It’s no fun losing

Voting someone out of a job. Photo: Google

The day after former Premier Louis J. Robichaud’s government fell was a quiet day at the New Brunswick Liberal headquarters.

The phone stopped ringing not long after Robichaud lost to Richard Hatfield’s Progressive Conservatives in the 1970 election, said Wendell Fulton, the Liberal Party’s executive secretary at the time.

“You sit there and nobody’s coming near you. It’s very depressing in a sense,” Fulton recalled. “In our case, I remember we had a small office budget and the bank phoned the second day looking for their money.”

For some, leaving politics and piecing together a new life isn’t easy. And when a politician leaves office in defeat, it can be “devastating,” political analyst Don Desserud said.

“Suddenly, just not having people need you when you’ve been working so hard to help people … emotionally, that’s extremely difficult.”

Eleven cabinet ministers in the Shawn Graham Liberal government were defeated on Sept. 27 as David Alward’s Progressive Conservatives swept to power.

Sometimes, it takes a while for politicians who are leaving politics to land on their feet and find new jobs, and it could be the same for the province’s newest crop of defeated politicians, Fulton said.

“They have to be patient for upwards of a year or even more. Most of these cabinet ministers will find something easier than the backbenchers, because they’ve got associations and various things going for them. It’s no easy task. It depends on finding a new life and income.”

Joan Kingston knows how the recently defeated ministers feel.

Kingston, who was elected under Frank McKenna’s Liberals in 1995, lost her seat in 1999.

“When you lose in politics, you don’t have a choice. That day, it’s done. There’s no goodbye party, there’s nothing,” Kingston said.

After the loss, Kingston took a breather to recover from a gruelling election campaign.

“There is a bit of a grieving period,” she said. “What you find out during that time has a different meaning for you than it does for almost everybody else in the community. You see yourself as a defeated candidate and that’s it.”

Despite the loss, Kingston stayed involved in the party and went back to work in the health care field, where she toiled before entering politics

 Later on, when the Liberals returned to power, Kingston landed a job in the premier’s office.

“Your life is never totally the same after politics,” she said, adding that there are more opportunities.

While many assume it’s easy to move from politics to high-paid corporate jobs, this isn’t always true, according to Desserud.

Political Science Professor Don Desserud. Photo: CBC

“They see the high profile cases of premiers that become senators or cabinet ministers who end up being presidents (of corporations) and kind of assume that all these politicians are going to move into the corporate sectors and have these high paid jobs,” he said.

But Desserud bets the number of politicians who take this route after politics is small.

“We still sort of see our politics as being almost an amateur activity, something you do for the love of it,” he said. “That’s the old fashioned way of looking at politics. We get people that don’t necessarily have the great backgrounds that would allow them to move into the corporate sector.”

Fulton, who worked as a lobbyist for high school teachers in Ontario after leaving the political arena, said many politicians struggle with finding a job after they leave politics.

“The people are almost destroyed sometimes. Lawyers and the professional people can probably bounce and get a position. But if you’re not into the professional group, then it’s very difficult for many people,” Fulton said.

Michael (Tanker) Malley didn’t land a prominent corporate job after the former Progressive Conservative MLA was defeated in the 2006 election.

Instead, Malley went back to his first love: driving school bus.

But Malley had difficulty standing back and watching his community without being able to help, so he ran successfully for town councillor in Miramichi in 2008.

“I ran to serve the poor people and to serve my community,” Malley said.  “I saw just after the (2006) election a lot of the poor people I represented, the low-income families and the seniors that I loved dearly were falling through the cracks.”

Former M.L.A. Vaughn Blaney. Photo: Google

Vaughn Blaney also had no desire to find a high salaried, corporate job after he left politics.

The former teacher, who served as a cabinet minister under McKenna from 1987 until 1999, chose not to re-offer in the 1999 election because he felt like it was time to step away.

“I was quite tired,” Blaney said. “It’s like a heavyweight fighter, you have to know when to put them up and not go for that one more fight.”

But Blaney saw many of his colleagues encounter trouble figuring out what to do after their political careers ended.

“It was almost like hell. They were totally lost. I felt for them,” he said.

The support of his wife, Diana, helped Blaney survive during his time in politics but also to cope with life after politics.

“If you don’t have that support system, I know I couldn’t have survived. Now I know why some just don’t survive,” Blaney said.

The challenges people face when they leave politics aren’t exclusive to politicians, though.

They’re the same challenges that a lobbyist, a health care professional, a school bus driver or a teacher face when it comes time to leave their careers.

“No matter what you do, what you give your life to, it’s always difficult,” Blaney said.

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Posted by Karissa Donkin on Oct 25, 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.