It was Halloween in two small towns five time zones apart – and the talk was all about the consequences of being tricked.
Dean Del Mastro, then the Member of Parliament for the federal riding of Peterborough, stood outside a Lindsay, Ont., courthouse looking like a five-year-old who has just seen his puppy disappear under the wheels of a truck.
He had been found guilty of three counts of election fraud during the 2008 campaign. Justice Lisa Cameron had called his testimony "incredible" and riddled with "inconsistencies and improbabilities." Defiant, he countered, "That's her opinion. My opinion is quite different."
Mr. Del Mastro vowed to continue sitting as an Independent, only to resign a few days later. He talked about appealing the conviction – which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison, a fine of up to $6,000, or both – but has not done so with sentencing scheduled for next Friday.
Far away, in the tiny village of Wick, Wales, Betsy McGregor, who came second to Mr. Del Mastro in that race, had no knowledge that a conviction had been handed down. She had been hiking in the mountains and her drenched BlackBerry was no longer working. The bed-and-breakfast where she stayed had no Internet, no news from Canada.
She had just returned from a three-hour walk around the cliffs that form part of the Glamorgan Heritage Coast, and her hiking companion, Nicole Cooke, was talking about how one deals with opponents who do not play by the rules, who will do whatever it takes to win the race.
Whether for a gold medal or a seat in the legislature.
Ms. McGregor and Ms. Cooke, the 2010 Olympic gold medalist and world champion in women's road race cycling, had developed a strong friendship in recent years. Ms. McGregor, a veterinarian with a résumé that includes work with the United Nations and a hobby that includes climbing some of the world's major mountains, moved on from politics to take up leadership instruction. She works with MBA students by taking them on difficult climbs – metaphor deliberate – combined with lectures. Ms. Cooke, who comes from the little Welsh village of Wick, was not only in the class but became a good friend of Ms. McGregor's son, Mac Faulkner, a professional hockey player who wound up his career as captain of the Cardiff Devils and is now studying at Harvard University.
The two women finished the hike and repaired to one of Wick's two pubs. "We were in front of the fire," Ms. McGregor says, "while Dean Del Mastro was before the court."
They talked about the book just released by Ms. Cooke to sensational reception in Britain – and Ms. McGregor found the parallels uncanny. "The themes," Ms. McGregor says, "parallel each other perfectly."
In The Breakaway, Ms. Cooke writes about what it was like to come from a small village and a simple way of life to compete in international cycling, a world infamous for its rule-breaking and cheating. Performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) seemed as common as pedals in a sport where Lance Armstrong was king of the road in the years in which she was trying to reach the top by staying clean. The year Ms. Cooke won her Olympic gold was the same year of Mr. Armstrong's incredible fall from grace, banned for life for lying about his drug use and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.
Ms. Cooke was aghast at the amount of doping in her sport. She refused even to stay in the same team house as someone she suspected might be taking PEDs.
"I was clean," she wrote. "And if you lived in the house with me you had to be clean there as well."
It was difficult, Ms. Cooke says, but "I wasn't about to trade in my moral code and principles. If it was ever going to happen for me, it was to happen my way."
It outraged Ms. Cooke that the price paid by those who were caught was usually so small. "Our sport," she says, "came up with meaningless out-of-season penalties for that tiny minority who actually tested positive."
She persevered, stuck to her principles – and in the end she was victorious.
Ms. McGregor, of course, was not – at least not politically. She ran twice against Mr. Del Mastro and lost both times. In 2008, the election in which he has been found guilty of cheating, he received 47.4 per cent of the vote; she got 31.6 per cent. The spread was more than 9,000 votes – impossible to say how critical his transgressions might have been to the eventual win.
"I would be the last person to say that had this not happened I would today be sitting in the House of Commons," Ms. McGregor says.
She believes a candidate can influence, at most, 15 per cent of the vote; the rest depends on the party, slightly less on the leader – she suffered under Stéphane Dion – and on actual policy.
None of that, she says, is the point. What is the point, she argues, is the amount of time it has taken to see action. It took six years and two elections before the charges against Mr. Del Mastro got to court. She believes that Elections Canada, like Statistics Canada, has been crippled by budget and staff cuts. The long-form census is a great loss to Canadian planning, she says, just as quick action and decision is a loss to Canadian democracy. In 2008 there was suspicion; it should never have taken to 2014 to have those suspicions confirmed or dispelled.
"Voters, donors, campaign workers and fellow candidates were all denied a fair election," she says. "With his resignation, Peterborough is left with no voice in Parliament. Election fraud is not a victimless crime. It damages democracy and hurts us all. Let us make sure our elected leaders, regardless of party, embody the values that we as a community hold close – ethics and integrity being at the core. Let us ensure that democracy is protected."
Her long talks with Nicole Cooke did give her another thought, though. Not one that would put her in the House of Commons, but one that could give her – and other candidates denied a fair chance – a little peace of mind.
"In cycling," she says, "the yellow jersey does get presented to the second-place competitor [as happened in the Tour de France championships taken away from Armstrong]. And the Canadian shot putter [Dylan Armstrong] who just got his bronze medal from the Beijing Olympics when the putter who took third place on the podium was confirmed to be on PEDs.
"I would love to have an asterisk appear beside my name in parliamentary history – along with those others who came in second behind candidates who committed fraud to win."
Editor's Note: In an earlier version of this column, the village of Wick in Wales was incorrectly identified. This version has been updated.
Roy MacGregor