We lost a dear friend today. Senator Elaine McCoy, former Cabinet Minister in the #Alberta Lougheed government.

She loved her whiskey straight, her cigarettes strong and her politics hardcore. She liked people to speak their minds, and she liked free thinking eccentrics best

She was sharp like cut glass and her genius dazzled — even in her later years when she became physically frail, her mind was strong and she worked as a sitting Senator right up to the end.

If she liked you, you knew it, and if she didn’t, you knew it too.

I watched her eviscerate ambitious politicos with a single cutting remark, perfectly timed. She could be kind too, when and where it mattered.

She took me for a fancy dinner at the Parliamentary restaurant the day before centre block shuttered for a decade for renovations and

she once invited me to the Speech from the Throne — just because she knew I’d love it.

We enjoyed her many Hill parties. You never knew who would turn up, depending on how hot and bothered Ottawa was at any given moment.

She was the last Progressive Conservative politician in Canadian federal politics. Though she called for an independent (non-partisan) Senate long before Prime Minister Trudeau made it so. And was the first leader of the Independent Senate Group.

In later years, she’d become morose about how partisan it was becoming.

In the last few months, she called both me and and my husband to just chat politics. We often disagreed but we often agreed too and she’d often school us in Canadian political history. COVID meant we didn’t

get to visit in person (she was too frail for patios and I couldn’t meet indoors) this year.

I had planned to call her the last few days to wish her a happy new year — but didn’t in time, and I regret waiting now.

Her political contributions are many; I’ll write about them another time. I’ll just say now, she was a free spirit and an original thinker and our family will miss her. I loved her stubbornness best.

In our household she was known simply as Senadora. Formidable, until the end.