The article gives an inside, private look at Gerard. Here are some exerts from the article in specific categories, that tell of facts that I'm pretty sure you didn't know about Gerard Kennedy.
IDENTITY
A summer day in Toronto. At the north end of High Park, the city's Ukrainian community gathers for its 10th annual parade and festival: marching bands, costumed dancers, long-coated, mustachioed Cossacks and bins full of perogies.
Gerard Kennedy trades his sport jacket for a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt and strides casually along Bloor Street, waving and shaking hands. He has genuine standing here; the parade route traverses part of the provincial riding (Parkdale-High Park) that he represented until stepping down to seek the federal leadership. His mother, Caroline Shemanski, descends from a Ukrainian family that arrived in Canada in 1891.
CARES ABOUT IDEAS
Later, from a grandstand, two dozen speakers, mostly local politicians, assemble to make empty speeches to an appreciative, geriatric crowd, an exercise in mutual validation. Among them, only Mr. Kennedy actually seizes the occasion to try to communicate an idea.
"My generation has been the complacent one," he says. "We had the education and the health care and the economic opportunities, thanks to the sacrifices made by your generation. And now we need to make sure that the next generation has the same chances."
Does any of this register with the audience? It seems unlikely. The perogies are a higher priority. But he makes an effort all the same, an effort no one else makes.
HISTORY
He grew up in small-town The Pas, Man., (read: solid Western roots) ran food banks in Edmonton and Toronto (big heart for social justice), was an MPP in Queen's Park for a decade (political experience) and, until throwing his hat in the leadership ring in April, was education minister for three years in Dalton McGuinty's Ontario government (a key portfolio, by all accounts deftly handled).
DRIVEN
"Incredibly smart," said Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education, an Ontario parents' organization involved in school reform. "He knew the issues up and down, understood the complexity of public education. And he was really passionate about it. He didn't just talk the talk."
"He did his homework," said Rick Johnston, president of the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, who met with Mr. Kennedy regularly. "His attitude was, 'I've read the reports. Here's what I think. Now show me I'm wrong.'"
The approach, Mr. Johnston said, did not always endear him to his senior civil servants. "But he's persuasive. I saw him address a roomful of trustees that was ready to lynch him and, after 40 minutes, they gave him a standing ovation."
EFFECIENT
In Mr. Fullan's judgment, four things made Mr. Kennedy effective: concern for social justice, his sheer, intellectual prowess, an obsession with results, and indefatigable energy. "He must have worked 20 hours a day. I'm sure it made him annoying to some staffers. Too much micromanagement. Too many expectations. He didn't berate anyone, but he was demanding. He put enormous pressure on people, because he was driven that way. I've worked with policy makers for 25 years. Most just want to get it on the books, not worry about implementation. Gerard's take was, 'How will this translate into results? Where are the results?'"
HIS WIFE, HIS LOVE
Gerard Kennedy and Jeanette Arsenault met at a nightclub in Edmonton in 1981. They were out with another couple. Ms. Arsenault-Kennedy, an Acadian francophone from Prince Edward Island, isn't sure what the other couple talked about, but Mr. Kennedy, she remembers, talked politics.
"That's all we talked about, the entire night." Her first impression? "This is one ambitious and motivated guy... Maybe that's what attracted me. He is solid. He knows what he wants." In fact, not long after they started dating, Mr. Kennedy thought it best to put Ms. Arsenault-Kennedy on notice: "You know," he told his future wife, "one day, I'm going to go into politics. You know that." He was 22.
They dated for nine years. When he finally proposed marriage, "at first I didn't believe him," laughed Ms. Arsenault-Kennedy. "It was like — did I hear that right?"
CHILDHOOD
Politics had been part of his world from the start, a staple of conversation around the Kennedy kitchen table in The Pas, 630 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. "There was lots of voluble debate. In our house," Mr. Kennedy said. "Trivial Pursuit was a contact sport."
His father Jack, owner of a gas franchise for the region, was Mr. Community; active in Kiwanis and Knights of Columbus, a school trustee, then mayor and later a Liberal candidate in the 1984 federal election.
Gerard, the second of six children, was born with a clubbed left foot, a handicap he refused to let impede him. "My mother actually made me believe that the reason I had a specially built shoe was that the other kids just hadn't got theirs yet," he said. "I could skate before I could properly walk."
A friend of his father's built a reinforced skate and the young Kennedy, in the dogged manner that would come to mark him, "just kept at it and kept at it." At 14, with his older brother Ed, he won a hockey scholarship to Winnipeg's private St. John's-Ravenscourt school. Later, he played at the Junior A level, a rugged defenceman known for his ability to deliver hip checks. In college, he recalled, not without a glint of pride, he put two guys through the glass that way. He still plays in a Queen's Park pick-up league.
SCHOOL
"What Gerard may have lacked in athleticism," said Ed, now CEO of the Winnipeg-based North West Company, "he made up for with sheer tenacity. He wasn't reckless on the ice, but he was determined and fearless. He'd immerse himself in the moment and I think it connects to his life. He's purpose-driven. It's hardwired into him."
After high school, Mr. Kennedy spent a year at Trent University but, when its hockey program was scuttled, transferred to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It was the early 1980s, a recession had set in, and the provincial Tories had cut welfare payments. A friend recruited him to volunteer at a local food bank and within months, he had suspended his studies and was running it.
"I was probably as abstract as any university student," Mr. Kennedy said, "and I was angered by what I saw — average people with difficult situations and nowhere to run, quite at variance with the country I'd been led to be believed existed."
He intended to return in six months to complete the degree, but never did; addressing the poverty issue seemed a higher calling. He's proud of his achievements there. "We got the [Peter] Lougheed government to restore welfare cuts, a day before we released a report showing how their policies were driving clients to the food bank. We created an awareness of a problem that just was not there before."
SOCIAL JUSTICE
"What Gerard may have lacked in athleticism," said Ed, now CEO of the Winnipeg-based North West Company, "he made up for with sheer tenacity. He wasn't reckless on the ice, but he was determined and fearless. He'd immerse himself in the moment and I think it connects to his life. He's purpose-driven. It's hardwired into him."
After high school, Mr. Kennedy spent a year at Trent University but, when its hockey program was scuttled, transferred to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It was the early 1980s, a recession had set in, and the provincial Tories had cut welfare payments. A friend recruited him to volunteer at a local food bank and within months, he had suspended his studies and was running it.
"I was probably as abstract as any university student," Mr. Kennedy said, "and I was angered by what I saw — average people with difficult situations and nowhere to run, quite at variance with the country I'd been led to be believed existed."
He intended to return in six months to complete the degree, but never did; addressing the poverty issue seemed a higher calling. He's proud of his achievements there. "We got the [Peter] Lougheed government to restore welfare cuts, a day before we released a report showing how their policies were driving clients to the food bank. We created an awareness of a problem that just was not there before."
In 1985, Terry Sweeney, then a Loblaws technology executive and now a consultant to Big Pharma, tried to recruit Mr. Kennedy to run Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank.
"My first impression was that he was too young and I was wasting my time," Mr. Sweeney recalled. "But while I was waiting to see him, he was with a young couple and I eavesdropped. And he was so detailed in his questions. He listened so well and was very creative in looking for solutions. He gave them his complete attention. We ended up talking all night long. It took me a year to get him here."
Finally moving to Toronto with Ms. Arsenault-Kennedy, a daycare supervisor, Mr. Kennedy's first assignment was a fall food drive. "We were expecting to collect 50,000 pounds," Mr. Sweeney said. "We got almost a million. He just generated a ton of media. The thing is, he had a very clear vision. He saw food banks as interim measures that could be used as a platform to talk about poverty in Canada."
During his 10 years at Daily Bread, Mr. Kennedy distributed $30-million in food annually and put hunger in Canada on the front page. It did not hurt that he was bright, articulate and photogenic or that he refused to take a dollar of government money.
"That wasn't ideological," he insisted. "It was practical. It was a waste of time. You can't just throw money at things. The public is not wrong in thinking there is a disconnect between what they're told and what gets delivered."
THE ARTIST
Although considered something of a loner — a talented artist, Mr. Kennedy's notion of unwinding is to sit down with a sketch pad and charcoal pencils and draw — he takes soundings from friends and confidantes, including Mr. Harmer; Mr. Sweeney; Katie Telford, his former chief of staff and now national campaign director; her husband, Rob Silver, an energy lawyer and head of his policy team; his father Jack, whom he calls "a touchstone"; and his siblings. Before most major decisions in his life, Mr. Kennedy has flown home to Le Pas to kick the permutations around.
LEADERSHIP CANDIDATE
"I was very content doing what I was doing." But he did agree to look at it and, after consultations, decided to run, concerned that the federal party was adrift and that, without a renaissance, would hand the federal Tories a second term almost by default, just as Ontario Liberals had done for Mike Harris in 1999.
"I felt I was the only one who could do with the renewal of the party," he said. "I met with the other candidates. And it's not about their deficiencies. It's about what approach is needed for these times."
Over the past six months, Mr. Kennedy has laid out a broad policy template, calling for the adoption of national education standards, gender equity, energy and environmental initiatives and a review of Canada's military mandate in Afghanistan, an issue that threatens to polarize the convention. He's also spent a lot of time talking about enterprise, what he calls "unshackling the power of the individual to make a difference" and promoting "an innovative, risk-taking climate."
He'd like to be given a mandate for those policies, or at least a nod in their direction. "People have to be buying something. You could slip in and [win by] being the best of the worst, or the only one without too much baggage, or the only one who doesn't fall down, but that's not a mandate and it's not worth having."
Despite his hands-on, let's-review-the-numbers-again style, Mr. Kennedy sees his main role as strategic synthesizer — to bring disparate parties together and create the agenda that will move things forward. "I established clear goals, at the ministry and elsewhere, and gave a lot of latitude, but was never content to see those things not done. You have to get the implementation. There's nothing worth getting up for otherwise."
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