There is an incredibly special place—a short southbound drive from our beautiful borderland, just past the town of Eveleth. Equal parts sanctuary, summons, and spark.
It is a place of pilgrimage I’ve returned to for the last twenty years for silent reflection. On October 4, 2025, I again walked the trails of the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Memorial—paths thick with fallen autumn leaves.
I went looking for a glimmer of inspiration, maybe a shimmer of destiny—a spark for how to live, how to lead, how to hope again when the world feels perpetually on fire. Somewhere between the wind-bent birches and the words that still speak from the stones, I found it in Paul’s quiet echo.
Paul Wellstone, eloquent son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was many things: educator, author, activist, senator. He was called the Conscience of the Senate—a title he never claimed but earned by listening, showing up, standing firm, and staying integrally consistent. He stood on picket lines when it was dangerous, voted against the Iraq War when it was risky, and spoke for the voiceless when it was inconvenient.
His politics were not a zero-sum game but the art of moral purpose—transformational rather than transactional. In an age of triangulation and calculation, he was conviction incarnate.
We lost him in October 2002, when his plane carrying family and campaign staff crashed just a stone’s throw from the memorial built in his honour.
Walking those trails alone in the early autumn breeze, Wellstone’s creed kept repeating in my mind: “We all do better when we all do better.” Simple, yet revolutionary. He believed politics could be personal without being self-serving, moral without being sanctimonious, and that empathy could be a governing principle rather than weakness. We are now so fluent in cynicism that heartfelt sincerity often sounds subversive.
His vision was not partisan but civic—a belief in the dignity of people, the power of collective action. Yet he was no saint. He was a fighter—sometimes obstinate, often idealistic, always human. What set him apart was not perfection but a forged conviction: the belief that empathy could be policy, that decency could be influential power.
That conviction made him dangerous to cynics, indispensable to citizens, a threat to powerbrokers, and—as we now can see—irreplaceable in the halls of influence. He embodied humility, eloquence, and fire that make democracy breathe. He didn’t just fight for the poor; he listened to them. He didn’t just talk about education; he taught it. He saw the struggle of the mother working two jobs, the labourer, the person struggling with mental health, the farmer, the teacher, and built his politics around their stories. He didn’t just speak of them—he truly saw them. He didn’t just give them voice—he gave them visibility.
His politics were never about power, but people.
Our world—Canada too—needs its Wellstones, not in name but in spirit. The divisions dismantling our civic life mirror the fractures south of the border. Our shared world feels on fire with civic fabric scorched by polarization, extremism, cynicism, monetization of anger. Democracy, performative rather than participatory. Civic education replaced by the theatre of outrage.
When it comes to civic participation, we face a creeping nihilism that tells citizens politics is perpetually corrupt, that common good is illusion, that change is futile. Often, we argue more than we listen and in turn, have allowed the language of healthy democracy to be drowned out by the noise of incessant grievance.
Wellstone often said, “Politics is not about power or money; it’s about improving people’s lives.” Imagine those words etched into the conscience of every legislator, every candidate, every voter.
Imagine if our civic life aspired again to goodness, not just victory—and if our debates aimed for understanding, not annihilation. Democracy, as Wellstone taught, is not a spectator sport. It’s a verb requiring participation, education, confidence, and above all, imagination.
And it is that last word—imagination—that haunted me as I walked through the fallen leaves. It was the imagination to believe we can do better, to see politics not as blood sport but as care.
That precisely was Wellstone’s gift.
Imagine. That word could rebuild countries if we let it. Perhaps the path back to civic faith begins in places like that memorial trail—in silence, reflection, hope, and recommitment. We must teach our young that democracy is not only inherited but practiced and protected; that hope and conscience are not naïveté, but a discipline that defines.
In a world ablaze with division, Wellstone’s example reminds us that fire can also warm.
When I left the trail, the leaves were still falling—each one a quiet pause or punctuation mark on a sentence the world has not finished writing. I had returned to this special place, this musing mecca, searching for inspiration and destiny and found instead a kind of unexpected insight and direction, the reminder that purpose doesn’t roar. Sometimes it whispers. Often, the echo of a whisper outlives any roar.
Sometimes it lingers in the woods, in memory, in the words of a man who believed compassion can still lead.
The Conscience of the Senate now belongs to history. But conscience itself—the civic kind, the human kind, the rarest kind—doesn’t die. It waits for us to listen. If we listen, we can hear it and by its very virtue, we can hear Paul.
And on this October morning, amid the falling leaves and the howl of the autumn breeze, I finally did.
