Townsman, 1991-02, Page 6faced MPPs who months earlier
would probably have been shocked
if they had been told they not only
would win the election but would
form part of the new government.
Karen Haslam, the Perth school
trustee and former high school
teacher, decided to run for the NDP
nomination at the beginning of July
after thinking about it for a long
time. She decided if she was going
to run she would go for the win, not
just put in a good performance. It
might have been described as
presumptuous at the time since
Hugh Edighoffer hadn't yet indicat-
ed he was stepping down and Perth
was probably the safest Liberal
riding in Ontario. A Girl Guide
leader, she went off to Guide camp
after making her decision to run and
while there heard the news Edig-
hoffer wasn't running which, she
says, totally changed the race,
opened it up so she felt she had a
chance to win.
She didn't pay attention to the
polls during the election campaign,
just kept doing what her husband
Duncan, her campaign manager,
laid out for her to do each day. She
said she knew she had run a good
race and could feel good response
and knew that whether she came in
second or came in first she knew it
was a big improvement for her party
which had been a distant third in
the previous elections. On election
day it was Duncan who told her how
close things were likely to be,
predicting she could win or lose by
500 votes (she eventually won by
more than 3,000).
So election night she was cau-
tiously optimistic and when the
results started coming in and she
was ahead she kept waiting for the
results from the rest of the county,
worried that early results might
show her strength in Stratford
itself. "I never, ever got overly
excited, not once," she says. Cam-
paign workers were growing in
excitement as she won poll after poll
but she refused to get carried away.
Even after radio and television
stations had declared her victory
she kept waiting for all the county
polls to be in. It wasn't until she
overheard Duncan talking on the
phone to a friend from Nova Scotia
Reality came
with overheard
phone call
and talking about the size of the
victory that it really sank in, she
says.
After that the evening was a
round of media interviews, meeting
Gerry Teahan, the Liberal oppo-
nent, and the victory party, an
evening she remembers vividly like
a series of vignette.
For Paul Klopp, the Zurich -area
pig farmer and Hay township
councillor, the reality of his win in
Huron sank in the morning after the
election as he tried to do his chores.
The party of the night before had
given way to a string of early
morning phone calls from people of
all walks of life wishing him the
best. "It finally sank in, seeing
there's the farm and there's this
other job and you're not going to be
doing this (farming), not at the
extent you thought even the night
before. It kind of hit me that `you've
changed today'. It starts that
quick".
For about four days, he said, he
kept up the illusion that he could
scale down his farming operation.
He planned, with help of a hired
man, to finish out the herd of sows
he had and take off the bean crop.
Within days he realized the pigs
had to go immediately and after his
first trip to Queen's Park when he
learned he had four meetings
scheduled for that week, he realized
he had to hire a neighbour to take
off the beans.
The campaign had already taken
its toll. "The Monday before the
election I wouldn't have complained
if they'd cancelled the election, if
they'd said it was just a joke,"
Klopp recalls. He was worn out and
had lost nine pounds from his small
frame.
With 52 new members in the
Legislature the new government
began a series of crash courses to
familiarize the rookies with what
they could expect ahead. For six
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4 TOWNSMAN/FEBRUARY-MARCH 1991