VANCOUVER - Jim Abbott typically wakes up around 5 a.m., goes downstairs to his computer and checks out National News Watch and The Globe and Mail for his early morning fix of news.
He did exactly that on one morning in the third week of January. But something was different. The veteran Conservative MP for the British Columbia riding of Kootenay-Columbia was overwhelmed with the feeling that he should leave politics.
After six elections, all solid majorities, and 17 years in Ottawa, Mr. Abbott knew: It was time. Never had he thought of this before. So he sat for half an hour and then he went upstairs, woke up his wife, Jeannette, and told her the news.
"She said, 'great'," he recalled today in an interview.
There is never a good or easy time to exit politics. And at 68, Mr. Abbott is one of few original Preston Manning Reformers left in the Conservative caucus.
A team player and a Stephen Harper supporter, he says the Prime Minister told him he understood "completely" his decision when they had the chat in Vancouver recently, just before the opening of Olympic Winter Games.
The game-changer, Mr. Abbott says, was the wonderful Christmas he and his wife just spent in Edmonton with their seven grandchildren, who are between 6 and 14 years old.
"They could either visit me for hugs or at my gravesite," he said, explaining his decision to go now.
And he wondered, too, how many of those sorts of spontaneously fun family gatherings he had missed because for so many years as an MP he operated under the "tyranny of the urgent."
Mr. Abbott is in great health and so is his wife. And he will be getting a great pension - $108,516 a year, according to calculations provided by the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation. He says he will work "flat out" until the end of this Parliament and at the same time he is giving his riding association the luxury of some time to find a successor.
Still, he says he is conflicted. Being a politician is a "phenomenal life." His greatest successes, he believes, were in constituency work, especially when he was able to help miners in his riding recoup at least some of their pension earnings when the coal mine where they worked went bankrupt.
A big man at six foot, five inches, he always stood out on Parliament Hill and had served as the heritage critic in opposition, fuelling speculation he would be appointed Canadian Heritage Minister in the Harper cabinet. It never happened.
"I would be lying if I had said I wouldn't have liked the challenge" he says. But he also looks at the demands of being a minister on top of those of being an MP and he is happy with the job he has as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of International Co-operation.
As he prepares to make his exit from Parliament Hill he asks that politicians respect each other but also that the public respect politicians, allowing them the time to debate issues responsibly without jumping to conclusions and trying to shut them down.
"Cut us some slack," he asks.
(Photo: Mr. Abbott, right, applauds Reform Party Leader Preston Manning prior to a 1998 budget debate. Tom Hanson/The Canadian Press)