All of us worked in politics, back then.

I worked for John Turner's Liberal government, and my then-girlfriend worked for Brian Mulroney's Conservative Opposition.

On the afternoon of September 4, 1984, I was heading home to Calgary and law school.  So I went to the Ottawa polling station where she was volunteering.

She was sad to see me go (I guess), but happy about what was happening: her party was winning, and mine was losing.  We said our goodbyes and I headed to the airport.

In those days, there was no Wi-Fi on planes, because there was no Wi-Fi.  There wasn't even an Internet.  So when you got on a plane, you didn't know what was happening down on Earth.

Down on Earth, Brian Mulroney was heading towards one of the biggest Parliamentary victories in Canadian history.  When all the votes were counted, his Conservatives would win 211 of 284 seats in the House of Commons.

The Liberals, formerly a majority government, would go from 135 seats to 40.  It would be the worst election result for a sitting government in Canadian history until that point.

My Dad picked me up at the airport.  I was happy to see him, and happy to be back in Calgary.  But we were quiet as he drove us home, listening to the election coverage on the radio.

I've never told this part of the story before: as we pulled into my parents' Northwest Calgary driveway, John Turner came on the radio.  He had won his seat in Vancouver Quadra, but his party had been decimated.

I'd been supporting Turner for a couple years he got to me before Jean Chretien did, basically and it was that moment.  That moment comes in every campaign, when all of your work and your ideas and your emotion and your hopes and dreams are decided by someone else.

And it was all over, just like that.  So I can't remember everything he said.

But I do remember this.  As my Dad and I sat in the driveway, listening to him, this is what John Turner said: "The people are always right."

And so I cried when I heard him say that, a bit.

That moment, to me, is always when you see political leaders for who they really are.  There are no more rallies, no more speeches, no more votes to count.  It's over.  And you get to see them for who they really are, even for the most fleeting of moments.

And that was what we saw, that is what we heard: John Turner, in his essence, was a democrat, one who believed deeply in his soul in the judgment and the wisdom of the people.  That is mostly what characterized his time in public life, too: a belief that the people's will was inviolate.

That was the pardadox of John Turner: he believed in that old-fashioned notion, the one that held that the people knew best.  They don't always, of course: witnessing the foul, fetid Trump era from afar, we all know by now that the people aren't always right.  The people are often terribly, terribly wrong.

But John Turner forever considered that to be an article of faith, a truth that deserved defending.  It reflected the dignity he showed on election night in 1984, and it was seen in all that followed when his caucus worked to jettison him, and he seemed almost perpetually bewildered by their inability to accept a democratic party vote.

Was he a man out of time?  Perhaps.  That's why he lost, some say: he clung to a long-ago, long-abandoned Canada, where there were no attack ads, no personal attacks, no Twitter.  He left in the Seventies, when politics was about service and solemnity.  And he returned in the Eighties, when politics was no longer about either.

Politics had changed.  He hadn't.  He didn't.

The last time I saw him, I introduced him at a Liberal event in Oshawa in 2015, where I had asked him to speak.  He was in a wheelchair, and he was much older.  He was handsome but no longer as handsome as he had been.  He was frail.

He listened to me as I told the story of that night, when he had said the people were always right.

Afterwards, after he spoke in supper of the Oshawa Liberal candidate, he pulled me closer.  "You remember what I said that night, eh?"

I told him I did.

He patted me on the arm.  "Good," he said.  "Good."

And then he had this far-away look, remembering what could have been, and what was.

Photo Credit: Vancouver Sun