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Scott Brison, who hails from an area of Nova Scotia where the phrase “old Tory warhorse” might have been coined, marked his resignation from cabinet this week by celebrating his husband Maxime Saint-Pierre and their twin daughters.

Brison’s story — he ran for the leadership of Canada’s two major political parties and became its first openly gay cabinet minister — makes him one of the most remarkable Atlantic Canadian politicians of the last half century.

The former president of the Treasury Board is a child of the Annapolis Valley, the region of Nova Scotia that answers most closely to the phrase “Bible Belt.” The Valley was once so fiercely Conservative that the best man it could find to replace Diefenbaker cabinet minister George Nowlan (who served in Parliament from 1948 until 1965) was his son Pat Nowlan (who held the seat until 1993). Yet Brison won seven straight elections in the area. As he said this week, voters showed him enduring allegiance in 2002 after “I came out, and in 2003, when I came out again — this time as a Liberal.”

Brison’s success reflected his understanding that he was sent to Ottawa to represent rural Nova Scotians as their MP — case closed. He practised traditional politics by twinning highways and otherwise spending money in his riding, and by bringing home to the region tens of millions of dollars to support research-based growth. He could also play hardball politics with the toughest opponents, a caveat I add as I am about to be accused of beatifying the guy.

Brison’s gay-rights advocacy was understated and witty, never angry or hectoring. He liked to joke about the annual pride parade in his tiny community of Cheverie on the Bay of Fundy — “That’s when Max and I walk to the corner store for milk.” Brison seemed to understand that he could win more support for gay rights by telling parables than by issuing declarations.

Brison told me Thursday, in an interview, that people shouldn’t be surprised that he and Max were welcomed in rural Nova Scotia. He said city people often demonstrate a “cultural condescension” to the “progressive” rural residents of the Maritimes. To make his point, Brison recounted the story of Douah Shakshuki, the Muslim student who graduated with a 100 per cent average from Horton High School last year and earned a standing ovation for her valedictorian speech to classmates.

In telling that story, Brison didn’t sound like a politician about to stop celebrating his people.

He didn’t take the bait, either, when I hinted his star might have shone brighter in a more prominent cabinet job. Make no mistake about it, though, Brison would have made a better finance minister than the whinging Bill Morneau. He also would have been a better fisheries minister than the doctrinaire Dominic LeBlanc — who showed a romantic and ultimately self-destructive attachment to the “social fishery” his dad promoted in the 1970s. (Dominic’s father, Romeo, was fisheries minister under the first Prime Minister Trudeau — Pierre.)

At Fisheries, Brison would not have suffered from a deluded temptation to embark on a clumsy, doomed effort to transfer a corporate surf clam quota to a loose coalition of Indigenous groups and a Liberal-connected fisheries firm — both of which shared the disquieting distinction of having no experience in the fishery they were selected to run. At Finance, Brison, a former small businessman, would have foreseen the political fallout from Morneau’s disastrous, largely discarded 2017 package of tax reforms.

Not that Brison would endorse the view that he was an underutilized resource in the Trudeau cabinet. He’s a political loyalist of the first rank, and while he was said to have switched parties in 2003, he insisted that it was the grand old “Progressive” Conservative party to which he was attached, not Stephen Harper’s hybrid Conservative party, a shotgun wedding of triumphant Reformers and reluctant Tories. As Brison said at the time, he didn’t leave the party; the party left him.

On Thursday, he made it clear he’s not abandoning the Liberal party now. Indeed, he told me no prime minister has shown more concern for Atlantic Canada than Justin Trudeau. When asked for supporting evidence, Brison mentioned the Atlantic Immigration Pilot Program, under which employers can more easily attract foreign workers. Furthermore, there was funding for Canada’s ocean research cluster, which is designed to transform world-class ocean research into world-beating commercial success.

This brings me to Scott Brison’s greatest distinction. The most dangerous politicians (i.e. Donald Trump) make us yearn for a fictitious past. The most enduring ones (Jean Chrétien, John Buchanan) make us feel good about where we live and what we are today. The most idealistic leaders (Barack Obama, Frank McKenna) make us believe in a better future.

That’s Scott Brison. A rural politician, a policy nerd, an unrepentant optimist, Brison believes immigration and diversity will strengthen the Atlantic region; he remains firmly convinced the knowledge economy can be transformative; and he knows us to be more accepting and open than we probably are — even as his expression of that conviction moves us in the right direction. Heck, Brison can even get away with quoting Lincoln (as he did Thursday) about summoning “the better angels of our nature.”

Scott Brison will be missed.

We need more leaders like him.