He was a rare creature in the House of Commons and handed me my first scoop

John Godfrey was a rare creature in the House of Commons: He had a full life before politics, a fun life after politics, and a family life that transcended politics. At a public memorial service Wednesday, Godfrey was remembered as a Renaissance man with a common touch. A scholar and a scribe, he lived in the world of ideas and moved easily among the powerful and famous, all the while working behind the scenes for the voters he represented as a Liberal MP from 1993 2008.

He after a rare losing campaign — personal, not political — against cancer. To be sure, Godfrey enjoyed the glory — the glamorous life of campaign speeches and policy debates in the public eye, culminating in a coveted cabinet post. As a man of words and wit, it all came easily to this patrician former university professor and president, newspaper columnist and publisher.

Perhaps all those real life experiences motivated him to treat politics as a deadly serious business for the ordinary people of his Don Valley West riding, whose lives were affected at ground level by the decisions made at the highest levels. At Wednesday’s standing room only memorial — attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other political luminaries past and present — no one mentioned perhaps his most unlikely claim to fame, now long forgotten.

Back in the summer of 2000, the Star’s Ottawa Bureau chose him as Toronto’s most worthy MP — a force for good and great things. That he achieved this ephemeral distinction by dint of political will and personal zeal, as a mere backbencher who still lacked cabinet clout, was a testament to Godfrey’s unique blend of ambition and dedication, extroversion and vision.

I remembered that long forgotten article this week as I listened to the cascade of far loftier tributes from friends, family and faithful at his favourite house of worship, Christ Church Deer Park. The Anglican preachers pointed to his favoured pew, and I thought back to my first meetings with Godfrey, long before he rose to national fame, on an obscure campus with a tiny Anglican chapel where he’d had his own presidential pew.

I was a newly arrived nobody student at the University of King’s College, which was affiliated with the much larger Dalhousie University in Halifax but ensconced in its own faded glory and future potential. Godfrey had just been appointed to be the youngest university president in Canada, already a local celebrity thanks to his wildly entertaining and hugely enlightening classroom lectures on the history of revolutionary France.

He set out to transplant the traditions and pretensions he had picked up as a doctoral student at Oxford, instituting formal meals with academic gowns in the grand King’s dining hall. I watched him at the college’s chapel service — high Anglican, infused with incense and leavened with choral music (the latter, though not the former, reprised at this week’s memorial).

Godfrey would hold court with students and faculty over sherry in the President’s Lodge, debating Greek tragedies past and present. He helped found the Foundation Year Program, an interdisciplinary immersion in the history of civilization that stays with me to this day. He also midwifed a new journalism program.

I took economics, not journalism, but Godfrey allowed me to pick the brains of all the wise and wizened writers on faculty — and soon handed me my first scoop: Godfrey had come upon a hitchhiker in a wheelchair, Bill Ferris, wheeling his way across the continent. Instinctively, he plucked Ferris and the wheelchair into his VW Beetle and ferried them both to the President’s lodge, whereupon he summoned me to tell the story of his peripatetic passenger — my first byline in a big city daily via the Montreal Gazette.

An unusually accessible academic, he was a polemicist and columnist in his own right. His erudite writings in the old Financial Post soon landed him the job of publisher, followed by the leap to federal politics that had always seemed preordained. But this gadfly with the gift of the gab was soon in the doghouse, a provocateur who’d poked one politician too many.

Ever the mischief maker, Godfrey had asked a psychiatrist friend to assess Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard’s separatist impulses and demagogic tendencies after the 1995 referendum. When the story came out, Godfrey’s faux pas rendered him radioactive in Quebec, relegating him to the Liberal backbenches for years to come.

Undeterred by his misstep, Godfrey threw himself into more of the good works that were his touchstone. He had organized famine relief for Africa in the past, and so he would focus on present day childhood hunger at home. When he’d done his penance, rehabilitated by then PM Paul Martin, Godfrey belatedly entered cabinet as the minister of infrastructure with special responsibility for cities.

He made his mark, but his time was too short, for the minority Liberals fell from power within two years. Godfrey flirted with a run for the Liberal leadership, but his campaign didn’t get far before a first health scare forced him to withdraw. In the aftermath, this lifelong Francophile took over the Toronto French School, and later acted as an adviser on global warming to the provincial government.

Godfrey touched so many lives before his own life came to an end, but who knows how much more he might have achieved if he’d had more time — in the Liberal cabinet, in a leadership convention, in a longer life. He climbed the greasy flagpole of politics (as Benjamin Disraeli famously put it in a phrase Godfrey knew only too well), but his rise and fall — and subsequent resurrections — are surely beside the point.

The legacy of his life, the lesson of his narrative arc, is that he was a performer of limitless potential, endowed with an endless competitive drive. At every stage, he did his best to better the world around him..