Emotional Fatigue

In a voice loud enough for several of their cabinet colleagues to hear, Flaherty told Kenney to "shut the fuck up" about Ford.

Kenney responded angrily in kind, and although the two men were separated by four other ministers, alarmed caucus colleagues, who requested anonymity, were concerned the bilious debate might escalate beyond their control.

I know an employer who once had an employee that was an absolute disaster - he'd swear at clients on the phone, get sloppy drunk at events and generally cause his employer and company completely avoidable grief.  I always thought it odd, as the employer was proud in a rustic way and not overly fond of poor social etiquette.  It was something that always interested me, this - how a decent man could overlook such detrimental behaviour in someone who represented him.

It was much later that I saw this man in the presence of a family member who was behaving in much the same was as the employee - drunk and disorderly in public, making a scene, embarrassing everyone, themselves and family included.    The employer had this look of almost paralyzed fatigue on his face, like this was an inescapable but unfortunate reality.

That was the moment it all made sense.  Some sort of psychological association had been made in the employer's mind between the employee and the family member - to abandon the one as a hopeless case would be to do the same with the family member.

It's a look a lot of parents have when they see their children going down dark paths or, perhaps even worse, being consumed by a mental health/learning disability condition that seems to forever shut the doors of normalcy to them.

I don't have anywhere near enough intel on what happened between Kenney and Flaherty to know the context of their spat - it could have strictly been about politics.  Flaherty's a man of discipline, though, an internalized Irish Catholic to the core - it's hard to imagine him losing his cool in such a public place over something as pedestrian as politics.

Part of me wonders if Jim Flaherty feels some degree of responsibility for the offspring of his former Leg colleague Doug Sr.  It must be painful to watch how both sons are spiralling out of control, bringing havoc to their community and also tarnishing their father's good name.

Flaherty's life has been filled with unmet expectations and surprise disappointments - he is, I think, a bit entitled to some emotional fatigue.  Meanwhile, none of this registers with Kenney - younger, more political, more ambitious, more righteous.  To his Ford is a liability to be tossed away.

At a deeper level there's a much more poignant, tragic story playing out that, hopefully, can serve as a catalyst to a renewed and open conversation about how we can do better around mental health in general.

Because yes, that is the underlying theme here.  There are no good people nor bad people just choices, and the internal hardware / external environments and accommodations that shape our moods and reactions/actions.  All of us.

This is the lesson I ultimately hope comes out of this mess.