I have loved Barry Devolin since he gave up a career in real estate to work for the Minister of Natural Resources in the Ontario government. When I first met Barry, he was ambling around the Premier’s Office in a cozy knit cardigan (quite distinctive in a culture of “power suits”) and had a little gurgling quartz water fountain on his desktop.

“It’s part of my plan,” he explained. “If we lose the next election and the left wing gets back in, maybe I’ll look enough like one of them that maybe they’ll forget to fire me.”

Actually, we did lose the next election and of course all of us got “fired” promptly, but Barry had the last laugh, as he went on to win in the federal election and is now the Member of Parliament for Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes.

I kept a running file of “Barry-isms,” as he regularly dropped  quiet, insightful little rural pearls of wisdom.

Once, discussing the fact that three female union leaders had publicly commented on an issue while the lone male boss in their midst had yet to reveal his position, Barry compared it to hunting for white-tailed deer inEastern Ontario:

“A smart buck will stay back and let three does cross a clearing first,” he noted. “If the third doe makes it across without getting shot, the buck figures it’s safe enough for him to emerge.

“Of course,” he finished, “a smart hunter lets the first three does cross, hoping that will draw out the buck.”

So there we were, the brilliant team of crack communications strategists, basing our negotiating plans on an age-old hunters’ strategy!

I saw Barry in Ottawa years later and Parliament hadn’t changed his wit or humour one little bit. Pleased to have been elected, he was keenly aware that the minority government of the day could fall at any time, and that he would then be plunged into another election battle to keep his seat.

“Waking up every day knowing you could be 38 days from unemployment tends to keep you focused,” he commented wryly.

Of all the “Barry-isms” I can recall, my absolute favourite has always been this one:

“If you wrestle with a skunk,” Barry used to warn as we prepared to plunge headlong into yet another round of political mud-slinging, “even if you win, you both stink when you get up.”

Dale Carnegie offered a similar observation in Stop Worrying: “As a farm boy, I trapped four-legged skunks along the hedgerows inMissouri; and as a man, I encountered a few two-legged skunks on the sidewalks ofNew York. I have found from sad experience that it doesn’t pay to stir up either variety.”

Both Dale Carnegie and Barry Devolin were pointing out that some things just don’t pay: wrestling with skunks is one of those things.

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