The Best Laid Plans

Terry Fallis’s novel The Best Laid Plans is a satirical take on the Canadian political system. Published in 2008, the novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for humor with its tale of a burned-out speechwriter who decides to run the Quixotic, can’t-win campaign of a curmudgeonly professor. When the campaign proves successful enough for the principled professor to win a seat in the Canadian Parliament, the speechwriter has to help his newly minted MP navigate the corrupt hallways of power.

The narrator is Daniel Addison, a young man who has spent the last five years working as a speechwriter to the House Leader of the Opposition Liberal party (they are called the opposition because they have been in the minority to the Conservatives, or Tories). Daniel’s tenure in politics has been a most dispiriting one, and he finds himself ready to throw in the towel. The final straw comes when he accidentally walks in on his girlfriend, Rachel engaging in a late-night affair with the House Leader. Readers hold up this sex scene as a particularly funny moment in the novel because the activities are described in ingeniously adapted parliamentary language (for instance, the first thing Daniel sees is Rachel on her knees “enthusiastically lobbying the leader’s caucus”).

Thoroughly disgusted and disappointed, Daniel quits his job just before the upcoming election. However, before he can take a new job teaching English at the University of Ottawa, Daniel is convinced by the House Leader to do the Liberal party one last favor – run an impossible campaign in the Cumberland-Prescott riding (or district). The incumbent MP there is probably the most popular Tory in the country, and the place has been a Conservative stronghold since time immemorial. Daniel doesn’t want to completely burn all bridges before leaving politics for good, so he says yes.



The first part of the novel follows Daniel’s attempts to find a candidate for this unlikely race. He lands on a crusty old Scot named Angus McLintock. Angus is not only Daniel’s landlord but also a brilliantly eccentric engineering and English professor at the University of Ottawa. Angus agrees to run for two reasons: first, because there is simply no way he could possibly win the election, and second, because Daniel agrees to teach Angus’s least favorite class, “English for Engineers,” which Angus would do almost anything to avoid having to give this course.

Angus is an unlikely politician. He is sixty years old, speaks with a Scottish burr, is given to correcting the grammar of anyone who talks to him, has a mop of unruly hair, spends his evenings building a hovercraft in the basement of his house, and is in deep mourning for his wife Marin, a famous feminist who died a year ago. Each of the novel’s chapters ends with a letter Angus writes to Marin explaining to her what has been going on, giving readers a poignant window into his inner thoughts.

Daniel assembles the rest of the team from equally unlikely places. He recruits Muriel, a now-retired campaign manager, by pitching the idea to her in the retirement home where she now lives. He also finds staffers named Pete 1 and Pete 2 who are described as “alarming anarchist punks” who live in what the book calls a “punkhouse.” The Petes continue wearing their punk-Goth getups as they canvas the neighborhood getting constituents to support Angus’s candidacy.



In a bit of good luck, the district’s popular Tory MP Eric Cameron suddenly suffers an unpredictable setback, a plot twist that comes in for some criticism from readers. Despite the fact that Cameron is the Finance Minister, his downfall doesn’t come from skimming and kickbacks. Instead, discovered having an S&M based tryst with his lover, he decides to resign to escape the controversy that follows. Considering that he is not married, wields enormous power, and was doing nothing wrong by engaging in this relationship with his girlfriend, readers have a hard time figuring out why he would need to flee the country as a result of being found out.

Still, this turn of events means that Angus ends up in Parliament after all. In the second part of the novel, Daniel becomes Angus’s executive assistant, a job that mostly involves trying to curb Angus’s instincts for always doing the right thing no matter how impolitic. At the same time, Daniel starts a relationship with Lindsay, the granddaughter of their campaign manager Muriel.

Angus realizes that both the Conservatives and the Liberals are tainted by their proximity to power. In his climactic final coup, he defeats a crooked mini-budget deal that was about to be passed by nefarious means by flying his finally completed hovercraft to the House of Commons in order to cast the deciding vote to reject the mini-budget.



The novel ends with Angus considering whether to run again. Although he is tempted to quit the politics game once and for all, in a letter to Marin, he realizes that he just can’t sit out while terrible people have all the power.