"Don't talk about the future. I'm not even thinking about the future. "
As of yesterday, when the provincial election writ was dropped, Diane Thorne is no longer the NDP MLA for the riding of Coquitlam-Maillardville.
And the 70-year-old is not taking the departure from public service easily.
Ahead of the day, first, she cleaned out her Victoria office. Then, her husband of 46 years, Neil, sold the boat they lived in for four years when the legislature was in session.
Now, her Coquitlam constituency office - where she worked since being elected in 2005 - is being shut down and her MLA Twitter account is digitally defunct.
"I've had a good run," Thorne says, "People are sad to see me go. That's better than saying, 'When is she ever going to leave?'"
Characterized, by her own admission, as a thorn in people's sides, Thorne has for more than two decades championed a variety of community issues in the Tri-Cities.
But giving up such a career isn't easy, and Thorne doesn't even like to talk about it, even though she believes she made the right decision.
"I never wanted to stay too long," she said. "I think everybody should know their best-before date."
She doesn't favour political careerism, although she has been around longer than some, having run for elected office continuously since 1990; she was elected first to Coquitlam council in 1996, then as MLA in 2005.
For years, she has been involved in women's issues, helping to start the PoCo Area Women's Centre (now Tri-City Transitions) in the mid-1970s, and representing southwest B.C. at the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
She has been vocal on the Riverview Hospital file, nagging about the need to keep it for mental health purposes - and keep it in the public's hands.
"It's our lands, it belongs to the people of Coquitlam," she said.
She also fought for affordable housing and renters' rights in the legislature. But as a member of the opposition - a sometimes frustrating experience, she says - her bills died on the order paper.
TOUGH FIGHTS
Her background is with social services, first with Family Services of Greater Vancouver and, later, with Share Family and Community Services, and was an outspoken councillor at Coquitlam city hall. But if she's leaving behind a legacy, Thorne believes her efforts to get the Tri-Cities' first youth centre and her fight to get women elected in provincial politics are the things of which she's most proud, even though involvement in these causes was at times like Don Quixote and Pancho Villa tilting at windmills.
Championing a youth centre in the early 1990s earned her death threats while working with the provincial NDP women's caucus to win approval for equity policies drew scorn.
In 1992, she worked with a group that tried to get a youth centre built near Mountain View elementary school in Coquitlam. The group, which called itself PoCoMo Teen Centre Society, failed disastrously, and had to give back donations it had received.
Thorne still regrets that low-water mark, saying, "They [area residents] just didn't want it in their neighbourhood. That was my first introduction to NIMBY."
The group switched tactics, however, and for eight years worked hard to promote youth concerns. It was aided by a tragic and galvanizing murder, Thorne says, the brutal killing of Graham Niven by then 18-year-old Stephen Stark. It struck a chord and changed attitudes, she now says, and youth centres are today an integral part of cities' recreational programming.
PoCoMo Youth Services Society, which Thorne helped get started, provides mobile outreach services to youth but getting youth drop-in programs in those early days to support at-risk youth was one of her first - and biggest - battles.
EQUITY
Overcoming the sexism barrier and promoting women in politics has also been difficult, Thorne says, but it's a fight she's happy to wage for women who will follow in her footsteps.
Many of her NDP colleagues (mostly Caucasian males, she notes) disagree with the policy that prevents men from running for nomination in ridings vacated by incumbents. But without this policy, she says, women would only ever get to run in unelectable ridings where they are expected to lose, and she fears declining participation by women in politics without equity policies.
"This is a fight for our lives. For our daughters and women everywhere."
Thorne has had no trouble carrying the NDP banner in the riding since 2005. Perhaps it was grit and audacity that won her public profile and acceptance at the civic level in the mid-'90s and has kept her elected through the years.
Now, though, it's time to give it all up and she finds its difficult to make the transition.
"It's terrible. I loved my job."
To escape the inevitable what-will-you-do-now questions, she and her husband are decamping to Newfoundland - where she grew up and the couple has a cabin - and they'll return, possibly later this summer. With no political schedule or agenda to attend to, the couple is free to make their own decisions.
This is both a good thing and a bad thing for Thorne, but beware of predicting her future.
As she says, "You don't need to be elected to have a big mouth."
