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Jan 15,2006 - Jan 22,2006 |
16 - Climbing the high ladder to success
Federal Public works and government service minister Alfonso Gagliano talks about politics and culture
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-22
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Alfonso Gagliano
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Silent clerks work at their computers, or check printouts, or talk in low tones with customers over the phone. The office boss walks among their desks, with a not unfriendly attitude. Smiles and the occasional joke accompany his instructions.
If it weren't for the big posters on every wall, this office on Jean Talon St. East in Montreal could be mistaken for the accounting department of some large corporation. It is not. This is the campaign headquarters of Alfonso Gagliano, born a Sicilian in Siculiana, and now a Federal minister of Public Works and Government Services.
"Anyway, when you thought of the accounting department of a large corporation you weren't far from the truth," remarks the office 'boss,' Tony Mignacca, Minister Gagliano's collaborator for over 30 years. "A serious campaign is based on numbers, exactly like accounting. In our case, the numbers are the voters, whom we have to know well, and the Minister contacts them all, in person, via phone, or mail." Tony Mignacca also specifies that he carries out the instructions for his 'chairman of the board,' Alfonso Gagliano, who has applied his organizational instinct as well as his vocational training as an accountant to politics. But this is an old story.
The 'chairman' arrives on time for our meeting between Southern Italians (he's a Sicilian, the interviewer's a Southern Apulian). We do not speak of the campaign, but of politics, because the purpose of this interview is to understand how a boy, who arrived in Canada at 16, could climb this high.
"Actually, as soon as I arrived in Montreal," jokes Gagliano, "I went down, because I sank in snow to my neck. I couldn't imagine one could be literally buried in it. In Siculiana I had seen the snow maybe twice or thrice, and even then, a few sparse flakes of it. My first impression, on a day in December 1958, was of total dismay. And several more such moments came later, when I started looking for a job."
And why was that?
"Because when I arrived, Canada was in a full recession, and the El Dorado I was expecting turned out to be an atrocious mockery. There were very few jobs; none at all for an Italian boy who couldn't say a word in English nor in French. I was living with a sister of mine, who had come here before me, so I wasn't exactly without means. However, I really had to overcome the temptation to go back at once. Then I started looking around, and I saw that during that freezing winter the one abundant raw material was snow, so I offered to go and shovel it from the railway tracks. They took me, giving me 95 cents per hour. That was little, but more than nothing. I didn't last long, though, because after one week I got pneumonia, and my sister forbade me to go snow-shovelling again. That was my first experience with Canada."
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