taking careful note of every Monday off.

Two weeks ago, Tory was the man of the moment when the Prime Minister came to town. After declining to have his photograph taken with McGuinty following their 45-minute meeting (more on that later), Stephen Harper feted Tory at a partisan dinner that night in Toronto, saying he hoped Tory would be the next premier. 

More than that, however, Tory seems to be everywhere. In recent days, he's been in Ottawa, Caledonia twice, Peterborough and London, where he spent the day shadowing a nurse in a local hospital. 

"I think that John had been in every riding in the province in his first year as leader," said Laschinger. 

"I can honestly say I don't know whether Dalton McGuinty compares to John in terms of work ethic ..." 

It's not hard, given the leadership and hard-work themes, to imagine both the negative and positive PC ad campaigns.

Last month, Tory even got a standing ovation from a Liberal audience. As Toronto Star columnist Ian Urquhart reported, Tory had Liberal members of the Walter Gordon Circle on their feet after a speech in which he hammered home his favourite theme about increasing partisanship, noting: "I think we are in the midst of a fairly lengthy crisis of confidence in politics, politicians and government."

His aversion to the ugliness of modern-day politics is so strong, one wonders why he's a politician. His former boss, long-time Ontario premier William Davis, once told the Star he knew "from the early stages that, if the right opportunity arose, (Tory) would run for political office."

Tory knew, too, biding his time for the right moment. He ignored pressure to run for the provincial party when Mike Harris stepped down and for the federal party when Joe Clark retired, instead choosing municipal politics in 2003.

"I'm so glad I waited to the middle of my life to run, because it gives you a whole different perspective of why you are here," explained Tory. "If you think of this as one of the noblest things you can do, you can make a real difference to your community." 

Not that his family coddled him. Some of the best lines I've heard in a career covering politics came when I profiled John Tory during the last mayoral race. Asked about his tenure with the premier, his grandmother Jean remarked of Davis: "Why would he want Johnny's advice?" 

In Tory's earlier political life, he inhabited the shadowy backrooms of provincial and federal Conservative politics. During his days working as an unpaid senior adviser to Brian Mulroney, he came across as careful and aloof, particularly to the media. Then, he seemed more at home in starched whites and ties than the trademark open-necked shirts he wears today.

Still, it was from the backrooms in 1988 that Tory made one of the most critical decisions in recent Canadian history, one that has been little noted. During the 1988 "free-trade" election campaign, he was pulled out of the labour room where his wife, Barbara Hackett, was delivering their fourth child, George, to take a call from the Prime Minister's Office. He was told the polls were looking bad and Mulroney's advisers were considering a promise to throw the free-trade issue open to a post-election referendum. Tory advised against it, saying the election was already a referendum.

If his advice had been different, it is conceivable the 1989 free-trade agreement with the United States would never have become law and the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 would have been dead in the water.

Instead, Mulroney was re-elected with a mandate for free trade with Washington, and Tory went back to work at his father's law firm.

The hard times began in June 1991, when wife Barbara, who'd just accepted a VP position in the finance sector, came home from a U.S. conference experiencing tingling in her extremities. It worsened over a week until she was in hospital and, in a short period, in grave condition. The couple thought about bringing their two oldest children home from summer camp to, as she put it, "say goodbye to their mother."

The doctors couldn't find the cause of her paralysis and, in the period before the auto-immune problem Guillain-Barré Syndrome was diagnosed, she was started on chemotherapy for what doctors feared was a spinal lymphoma.

"John was keeping everything going, but I could see the fear in his eyes," Hackett said. 

"He was very scared, but he was there for me, 100 per cent. That's the type of guy he is — he was just being John."

Hackett, who owns a residential construction and design business, said the experience changed both their lives, putting the focus even more squarely on family and health. Next Saturday, the couple who have four children — John, 26, Christopher, 24, Susan, 21, and George, 17 — will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary.

It took Barbara Hackett six months to be really back on her feet in 1991, in time for her husband's other darkest moment.

In the early '90s, Mulroney asked Tory to be his campaign chair for the next election. When Mulroney resigned and Kim Campbell took over as PM in 1993, Tory stayed to co-chair what would be the most disastrous campaign in Canadian history, one in which the Tories were reduced to two seats.

Donolo, however, remembers Tory on television during that campaign, holding up a cover of Maclean's with a Chrétien photo and saying something like, "He looks worse here than he does in our ad." The whole election campaign was a mess.

"The worst," said Tory last week, "the worst." 

"What I found difficult when I was running for mayor was walking up to a group of strangers and saying, `Hello, I'm John Tory,' while they were all talking to each other. I thought the reaction might be," and he laughs, "`That's nice. Who cares?' So, I was reluctant to do it.

"And then I realized if I was going to run for mayor of this huge city and spend 10 months out meeting people, I couldn't just wait around for them — especially when they had no idea who I was — to put their hands out and introduce themselves to me. So, I started to do it. My fear hadn't been about doing it but that people would find me intrusive, interrupting their private space.

"What you realize, actually, is that people are very happy that you came over and introduced yourself to them because they are all having that same feeling, `Oh, I better not go up and shake his hand ...'"

In this, Tory realized something that forever escapes many who would benefit greatly from just such insight: People are happy to have a chance to talk about their lives.

"People who have been around politics for 25 years might say to me, `Did it take you this long to figure this out?' And I would have to say, `Yes. It did.' But now I know that 99.9 per cent of people are delighted when I approach them."

And approach them he does. In lineups at rib restaurants, waiting for buses, in the barbershops and beauty parlours of small-town Ontario. He drives his staff crazy as he "works" the lines. To death, they say.

The thing is, though, and this sounds like such a cliché, Tory likes people.

"Oh, he was great," said Michele Cummings, a complex care nurse at St. Joseph's Health Care, London, Parkwood Hospital. Tory job-shadowed her for a few hours recently to better understand health-care issues, watching one patient's airways being opened up by a tracheotomy and a feeding tube inserted into another patient's stomach.

"I thought he was fantastic because he asked us how we did things and why, and he was interested in everyone as a person. You didn't feel you were with a politician," she said. "I've never voted Conservative in my life, but I can honestly say I will follow next year's election campaign and — well, we'll see ... "

Tory gets excited about issues. In recent visits to Caledonia, near Hamilton, where hundreds of Six Nations protestors are occupying a 30-hectare subdivision over a 200-year-old unsettled land claim, he talked about the potential for long-term damage to the community.

"People there on both sides of the issue are very worried that a peaceful co-existence they have developed living beside each other for decades is going to be put in peril by this whole thing," said Tory. 

McGuinty should have gone, he charged. "It wasn't just a matter that he heard the issues, but that people had a chance to see him listening to them, had the chance to know that the top person in this province thought enough about the situation to come and listen to what they had to say."

Tory may listen, but he still talks in that convoluted style of his, rich in subordinate clauses. Perhaps his inability to edit himself stems from not knowing what information to withhold from people, and not wanting to withhold any.

A case in point about the morning after his night in public housing:

"When I left Flemington Park at 6 a.m. — because I come to the office between 6 and 6:15 in the morning — I went to the bus stop, well shelter actually — because it was December and it was cold — and a man was standing there — and you know I have some recognition now because (I'm) on TV — and he said, `Are you John Tory?' And I said, `Yes.' And I said I'd just spent the night and asked him if this was where I get the bus to go south to the subway — because the bus goes both north and south — because, you know, I had to get to the subway to get to Queen's Park ... " And so on.

But it could be argued that he's in a tricky position. Some saw Harper's decision not to pose with McGuinty in Toronto — the day before he was all over the media with Quebec Premier Jean Charest — as a snub, not so much of the premier, but of Ontarians. One can argue either way, but the point is that it could have been so easily avoided. 

"A Harper administration that is openly hostile to Ontario is a problem for Tory," said media strategist Donolo, who worked against Tory, not just for Chrétien but as a Miller adviser in the last mayoral race. Donolo argued that Tory "seemed not to be his own man in the mayoral campaign, but rather listening to whomever was whispering in his ear. In my opinion, that is the leitmotif of his public persona."

Donolo believes Tory had a golden opportunity at the recent PC dinner, after having been lauded by Harper, to talk about Ontario's concerns with the Conservative government.

"If he is not careful, he could be seen as Harper's patsy, and there will be pressure to distance himself and be firm in his criticism. He's really on the horns of a dilemma. 

He's not running to be part of the Harper team but captain of Team Ontario. And you can't be captain of Team Ontario and a cheerleader for the Harper government."

Even Laschinger admits to a potential problem. "I think he will have a challenge. It will be a balancing act," he said.

Of the dinner and Harper's comments, Laschinger added: "We had no control over that ... This is a different kind of prime minister, a different kind of leader. As fiercely partisan as Mulroney was, he never did that."

Tory bristles at criticism that he's not prepared to stand up to Harper. Even while using much of the interview to talk about his desire for a less partisan sort of politics, he wasn't above fingering McGuinty as the one who started it. 

"The person who got this whole relationship off to a rockier start than was needed was Mr. McGuinty. On Day One, he said he wanted to work with the new government and then he proceeded to let his ministers (attack) Harper. And you know, there's only two choices: He either allowed his ministers to ... beat up on the Harper government on everything from Day One, or he told them to do it. It's one or the other. He should have abided by his own advice."

Besides, continued Tory, it was a partisan dinner and, after not being able to accept previous invitations, Harper wanted to come and say a few words.

"Now, at an Ontario Progressive Conservative fundraising dinner, I would have thought it unusual if he didn't make a few comments of a partisan nature."

Tory insisted he can — and will — hold his own with Harper. "I am not afraid, and I never will be afraid, whether it's Stephen Harper or anybody else" to disagree. 

He said he will stand up for the people of Ontario, just as premier Davis used to stand up to Pierre Trudeau as they "fashioned a tremendously constructive relationship where they really did some nation-building, where Ontario's interests were taken into account and where nobody thought that Ontario was getting short shrift."

Ah, but therein lies the rub. 

Davis was a Conservative premier and Trudeau a Liberal PM. Come election time, it may not particularly matter how Tory and Harper are getting along. Ontarians, like voters in other provinces, often have chosen to have opposing camps in provincial and federal politics, à la Davis and Trudeau. Voters can be canny that way. 

It may turn out to be unfortunate for Tory if Harper is PM in the fall of 2007.

"Found it," he said loudly. There was an audible "Phew!" It had been lodged between the cushion and the side of a chair where he'd sat at a morning meeting with his staffers.

Once again, he was in possession of one of the most valuable weapons in his race to unseat McGuinty. One does not give up anything in the hardscrabble race of electoral politics.