Moral of the story: Olympics are good if you're a Tory

There evidently is an Olympic omen on the right when it comes to federal elections in Canada.

The first election after the 1976 Montreal Olympics was contested May 22, 1979 when Joe Clark upset Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as the Clark Progressive Conservatives beat the Liberals 136-114 to win a minority. The NDP, under leader Ed Broadbent, held the balance of power with 26 seats.

The 1988 Winter Olympics were held in Calgary and PC Prime Minister Brian Mulroney went to the polls on Nov. 21, 1988 in the election fought on the divisive issue of free trade with the United States. Mulroney steamrolled to a 211-seat landslide in 1984, but in 1988 won re-election with a 169-seat majority.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives finally got their majority in the May 2, 2011 election, winning 167 seats. Harper now has 100% of the power with 54.2% of the seats in Parliament after getting 39.6% of the votes from 61.4% of the registered voters who cast ballots. That's how the first-past-the-post system works, folks.

Now that Quebec is coloured with the orange of Jack Layton's NDP, will the Tories try to gain favour during the next four years by backing La Belle Province's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics?

Throughout the campaign, Harper sported a black, HBC-made Team Canada jacket from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics collection. Who can forget his all-terrain vehicle ride or his syrup-sucking? Such famous images, like these two, were featured prominently on the Conservative party's campaign website. Harper was doing his best to remind Canadians of the Games and attach himself to the 14-gold medal success of the host nation's athletes. To this day, Harper's government has still not disclosed the final bill to taxpayers for the Games.




The Vancouver Games, however, weren't the springboard to victory for two other candidates who were part of the five-ring circus last year.

Tory Gary Lunn, who was the junior minister of sport, was handily beaten by Green Party leader Elizabeth May in Saanich and the Gulf Islands. May, the Hartford, Ct.-born, former Nova Scotia candidate switched coasts and upset the smug Lunn by more than 7,000 votes (May 31,890; Lunn 24,544) to become the first elected Green in Canadian federal politics. Lunn, you may remember, made VANOC CEO John Furlong the guest of honour to open the campaign office.

In North Vancouver, ex-VANOC vice-president of strategy and partnerships Taleeb Noormohamed (17,665) came a distant second to incumbent Tory Andrew Saxton (28,996).

The Olympics, meanwhile, featured a heavy emphasis on aboriginal involvement (despite there being no full-blooded native on Team Canada). Some believe the Four Host First Nations inclusion strategy was a clever move to prevent tribes-without-treaties from resorting to roadblocks. Others said it only made sense. Could it, however, have played a small part in the election of a record seven aboriginals to Parliament?

Will the ex-VP become an MP?

This time last year, there was a lot of buzz around VANOC CEO John Furlong and whether he would stay in the public eye and run for public office. It was one-way hype.

Furlong always issued an abrupt denial when asked. What's more, his leadership of the Vancouver Olympic committee was a tiring, nearly decade-long campaign fraught with politics and economics. He once said he would have done his job with a paper bag on his head if he could have. Despite his rousing speeches and sometimes feisty answers to relentless journalists, Furlong always seemed a tad reluctant to be in the public eye.

Different story for Taleeb Noormohamed. Noormohamed, 34, is a former VANOC vice-president of strategy and partnerships who worked closely with Furlong. That's Noormohamed with Furlong pictured above at the United Nations in October 2009. The charismatic, intelligent North Shore-raised Noormohamed was born in 1976 (after the Montreal Olympics) in Ottawa and he wants to go back to the nation's capital. This time as the Member of Parliament for North Vancouver.

Noormohamed is running for the Liberal Party in the May 2 election against incumbent Conservative Andrew Saxton. It was at a Noormohamed-hosted rally for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff that the legendary Nardwuar the Human Serviette convinced Ignatieff to do the Hip Flip. One of the best moments of the campaign, I say.

I caught up with Noormohamed on election eve.

Q: Talk about the experience of running for office in this election.

"It's been a really good opportunity to hear the issues and talk to as many people as you can. I've knocked on thousands of doors, I would hazard to guess, I would say over 4,000 doors.

Q: What have you learned about yourself and the process?

Taleeb: "It's a process that requires you to really trust in people and you have to be willing to work extremely hard. I've been knocking on doors quite literally eight hours a day. This is a team sport and so many people are doing this with you and around you.

"It's a very humbling experience, you have to really be aware of how important elections are to people and how seriously people take them. I've heard people share some amazing and very sad challenges they're facing. It really does inspire you to do this and do better for people.

"If I win, I carry this responsibility that I do keep that dialogue going not just when it's election time."


Q: What are your thoughts on the Jack Layton surge and how the campaign has evolved?

Taleeb: "It's very easy to make whatever promise you want when there is almost no chance you're going to form government.

"Mr. Ignatieff has quite literally years of the Conservatives putting out negative media, negative press, leaving Jack fairly untouched. Part of the fundamental image of Ignatieff that was created was created by the very offensive, negative media work done by the Conservatives. At some point, what Mr. Ignatieff had to say got lost in the hype around Jack…

"Mr. Ignatieff got a much rougher ride than the others did. I was surprised that the media let Harper get away with the kind of campaign that he ran, where questions didn't get answered or Conservatives didn't show up for all-candidates meetings. People didn't scrutinize as closely just the fundamental disrespect Harper had for the media in this campaign."

Meanwhile, though Furlong did not become a candidate, he did endorse Gary Lunn, the Conservative running for re-election in Saanich and the Gulf Islands. See the photo below. Lunn was the junior sport minister before and during the Vancouver Olympics. Furlong appeared at the opening of Lunn's campaign office on April 3.

VANOC needed more taxpayers' money -- including at least $74.4 million directly from the federal government -- because of the Great Recession. The Conservatives have still not disclosed the final bill to taxpayers for the Vancouver Olympics, yet Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been campaigning across the country while wearing his Team Canada jacket. At least one political blog has noticed and it even posted a gallery of Harper modelling the jacket. The Canadian Olympic Committee did not respond to my query about whether Harper signed a commercial rights agreement to use the jacket in such a way.

On May 2, voters get to decide which party forms government and, ultimately, which leader can attach himself to the Olympic rings.