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with former Canadian MPs reflect that those romantic notions are long gone, if they ever actually existed. (The exact moment when the tide turned is open to discussion.) Today, politics is considered such an unsavoury pursuit, the MPs tell us, that people must be harangued, corralled—sometimes conscripted—into pursuing public office. Even if being elected is a private dream, the most palatable way to market one’s candidacy involves at least a tacit separation from, and criticism of, politics, perpetuating the negative stereotypes. With outlooks like that, it would seem that we’re lucky anyone chooses to run at all.

CHAPTER TWO
    Out of the Frying Pan …
    A fter the decision to run for federal politics, the next waypoint toward a seat as a Member of Parliament is the nomination—the contest every political party is meant to hold when numerous citizens compete to become its official candidate in a particular riding. If ever a political party mandated clean nomination contests for itself, it was the Reform Party. Founded by Preston Manning and supporters in 1987, Reform was established on the principle of participatory democracy, the belief that citizens should have a greater say in the way their governments run their country. “If we wanted the operations of the federal government and Canadian constitutional relationships to reflect such principles, we had to be consistent in applying them to ourselves,” Manning wrote in a memoir. “We were to be an open, transparent organization in which every member was treated equally and fairly.”
    Hence the focus on clean nomination battles. One of the Reform Party’s early classics happened in the riding of Medicine Hat, Alberta, on April 11, 1992. Candidate Monte Solberg can remember stepping off the bus and into the city’s Cypress Centre that evening and being astonished at the number of people atthe convention. Maybe 10,000, all told. Medicine Hat, with a population of about 60,000, is the largest city in southeastern Alberta, and Solberg’s seven fellow nominees included some of the city’s best-known citizens. The president of the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce was going for the nomination, as well as the owner of the local VW dealership. The night’s favourite was Kathy Mandeville, a Medicine Hat alderman.
    If he was a long shot, Solberg had hustle on his side. None of his competitors, he felt, had such a hardworking group of supporters. Solberg was the manager of the local radio station in Brooks, a town of about 10,000 people located an hour away from Medicine Hat. Solberg’s camp realized the nomination venue of Medicine Hat put them at a disadvantage. A big fish in Medicine Hat would attract more support than a big fish from the small pond of Brooks. So Solberg’s camp did their best to bring Brooks to Medicine Hat: they chartered school buses and packed them full of supporters—150 in all.
    In his nomination speech, Solberg did his best to reflect the concerns of the people who’d attended the town hall meetings he’d held in the lead-up to the nomination. “The most important aspect of it was, we want you to represent our views to Ottawa, not the other way around,” Solberg recalled later. “People had just had it. They were really frustrated. So I did my best to channel that … My goal was to make sure they understood I understood what they were saying, and to convince them I would listen to them.”
    Sometime around ten o’clock, the returning officer, Elwin Hermanson, took the microphone to give the results. Solberg 403 votes, Mandeville 400, and a local business executive, David Humphries, a distant third with 97. Solberg wasin the lead, but without the majority required to win. There’d have to be another vote.
    Before that happened, one candidate withdrew, then another, leaving the three leaders and three other candidates on the ballot for the second round. Balloons waved. Supporters thrust placards skyward. Outbursts of enthusiasm broke