AGING MEN IN POSITIONS OF POWER
Jim Coyle
Humanity’s capacity for folly and self-ruin is almost bottomless, with none more susceptible to such bouts of gob-smacking lunacy than the aging male.
What soon-to-be former mayor of Toronto, John Tory, confessed to in a Friday evening news conference is a transgression as old as time. There is no new element about it. Not, by all accounts, even a whit of originality. It is the most common of cliches.
An older man, powerful but his own mortality advancing like distant thunder, takes up with a much younger staffer, usually an ardent devotee, in whose admiring eyes the aged one sees a reflection of his vanished youth, an assurance that he’s still — after a fashion, and perhaps thanks to the pharmaceutical industry — got it.
But John Tory?
John Tory?!
A man who always seemed as much a stranger to passion as his predecessor, the late Rob Ford, was to self-restraint?
A man who seemed unable to silence his policy yammerings long enough to listen to whatever sweet nothings another might be cooing at him?
It is yet more proof that none of us can ever truly know another person. Or as Blaise Pascal more poetically put it, “the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.”
Perhaps there were clues to Tory having been seized by what we might call “COVID Crazy” in the wild head of unshorn hair he flaunted during the lockdown. Many a man was drawn during those strange, strange days — perhaps reminded by the liberating unkemptness of their younger selves — into fits of nostalgia or regret for unexplored fields.
Some took up guitars and formed garage bands. Some commenced running. Some took to writing. The mayor, it seems, got reintroduced to his inner adolescent and found a partner in a 31-year-old now-former staffer.
To be fair, Tory is only 68, though he has been around Canada’s political scene so long he feels much older. He was principal secretary to the late Ontario premier William G. Davis. And Davis was nine premiers ago. He was an adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney. And Mulroney was a half-dozen prime ministers ago.
To his credit, Tory remained energetic. More energetic than was good for him, apparently. But what does a sagging, Dad-bodied man too often do when time’s passage becomes impossible to ignore? Pathetically often, what Tory did.
The world of politics is almost tailor-made for such lapses. Long hours in close quarters. A shared sense of purpose and importance. Pressure. Dining. Cocktails. Travel. The dynamic of wise elder and bright, young thing full of promise.
And since the relationship is almost by definition subject to a short shelf life and designed to fail, there is no future (which in the case of those on the cusp of 70 is a limited thing anyway) only the pleasures of the ever-present now.
In Tory’s case, the power imbalance and potential for exploitation is self-evident.
He was right to have promptly resigned on revelation of his conduct by the Toronto Star and he deserves whatever castigation is coming his way from the Integrity Commissioner.
Unhappily, his short statement on resigning contained aspects that suggest he labours still under a sense of rationalization and self-delusion:
“It came at a time when Barb, my wife of 40-plus years, and I were enduring many lengthy periods apart while I carried out my responsibilities during the pandemic.”
It was her fault?
It was the pandemic’s fault?
It was his limitless libido’s fault?
And, as Mrs. Tory might well note, who says “40-plus years” about the length of their marriage?
“I developed a relationship with an employee in my office in a way that did not meet the standards to which I hold myself as mayor and as a family man,” he said.
This was a classic example of trying to eat one’s cake and have it too. He didn’t hold himself to any such standards yet continued to speak of them in the present tense. As if they hadn’t been shattered.
There is, as ever, a lesson here for aging men in positions of power.
If history is a guide, it will not be heeded.
. . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jim Coyle - Jim Coyle spent 40 years in journalism with The Canadian Press, the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star. Over his career, Coyle covered breaking news, wrote columns, features, editorials and sports. He was nominated for National Newspaper Awards in four different categories. He has filed from every province and territory in Canada and has covered papal and royal tours, murder trials and judicial inquiries, the Grey Cup and the Calgary Olympics, and more elections and leadership conventions than he cares to recall. After retiring from the Star in 2018, Coyle taught journalism at Humber College. His proudest accomplishments are getting sober almost 30 years ago and, with his wife Andrea Gordon, also a former Star reporter, raising four sons.
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