Article content continued

East-side Ottawa is losing a great champion, said Coun. Mathieu Fleury.

“I’ve only ever looked up to her, her accomplishments and her efforts in our community and the support she has from everyone,” he said. “You can go politically or personally — she’s touched everything in the area.”

Meilleur has been in politics almost as long as Fleury has been alive.

“I think Madeleine has this feeling of — she’s your mom,” Fleury said. “When she speaks with me, she’s polite. But when she gets mad and she has something to say, she expresses it very clearly. You know where she stands, you know when she’s happy, you know when she’s unhappy. And that makes her very easy to work with.”

Born in a small town east of Maniwaki in 1948, Meilleur was once a nurse — just about every time she had a political event at the Montfort Hospital, she’d reminisce about training there — and then became a lawyer, before entering politics. Elected as a Vanier city councillor in the early 1990s, she rose through regional council and post-amalgamation city council before Dalton McGuinty tapped her as the party’s nominee in Ottawa-Vanier in 2003 as he looked forward to replacing a tapped-out Progressive Conservative government.

Long one of the safest Liberal seats in Ontario, Ottawa-Vanier had been held by Claudette Boyer — who’d been suspended from the Liberal caucus over attempts to get other people to take the blame when her husband hit the son of her predecessor, Bernard Grandmaître, with their car. McGuinty used his power as leader to appoint Meilleur as the Liberal candidate, bypassing a potentially nasty nomination battle.