Bob Rae on the Toronto subway

I didn’t trust my eyes. So I had to ask my friend to turn around and tell me if she too was seeing Bob Rae ridding in the same TTC subway car and battling against the same 9 pm rush that we were.

She couldn’t tell for sure if the navy blue suited man reading the book Lords of Finance was Bob Rae for sure. But she thought he looked special.

And he did look special as the lights of the subway car accentuated his thin white hair; the way lights do on a movie set would. The effect almost anointed sainthood upon him.

If it wasn’t for the random light effect, it’d be easy to miss the man who might very well be Canada’s future prime minister. This is because he just seemed so normal as he sat looking into space with a colleague sitting next to him glancing through an issue of the Economist.

Pardon my fuss. It’s just in Trinidad it’s not every day the commuter sitting across from you is a member of parliament. Politicians don’t make such cameos. They’re chaufered in tinted SUV’s along a priority roadway that the average vehicle can’t drive on, in Trinidad at least. And so this was a big deal for me.

Talk to him shall I? I was too damn scared to. However, he did make eye contact with me. He smiled and I nodded.