John Duffy 1963-2022 RIP

I did not really know John Duffy, the political strategist and author of a history of Canadian elections called Fights of Our Lives. But I interviewed him about twenty years ago about that book and I remember him well.

Duffy worked as a political communications strategist, consultant to politicians at many levels, confidant to Paul Martin and other leaders, local, federal and provincial, and principal of a strategy consultancy called StrategyCorp. Mostly I think the horde of political strategy consultants constitute just about the worst thing existing in the Canadian political world, and the source of most of its corruption and stupidity. But I thought Fights of Our Lives was clever, smart, lively and perceptive to a degree not often matched in Canadian political writing, and John Duffy's knowledge of and enthusiasm for Canadian political history was impressive -- and infectious.

He thought the historical sense mattered in politics, too. In my notes from twenty years ago, he says:

That old saying “history is past politics” has been a straw man for historians to knock down for a long time. But there is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. Historians like Bliss and Granatstein and Morton may think of themselves as isolated and without influence but they are not. History buffs may be a minority, but they are a significant one, an elite among the political community.... There is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. The top guys have always had a sophisticated knowledge of the past.

 And: 

I really believe Chrétien learned his way of dealing with the Meech Lake Accord from thinking about Laurier. It was not until this book, when I really looked into Laurier’s “Sunny Ways” image and how he used it, that I understood how Chrétien used a folksy image to deal with Meech. Laurier’s was from Aesop’s fables, and Chrétien’s, when asked how he would deal with Meech, was, “Well, negotiating is like when a car gets into a snowbank. It takes a lot of rocking back and forth.” Meech was threatening both parties, and he wanted it to break the Tories before it broke his party, which is what Laurier wanted from the Manitoba Schools Question.

Fights of Our Lives' categorizations of such time-honoured electoral strategies as the Quebec Bridge and the Double Tribal Whipsaw still impress and entertain.

John Duffy was the son of the equally-engaging English professor Dennis Duffy, author of many studies of historical Canadian culture and literature, who survives him. Toronto Star on John Duffy