Devine Ms. Ginny has her own life, thank you

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/05/2002 (8768 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT was a buddy’s idea. “Why don’t you write a column about the premier’s wife?” he said one day.

“Nobody knows who she is.”

It was a week or so later before I saw my friend again.

“I’m having lunch with Ginny Devine,” I said.

“Who’s that?” he said.

*     *     *

We met one noon-hour last month at The Loop, at the foot of Lombard, just a block from Viewpoints Research, the opinion-gathering company where Devine is one of the partners.

She is wearing a steel-grey pants suit, with a silver dragon brooch and silver earrings she bought at The Forks. But the first thing you notice is her freckle-faced, blue-eyed, strawberry-blonde good looks.

The second thing is how much she likes to laugh.

Jack Farr, of CBC radio fame, says she’s funny, too.

He and his wife Bonnie Bisnett are next-door cottage neighbours of the Doer-Devines at Lac Lu, just over the border in Ontario.

“She’s great,” Farr says when I ask about “Gin-Gin,” as he calls her. “She’s wonderful. I don’t want to sound gushy, but she’s one of the nicest, smartest people I know. She’s a tremendous mother. She’s a great friend. And on top of that, she’s handy. She can fix anything. Doer can’t.”

Yet someone who could be one of Doer’s greatest political assets remains largely in the background, unrecognized and unknown.

“I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to make Gary’s job part of what I do,” she says.

It’s not that easy, anyway, with their girls, Emily 12, and Kate, who’s seven.

As a child, Ginny had to share her own parents with six other siblings, including older sister Susan Devine, who’s a provincial judge.

Her father Jim, who had a screen print business he lost when Ginny was in Grade 12 at Kildonan East, died three years ago. She still misses him.

I ask if it’s because there were seven of them and only one of him to go around.

She agrees, but…

“I think the other thing is — I don’t know if I should be disclosing this. My dad drank. He had a drinking problem.”

She says he gave up drinking in the last seven or eight years of his life.

But we’re talking about Ginny Devine, the unrecognized, almost reluctant premier’s wife. The irony of which is that even if she isn’t on Doer’s arm, she’s the perfect political partner. She was once premier Howard Pawley’s chief of staff.

Devine was an elementary school teacher in Charleswood in 1981, when she dove head first into politics, running Roland Penner’s election campaign.

“Gosh, she was good,” Penner remembers.

When Penner was named attorney general, Devine became his special assistant.

“She’s an extremely intelligent, personable person who helped us over the rough spots, particularly through the French language crisis in ’82.”

That’s how she met Doer, in fact. Sitting across the table when he was with the Manitoba Government Employees Union doing verbal battle with Penner.

“Prior to her meeting Gary,” Penner would tell me later, “she was very much a person on her own. She very much had it together. And she never surrendered that when she began going out with Gary.”

Penner remembers 1987, when Pawley was struggling with whether the province would include sexual orientation in the human rights code.

“Howard was being a bit pressured on the issue and was a bit uncertain,” Penner says. “But she stiffened his spine on that one.”

Inevitably, the premier sometimes runs things past his uniquely qualified wife, the opinion researcher and former premier’s chief of staff.

“He’ll talk to me about things that are — if something’s bothering him. Or he’s thinking and rattling around. He’ll ask my advice once in a while.”

She laughs again.

“I don’t think I have a tremendous amount of influence over what goes on in the government.”

The question she seems to get asked most often is, how does she balance it all?

The answer is, some days she doesn’t.

“Because if I did, then I would exercise every day.”

But she does have a new bike her husband bought for her 47th birthday in March and she has a kayak at the cottage.

A single-seater that allows her a bit of solitude.

In many ways, the Doer-Devines are the province’s most ordinary extraordinary family.

They’re even listed in the telephone book, although the address will change this summer.

They’re moving to a 3,000-square-foot home in North Kildonan because they need the space. The premier of Manitoba doesn’t even have room for a home office in the 1,500 square-foot house in Elmwood where they have lived for the last 16 years.

And when he’s unwinding, watching football on a Sunday afternoon, she has nowhere to read or listen to music.

So she goes out by herself to a book store.

Up the street without a single-seat kayak.

*     *     *

Before coffee arrives, I have to tell her about how my buddy had suggested an interview with the premier’s wife because nobody knows who she is.

And how, when I said we were having lunch, he didn’t even recognize her name.

Naturally, The Devine Ms. Ginny laughs at that.

And then she offers the real reason no one knows who she is.

“It’s the nose and glasses.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca