This is the eighth in The Globe's series of profiles of the Liberal leadership candidates.
TORONTO – When people talk about Joe Volpe, the conversation frequently turns to 1988 and his hardball fight to wrest the Liberal nomination from a Toronto MP.
Roland de Corneille, an Anglican clergyman popular with the big Jewish community in Eglinton-Lawrence, had survived the 1984 election that devastated the Liberals. But he was facing a challenge from Mr. Volpe, who was then a 40-year-old high-school vice-principal and party organizer.
More than 4,000 people packed a hall in a Toronto airport hotel to settle one of the year's biggest local Liberal disputes.
Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe (Andrew Vaughan/CP)
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Mr. Volpe addressed the meeting first. His supporters went to the voting booth en masse as Mr. de Corneille headed to the podium.
"He cued everybody. He organized everybody to get up and block the voting booths, so only his people could get in there," George Berger, who was then Mr. de Corneille's constituency assistant, said of Mr. Volpe in an interview. "If you have 2,500 people waiting in line before you, you're going to say 'the hell with it, I'm going home.'"
But veteran party organizers express little sympathy for such allegations, saying hardball is the name of the game in organizing for nominations and leadership campaigns.
While the tactics may have been routine, the battle was not. Knocking out a sitting MP from your own party is both daring and controversial in the ethos of party politics.
Today, Mr. Volpe makes no apologies to those who think he violated some unwritten rule.
"I don't know whether it's Marquess of Queensberry rules that applied or didn't apply. If you have nominations that are open, presumably it means that all those who can garner the support can run," he said. Even now, some Liberals point to it as a nakedly ambitious step — a "Shakespearean act," in the words of a former senior Liberal government aide — more in the style of a warring chieftain than a prospective statesman.
But Mr. Volpe's supporters see it differently: It was a contest where the outsider asserted his right to upset the notions that protected a political elite, and rallied people in his community to his side.
In their eyes, Mr. Volpe, an Italian-born immigrant of working-class parents, represented much of Toronto then: immigrants and ethnic community members who got ahead through hard work and did not need what Mr. Volpe called a "white-bread and pretty exclusive" elite to represent them.
Mr. Volpe earned his stripes as an organizer as part of a group that was criticized for recruiting "instant Liberals" from ethnic communities for the 1984 leadership race. He insists they were simply trying to expand the role of those communities in a party that was still "pretty restrictive."
Now, after 18 years as an MP, two cabinet portfolios and a stint as Ontario's senior political minister, Mr. Volpe's background as an organizer is seen as both a strength and a weakness in his Liberal leadership campaign.
His campaign is considered an organizing success, recruiting thousands of new party members to support his candidacy. Although a recent poll showed that Mr. Volpe had the support of only 2 per cent of party members, many organizers for competing campaigns predict that when delegates are chosen for the leadership convention, Mr. Volpe's block of delegates will rank in the top five.
But it is a block they predict will lay there like a slab of concrete, unable to grow. Its weight is important because they think Mr. Volpe will eventually lug it over to another candidate, although some question whether his endorsement will taint the candidate who receives it.
Mr. Volpe's leadership campaign was knocked off stride by a fundraising scandal in June, when he was forced to return five donations of $5,400 each from the under-18 children — including 11-year-old twins — of current and former executives of drug maker Apotex Inc.
For some Liberals, the incident added to their view of Mr. Volpe as just a machine-politics organizer, the poster boy for backroom boys.
"So where are all the backroom boys?" Mr. Volpe asked.
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