MP E. Davie Fulton faces reporters. Image credit: Toronto Star Photo Archive, courtesy Toronto Public Library

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Who was the best Kamloops Member of Parliament ever?

Feb 6, 2021 | 6:56 AM

NOW THAT CATHY McLEOD has announced she won’t run in the next federal election, the pundits are busy speculating about who might chase after the Conservative nomination.

Every current or past local politician, anyone with name recognition higher than immediate family, and anything with a pulse is being touted as a possibility. It’s a tempting but silly game.

It’s not up to you or me. It’s not even necessarily about community experience, public profile, qualifications or so-called electability.

Constituency association members usually make the decision — though not always — and that decision is based on who sells the most memberships and gets those new members to vote.

But, as I just said, it’s not always up to them, either. One day a dozen years ago, the party’s local constituency association members were called to a special meeting for an important announcement — Cathy McLeod would be appointed as the candidate in the upcoming election.

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That was met with surprise and even anger by some members. Nobody knew Cathy McLeod. She’d been in Kamloops only a short time. Her political experience amounted to a term as councillor and another as mayor in the not-exactly-a-metropolis of Pemberton.

That was good enough for the party hierarchy, though, who wanted a woman candidate to follow in the footsteps of Betty Hinton, who had decided to retire. Others who had their eye on the nomination and were working their way through the normal process were unhappy.

One of them was Fred Bosman, a well-known resident who didn’t hold back from letting his views be known.

Cathy Who, as she quickly became known both inside and outside the party, was unphased, rolling to a comfortable win in the 2008 election over much-better-known candidates from the other parties.

She never made it into cabinet but has held several important parliamentary secretary and critic roles during the Harper years and in Opposition.

McLeod held her seat through four elections, winning all of them easily except for 2015 when Bill Sundhu of the NDP came within 3,000 votes. But that was also the year voters wanted to get rid of Harper, so Conservatives everywhere were in peril.

In 2019, she thumped former B.C. health minister Terry Lake, who ran for the Liberals, by 13,000 votes.

Our opinions of whether someone has been a good MP are based largely on our personal biases, which flavour our impressions of the job that’s being done. Though McLeod’s politics generally don’t coincide with my own, my experiences with McLeod over the years lead me to conclude that she has been a conscientious and effective constituency advocate when at home, and an influential parliamentarian in Ottawa.

In other words, Cathy Who turned out to be a fine Member of Parliament. But her retirement raises the question, at least in my mind, who was the best Kamloops MP in history? Is there a role model from the past to guide an MP in the future? Was it E. Davie Fulton, the Kamloops-born Rhodes Scholar and future judge who represented the riding for more than 20 years, serving as justice minister and later public works?

It took Trudeaumania to defeat him in 1968 when Len Marchand became the first MP of First Nations status. Len is surely in the running for “greatest ever” right up there with Fulton. Certainly, they’re in a dead heat for “most accomplished.”

Among other posts, he was environment minister and would later enjoy a long stint as senator. Alas, good people don’t always win, and, in 1979, he was beaten by Don Cameron, a crusty war veteran who didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

I’ve personally known five Kamloops MPs, including Marchand, Cameron and the man who ended Cameron’s political career after just one year, Nelson Riis.

That happened when the new Conservative leader, Joe Clark, quickly led his party to defeat. Riis, a former City councillor and school trustee, was the most populist and dynamic MP in this riding’s history, though, being a New Democrat, he spent his entire 20-year career on the Opposition benches.

However, he was his party’s house leader for 10 years and there were constant rumours about him being offered cabinet posts if he crossed the floor, and about turning down a Senate seat. If you ever get asked in a trivia game who introduced the bill to officially make hockey our national sport, and who tried to get the government to block Wayne Gretzky’s trade from the Oilers to the Kings — that was Nelson Riis.

He, too, stayed too long, eventually losing to Betty Hinton of the Conservatives in 2000. I knew Hinton well, too, and let’s just say she would not be on my list of best MPs. She retired in 2008, which brought McLeod on the scene.

Hinton, McLeod and Charles Willoughby are the only MPs in this riding who didn’t stay until they were defeated. Willoughby, a surgeon and a Progressive Conservative, served only one term, that during Fulton’s segue into provincial politics in the early 1960s. Thomas O’Neill, a locomotive engineer and two-term Liberal, was beaten by Fulton.

So, is it Fulton, Marchand, Riis, McLeod? And could our next MP be the best of all? Stay tuned.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.