Globe: KENNEDY IS "THE ONE TO WATCH"

Check out the Globe and Mail's comprehensive profile of Gerard at www.globeandmail.com!

Kennedy is 'the one to watch'

Candidate's youth, optimism and tenacity bolster his bid for the Liberal leadership

MICHAEL POSNER

From Friday's Globe and Mail

TORONTO – Quick, now: What does the jumbled Liberal Party leadership race have in common with an obscure 19th-century English novel? The answer: "a dark horse."
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Some Highlights:

"Less sullied and more youthful than his better-known rivals, Mr. Kennedy — neither a Martinite nor a Chrétienite — bears no scars from the party's internecine wars and might thus be regarded as a leader who can heal the rifts."

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"More importantly, although 81 per cent of Liberals told the Strategic Counsel they believe the party can form the next government, delegates will, in fact, be electing a new opposition leader, for potentially five years. By that time, Messrs. Ignatieff and Rae, with all their liabilities, would be into their mid-60s — not an age, perhaps, to galvanize the emerging generation. Mr. Kennedy would be just 51, seasoned federally and, leaning slightly left, a nightmare for Jack Layton's NDP."

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"Almost everyone who engages with Mr. Kennedy seems to come away impressed: with his intelligence, his command of whatever dossier is in front of him, his commitment to constructive change, his prodigious work ethic and his essential rootedness. Oh yes, and charisma, a word much debased, but applicable to Mr. Kennedy. He may look like a milky chartered accountant, and you're unlikely to ever see him pirouette with a rose in his teeth, but put him in front of a crowd to talk about poverty or education or gender wage equity and the life force emerges, palpably."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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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.

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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." (BCY4K note: "How Canadian is that?!?!")

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.

"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."

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"I was immediately impressed with him," recalled Jack Harmer, who befriended Mr. Kennedy in Edmonton and has remained a confidante (Mr. Harmer spoke at the Kennedy-Arsenault wedding in 1991 in Wellington, PEI — Jeanette's largely francophone home town — and predicted they'd one day live at 24 Sussex Drive). "He had immense leadership capabilities. He seemed able to do everything. In the course of a day, he'd run budgets, do research, give a speech, negotiate with food companies, handle media interviews and then be out on the floor at midnight filling bags of food that he would personally deliver."

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Sue Cox, Mr. Kennedy's No. 2 for eight years in Toronto, said he was "very good at approaching things from a different perspective. The whole volunteer component — that you didn't need money — but could ask for goods and services without offering tax receipts, that was Gerard. He truly believed you could appeal to people's better instincts. Sometimes his faith was vindicated, sometimes it wasn't."

He worked relentlessly. "People would call at all hours of the night because they knew he'd be there."

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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."

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The one to watch...

GERARD KENNEDY