In Which a Crime is Solved
I'm actually kind of pleased that Bob Rae is likely running for the Liberal leadership. I always felt sort of guilty about liking him, being a partisan Grit and all. I can remember reading The Three Questions and thinking I agree with this part. I agree with this part too. And this part. Why is this guy a Dipper?

Bob Rae is also responsible for important parts of my early political education. He taught me that politicians are real live humans. My very first assignment on my first day as a legislative page at Queen's Park was to bring some briefing binders to Premier Rae in the House. I remember his befuddled look when I set them on his desk and then stared blankly at him for a couple of seconds, thinking Whoa, it's not like television. He blinks. He reacts to your facial expressions. Politicians are, like, interactive! What a concept! (I was thirteen years old. What can I say?)

In the coming weeks, I would often see him sagging in a chair in the East Lobby, on his way in or out of the House. He'd be running his hand over his head until his hair stood on end and nervously eying the bobbing spotlights beyond the door, where reporters were prowling outside. I started to respect the man for never publicly despairing as he tried to make the best of a B-team cabinet and a platform that was not actually meant to be implemented, while fighting a recession at the same time.

A pity about 1990-95, really. I suspect those years make him unelectable.

However, since a good deal of Mr. Rae's premiership is probably going to come back and haunt him, I'd like to clear his name of one small misdemeanor, of which he is innocent and I was an accessory.

Bob Rae never mooned 10,000 protesters from his office window. I know this for a fact.

You see, one fine morning in the spring of 1991 several pages, including myself, were looking out the front windows of the legislative chamber and we beheld an enormous demonstration by landlords protesting the government's new rent control legislation. They were obviously agitated; they were lynching an effigy of the housing minister. To get a better view of the proceedings, some of the boys slipped into an unoccupied adjacent office belonging to the Speaker. They came back giggling a few minutes later. "Skippy mooned the demonstrators!" said one.¹ We laughed and thought no more of the incident. As I said, we were thirteen and didn't really understand that at Queen's Park, every game is played for high stakes.

A day or two later, an outraged letter to the editor appeared in the Toronto Sun. One of the landlords had seen our pal Skippy and she was shocked at the disrespect she had received from 'the government'. She also thought that the corner office from which he'd mooned her belonged to the Premier. (She had the wing and the floor right, just the wrong end of the hall.) An opposition Member seized on the letter and, in an uproarious session of Question Period, demanded that the Premier find the member of his staff who had committed the act and fire him. Bob Rae didn't help matters any by saying "But... but the only person in my office at that time was... me. No! Wait! I didn't mean it like that."

An actual police investigation was opened. None of the pages, who were nearly at the end of our term at that point, ever ratted on Skippy. The Case of the Queen's Park Mooner has officially been an unsolved mystery ever since. I remember overhearing two little old ladies sitting behind me on the bus the next morning saying "Shocking, isn't it? To think that political discourse has fallen to this level!" And so, I have always guiltily liked Bob Rae, who is not responsible for quite everything that went wrong while he was Premier.

1. Skippy was our nickname for a page who shall not be named and may very well be a respected doctor or lawyer by this point.