“The outpouring of grief among MPs these past days, as Parliament Hill comes to grips with the death of one of its finest, Jim Flaherty, has been extraordinary – a moment that has brought them together in shared loss, as sometimes happens with families. For now, more unites them than separates them. For a little while the veil of partisanship and manufactured outrage falls; they are just people, who’ve lost a friend. But as the country prepares for the former finance minister’s state funeral Wednesday, it’s worth asking whether there’s more to the sense of collective mourning, particularly among Conservatives, than the purely personal.” Michael Den Tandt wrote in an article for the Ottawa Citizen. Den Tandt continued, “Flaherty was, as all the eulogies last week made so clear, a human being, who never allowed his humanity to be eclipsed by the importance of his station. He loved a beer, loved a joke, was kind to colleagues, was warm, and decent. Though he operated on a different plane of influence from most other MPs in the Commons, Flaherty put on no airs. ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch,’ reads the line from Kipling. Flaherty was also a man of deep compassion, evidenced by his long championing of the disabled, informed by his own experience of raising a son with a developmental disability. He believed it was his mission as finance minister to help ordinary working Canadians who were struggling to make ends meet. He was the antithesis of the pin-striped, aloof Bay Street banker. If one looks back to the Conservatives’ early success, in the Christmas campaign of 2005, it stemmed from an intuitive sympathy for working families, and an ability to express this in policy. The child fitness tax credit, derided as a geegaw by economic purists but appreciated by millions of parents, was the quintessential example.” Read the full article here. | Raymond Matt, CFP, CLU, TEP, CHS
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