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.
You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
soundingsjohnbarker 