William Marshall Barker: My dad would have turned 100 today

My dad would have turned 100 today. Sadly, he left us almost 30 years ago in 1989. My cousin, Sharon Seager posted this picture of her mom and my dad two years ago.

William Marshall Barker, shown here at right, beside his youngest sister, Norma, my sweet aunt, was called “Bill” by everyone who knew him (aside perhaps from my mother, Pat, who called him “William” on rare occasions, which never failed to get his attention), and my Uncle Bob Barker in Indiana, who always called him “Will.”

My dad would have been 100 today if he was still alive. He died in 1989.

He was the finest man I’ve ever known. His word was his bond. I never knew him to tell an untruth, which is simply remarkable. He never equivocated. He was always straight forward, meaning what he said and saying what he meant.

He worked at General Motors of Canada in Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown, as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in the same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

There are other memories, of course, which I haven’t quite got around to writing about yet. Like how he used to take me tobogganing in the winter at the Oshawa Golf Course. Or before I had a driver’s licence, pick me up after the third period of Oshawa Generals games, where I sold pop and hotdogs when I was 14 and 15 at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium. That’s where the two of us would go together many winter Friday nights to cheer on our hometown Junior B Oshawa Crushmen, especially our neighbour, Scott Willson.

While my parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

Before that, and well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work, first at Paul and Helen Plishka’s Rose Bowl Fish and Chips at the corner of Bond and Prince streets, and later Pat and Mike Volpe‘s Pat & Mike Fish & Chips on Hortop Street, as well as from the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, where we also enjoyed their fish and chips. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965. Pope Paul VI’s proclamation of Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851, so dad was in no hurry to abandon eating fish on Fridays, especially Halibut. I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

My dad had a Grade 8 education and wasn’t much for reading. I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, other than maybe to consult the odd one for some factual information. His idea of leisure was to work with his hands at carpentry or upholstery, and he built me, the reader, several fine custom-size wooden bookcases, with a larger than normal shelf sometimes for oversized books.

My non-book reading father, however, made time every day to read the local daily newspaper, and from 1983, when I began working as a newspaper reporter, until his death in 1989, quite likely read every newspaper story I wrote during that six-year period, and, as I learned only after he died, would often point out my byline in the Peterborough Examiner to shopkeepers and acquaintances in Bridgenorth, a small community just outside of Peterborough on Chemong Lake, where he lived from 1980 to 1989.

That man, an ordinary man by the measures of the world, yet an extraordinary man of character by any measure, was my father.

Bill Barker. Born on July 13, 1919. Gone from this earthly plain to his true home, but never forgotten by those of us who knew him here. My dad.

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The death of Flora MacDonald is a reminder of a Canada where Red Tories were decent people, not mortal enemies to be engaged in endless ideological combat with

I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario from the late 1950s through the mid-­1970s. I was 13 when provincial Progressive Conservative “Big Blue Machine” leader Bill Davis (a.k.a. “Brampton Billy”), who is now 85, succeeded to the premiership in 1971, a job which had had been in the party’s hands since the days of George Drew, who had become premier in 1943. I wouldn’t have considered Davis anything but an establishment Conservative in those days, certainly not a Red Tory. But politics can be an exercise in relativity, both real-time and historically, as much as principle, sometimes more, and this was after all 35 years before Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power federally.

In 1971, Ed Broadbent, not yet federal NDP leader, having lost that year to David Lewis, was still a backbench opposition MP for the federal riding of Oshawa­-Whitby, elected by a 15­-vote plurality in June 1968, during the spring and summer of Liberal “Trudeaumania” for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, as Broadbent, now 79, dispatched seven-­term Progressive Conservative incumbent Mike Starr, a former federal labour minister, and Canada’s first federal cabinet minister of Ukrainian descent, along with Liberal challenger Des Newman, now 84, who had been elected as the youngest mayor in the history of Town of Whitby two years earlier in 1966.

As my parents liked to point out, Ed Broadbent had been their Oshawa Times paper boy, I believe in the late 1940s, when they rented a red Insulbrick asphalt-siding duplex near the top of Church Street (now part of Centre Street), and within sight of the south-facing Adelaide Avenue green wooden fence of Parkwood, where Sam McLaughlin, the Canadian automotive pioneer and later philanthropist, who turned 100 in September 1971, still lived. Adelaide was the name of his wife, who had died in 1958.

“Colonel Sam,” honorary colonel­-for­-life of the Ontario Regiment, had been president of the family­-owned McLaughlin Motor Car Company, which started in 1908 and was sold a decade later in 1918 to facilitate the formation of the Canadian operation of General Motors of Canada. Sam McLaughlin was named president of GM Canada and remained in the job until 1945 when he stepped down and was named chairman of the board, a position that he held until his death in 1972.

My dad, William Marshall Barker, on the other hand was an hourly-rated General Motors of Canada employee, and proud member of what was then Local 222 of the United Autoworkers of America (UAW). He always drove a GM car. Of course, you couldn’t buy a Ford, much less any other kind, new in Oshawa from a dealership when I was a kid. There were only General Motors dealerships, although in time a Ford dealership did open just across the municipal boundary in Whitby. During the lengthy fall strike of 1970, we carried on, which meant steak-and-fried onions for dinner every Saturday night, even if we had to tighten our belts elsewhere. My dad knew the difference between the “company” and the “union.” Between “white collar” and “blue collar.” He never had any confusion on those points. But at the same time, I never heard him have a bad word to say about our Parkwood neighbour up the street, Colonel Sam, also know as “Mr. Sam.” Such were the complexities of class relations in the world I became a teenager in in the early 1970s.

And it was also the world that Flora MacDonald in October 1972 won her first federal election in, as a Progressive Conservative for the riding of Kingston and the Islands, the riding represented by Sir John A. Macdonald a century before, and the only woman among the 107 Tories elected and one of only three women in the House of Commons during the Liberal minority government of Pierre Trudeau. She held the seat until her defeat by Liberal Peter Milliken in November 1988.

Milliken, now 68, it should be noted, a lawyer by profession and chosen by his peers to serve as speaker of the House of Commons from January 2001 until his retirement as an MP in June 2011, over that decade was one of the finest speakers Parliament has been served by. In a historic ruling on April 27, 2010, he adopted a Dec. 10, 2009 order of the  Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan compelling the Harper Tories to produce documents regarding Afghan detainees, which the government had previously refused to turn over to Parliament on national security grounds.

It was not the first time Milliken had acted decisively in making important decisions from the speaker’s chair. In November 2007, he issued the first speaker’s warrant, compelling Karlheinz Schreiber to appear before the House of Commons ethics committee to testify on his business dealings with former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, since February 1913 when R.C. Miller, of the Diamond Light and Heating Company in Montreal, was compelled to appear before the public accounts committee to testify about $41,000 in heating contracts. Miller, who refused to testify, was summoned before the Bar of the House of Commons, a brass rod extending across the floor of the chamber inside its south entrance and beyond which non-members or House officials are not normally allowed. He was found in contempt of Parliament and jailed in the Carleton County jail for the duration of the session until Parliament was prorogued about three and a half months later.

As well, on May 19, 2005 Milliken cast the-tie breaking vote on a confidence motion determining whether the Liberal minority government of then prime minister Paul Martin, who is now 76, would continue or fall when the House of Commons was deadlocked 152 to 152. The speaker only votes in the case of a tie.

With classic precision and reserve, Milliken explained his vote simply by saying, “The speaker should vote, whenever possible, for continuation of debate on a question that cannot be decided by the House.”

Flora MacDonald, who was born in June 1926 in North Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, died yesterday in Ottawa at the age of 89. You can read all kinds of well­-written obituaries,
tributes and other remembrances of her today online at places like the Globe and Mail
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/conservative­trailblazer­flora­macdonald­dies-
aged­89/article25714535/) and The Whig­-Standard in Kingston
(http://www.thewhig.com/2015/07/26/macdonald­a­true­pioneer)

Lots of ink will be quite properly spilled today on how MacDonald rose from being a proudly-trained secretary from Empire Business College in Sydney and a bank teller with the Bank of Nova Scotia to being appointed by former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark as Canada’s first female secretary of state for external affairs in June 1979. While the Clark minority government was short-lived, MacDonald played a pivotal, but at the time secret, role early in the Iran Hostage Crisis in Tehran from November 1979 to January 1980, authorizing false Canadian passports and money transfers for the six American diplomats ­­ Robert Anders, Cora Amburn­-Lijek, Mark Lijek, Joseph Stafford, Kathleen Stafford and Lee Schatz ­­ being sheltered by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and John Sheardown, former first secretary at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.

Flora MacDonald’s death represents part of the inevitable passing from our midst of a generation of Canadian politicians from an era in all parties when they could disagree with each other with civility, and us with them, as voters, without being disagreeable and when not every utterance was calculated for its value as ideological blood sport. MacDonald, her father a trans-Atlantic telegraph operator, grew up during the Depression in one of Canada’s poorest areas. By the time MacDonald came of age, Red Tory was a label worn as a badge of honour, not a Scarlet Letter, and the word “progressive” actually proudly preceded “conservative” in the old Progressive Conservative Party. Even some of us who are more likely to be thought of as democratic socialists miss those days.

While the Canadian political system does little to encourage or reward voters who depart from partisan voting along party lines to support candidates seeking office as MPs federally or MLAs, MPPs or MNAs provincially, I’ve often thought, as heretical as it sounds even to me, that had I lived in Kingston and the Islands when Flora MacDonald was MP, say in the 1979, 1980 or 1984 federal general elections, I’d have quite likely been marking my “x” beside a PC candidate for the first time.

Mind you, Flora MacDonald knew better than most Canadian politicians just how unpredictable actually getting that “x” on the ballot, when push comes to shove, can be. At the February 1976 PC leadership convention, where she lost to Joe Clark, tracking by her operatives and surveys by several television networks had found 325 delegates who insisted they would cast first ballot votes for her. Of the 325 delegates who entered the polling stations wearing “Vote-for-Flora” buttons, 111 of them cast ballots for someone else it was soon discovered when the votes were tallied. The phenomenon became known as the Flora Syndrome, and Clark, who is now 76, went onto to defeat Claude Wagner of Quebec on the fourth ballot.

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