The sudden death yesterday of Jim Flaherty, who was Canada's federal Finance Minister until less than a month ago, has produced a heartening display of non-partisan grief. The House of Commons suspended its session as soon as the news appeared, and members of all parties have been effusive -- and to all appearances, heartfelt -- in their tributes. You can get the flavour of it all at the CBC website or over at the Toronto Star, which devoted most of the main section of today's print edition to the story. The Star is, to put it mildly, not in favour of most of the policies that Flaherty espoused -- small government, low taxes -- but was able to put that aside at least for the day.
Because here's the thing: Flaherty seems to have been a genuinely good guy. He was ferociously partisan in Parliament, but decent and friendly in his daily life. That's unusual in today's politics, and especially in today's Conservative government. Prime Minister Harper is a calculating control freak, with a tolerance for dissent comparable to Vladimir Putin's. Foreign Minister John Baird is an unreconstructed cold warrior, who seems to be channeling the awful US bully-boy John Bolton most of the time. Flaherty genuinely stood out from the crowd.
One of the tearful tributes in the House of Commons today saw a colleague of Flaherty's reciting a piece of Irish verse that's often brought out on occasions like this -- you know, the one about "may the wind be always at your back". I suspect that Flaherty, who was proud of his Irish roots, would have preferred this slightly less reverential one:
"May ye be in Heaven half-an-hour before the devil knows ye're dead".
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