The importance of being James Moore

James Moore (macleans.ca)

I had to smile. On the very day I dove into Maclean's "50 Most Important People in Canada" cover story to discover that our very own MP James Moore was named as the 14th biggest wheel in the country, I received a mailer from the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting ripping into the aforementioned Mr. Moore for cutting the CBC's budget--thereby breaking a rather prominent promise he had made.
Not that I found the situation humorous or pleasing or anything. Rather, the smile was more about the irony and the bad timing and the fact that being a politician is a helluva job: up one second and down the next. It was also in sympathy for James the person and the road he has traveled and the heights he has scaled.
I first met James when he was a teenager--a whirlwind of a young man who spoke a thousand miles a minute and a was a true-believer Reformer with a capital-R. He was quite the dynamo as a political worker and then as a talk-show host in Prince George.
And I remember when he decided to run federally at such a young age, just 24, to seek the Canadian Alliance nomination. And then win it. I recall writing a column for the Tri-City News (in the days before I became a regular debater in the Face to Face feature) predicting very big things for the young Mr. Moore, stating that there may come a time when some of us would be proud to say "I knew him when he was just...."
James went on to clobber the Liberal incumbent, a certain Lou Sekora, in the May 2000 general election, and the rest is history.
But not history that has been perfectly recorded. The Maclean's piece on James doesn't get it quite right. For example, its description of his mother as "a teacher-turned-homemaker mother" fails to note a few very important factors. One: his mother was Golf Canada hall-of-fame member Gail Harvey Moore. Two: it was after his mother's death at a relatively young age that the teenaged James came to the realization that he'd better make something of his life, and decided that getting involved in politics was the way to go.  James and I have talked often about that important time of his life, and it's a pity Maclean's wasn't able to chronicle it.
I suspect, however, that there will be many more opportunities for magazine writers and perhaps even historians to more fully report on the life and times of James Moore.