There are moments when I’m somewhat jolted by one question: where has the time gone by?
This question became more poignant after my mother passed away in February, 2020. In that moment I felt an intense loss for an amazing woman and thought that I’m next. And while time has not “flown by,” it now feels like it has.
I promised myself that I would put my thoughts and memories down, in the hope that this exercise would bring back long lost memories and spur friends to fill in moments and events that may have slipped my mind. My husband is spectacularly amazing at doing that.
This page is a work in progress. I hope that once or twice a week, I will add to my story.
At the outset, I want to note that I am a first generation immigrant to Canada – born in Trinidad of Lebanese parents. I am gay and happily married to an incredible man. I have no adequate words to describe how amazing he is or the feelings I have for him. Suffice to say he is simply my everything.
The path to this personal happiness is paved with sexual, physical and emotional abuse. I may or may not come back to these dark moments. But critical to this path was the fact two cousins outed me to my entire extended family in 1991/1992. While I came out in Montreal in 1990, I had shared that with a select number of family and friends back home in Nova Scotia. These cousins decided that this ‘scandalous’ information was too juicy not to share with the whole family. When I moved back to Halifax in 1992, I realized that they all knew, and 90% of them refused to talk to me. I had become instantly invisible to all of them. 33 years later, they remain invisible to me.
Concurrent to what was happening to me on a personal level, I had fallen in love with all things political.
The political spark…
In January 1983, I watched the federal Progressive Conservative convention where 66.9 per cent of delegates endorsed Joe Clark’s leadership. However, in what would turn out to be one of the most consequential political decisions at that time, he resigned and called for a leadership race. That race led to Brian Mulroney’s leadership victory and the Conservative majority Government of 1984.
As a 16 year old teenager ( I turned 17 in July) who had arrived in Canada two and half years earlier from war-torn Lebanon, it astounded me that political transition could happen in such a peaceful process. I had witnessed – every week it seemed – open caskets of men (often as young as 18 or 19) who left our village to fight in the war, only to return as corpses. Their caskets would be danced through the village on the way to the funeral service and burial. We would all head to the roofs of houses so that we could bid farewell by throwing flowers into the coffin or sprinkling perfume on the body. I have often said that I saw more dead bodies by the time I was 14 than most people have seen in a lifetime.
These memories have stayed with me, along with the many nights being rolled under the beds by my parents when there were revenge attacks on our village. I didn’t think about it then, but in adulthood, it seemed unbelievable that in spite of the constant new bullet holes on the exterior of our home, and the occasional unexploded hand grenade on our roof, we were never harmed.
I was now hooked on politics on though. I was also in Grade 12 and about to graduate High School before I turned 17.
In 1984, a friend from High School who was a member of the Nova Scotia Young Liberals suggested that I join the campaign in Dartmouth, NS. I was already a fan of Pierre Trudeau, and grateful that he opened Canada to immigrants fleeing Lebanon, that the offer seemed utterly exciting and irresistible. The 1984 Federal campaign led to work in the subsequent provincial and municipal campaigns in NS.
There was no turning back.