A Rae of sunshine
The NDP is the NDP, true believers all in the rightest of right things that never change (equity, diversity, more taxing of the rich, more government in more lives.)
Andrea Horwath is her own woman, and I’m sure a splendid one. If not quite in short pants when Bob Rae was elected as Ontario’s first and thus far-only New Democratic Party premier — Horwath was 28 in 1990, when Rae won a majority government — she was busy polishing her impeccable party credentials as a social activist.
So there is no reason to imagine a government headed by her would be as prone to the spectacular sort of gaffes made by the Rae crew.
Well, actually, that’s not quite true: The NDP is the NDP, true believers all in the rightest of right things that never change (equity, diversity, more taxing of the rich, more government in more lives or, as Jerry Seinfeld once told a business-class flight attendant who asked if he wanted more drinks, “More of everything!”), and thus with as many cranks and oddballs in their ranks as the Tories.
Indeed, if the NDP doesn’t form the next Ontario government — polls show them in a virtual tie with the Progressive Conservatives, with most pollsters giving the PCs the edge — it may be the combination of those two things, rigid ideology and a fair number of whack jobs, which does them in.
But still, the prospect of a second Ontario NDP government is most tantalizing, certainly for journalists.
I was one who woke up on Sept. 7, 1990, to find that Rae et al had been elected. I was working for the Toronto Sun then, and though I wasn’t at Queen’s Park, it didn’t matter — stories of glorious ineptitude, mistakes of brilliant foolishness and craven nonsense essentially fell from the skies during the NDP years.
Let us, without casting aspersions upon Ms. Horwath or the current party, wallow in some of those memories.
Health care costs were, unsurprisingly, as big an issue back then as they are now, and one way the NDP government sought to bring them under control was to impose a “cap” on OHIP billings. Doctors would be paid only twothirds of anything they billed over $400,000 a year.
This was spectacularly unpopular with doctors and some small group even protested. The atmosphere was super-heated, and it was in that context that in December 1991, Northern Development Minister Shelley Martel, MPP for Sudbury East, became involved in a vicious row with a Thunder Bay city councillor in which she claimed the government was considering legal action against Dr. Jean Pierre Donahue because his billing practices were illegal and she had seen the file.
The Sudbury doctor was virtually the only dermatologist for much of Northern Ontario, with a vast practice, a huge patient load and presumably big billings.
Later that night, as Donahue later testified before a committee, Martel called him to confess what she’d done, said she’d “made it all up,” and apologized.
But, best of all, Martel later took a lie-detector test to prove she’d been lying when she’d bragged about having seen Donahue’s file and billings.
A demonstrated liar, she nonetheless remained in Rae’s cabinet.
And then there was Peter North, an amiable fellow, MPP for Elgin, and tourism minister.
In November 1992, he resigned after published allegations that he’d offered a government job to a woman, a bartender at a downtown club called the Loose Moose with whom he was having — wait for it — an as-yet unconsummated affair. He was cleared by the OPP of any criminal wrongdoing, but remains, to my knowledge, the only Canadian politician to lose his job over a sex scandal in which there was no actual sex.
In 1994, there was a longrunning series of stories (many of them columns written by me) about a Toronto Police Services Board member named Arnold Minors. He was a race relations consultant who just happened to have been hired, by the Rae government, to deliver race-relations training to Crown attorneys.
A black man, Minors told them in essence that the only racism that mattered was anti-black, and that the Holocaust was not racist.
He promptly sued the Sun, me and a number of other writers for defamation; he lost first at the Ontario Superior Court, then at the Ontario Court of Appeal and finally at the Supreme Court of Canada.
And then, my personal favourite was the story of the great hire at the province’s Special Investigations Unit, now under the auspices of the Ontario Attorney-General’s office (then, it was under the solicitor-general’s wing), which investigates incidents where police have killed or seriously injured civilians.
The SIU has long grown into a solid and respectable organization, but in its fledgling days, it struggled: There were stories of inept investigations and investigators arriving late to crime scenes, and the retired police officers who worked for it were widely regarded, especially by those they were investigating, as second-rate.
In 1992, the Rae government named lawyer Howard Morton as the second SIU director and, soon enough, he in turn made his first major hire — a fellow he was so proud of he took him on a little tour of police forces across Ontario to show off.
The man was a former Florida (Broward County) police officer named Fred Winston, and he was presented as the cure for all that ailed the SIU: Why, he was a seasoned homicide detective, and, dear to NDP hearts then as now, a person of colour to boot!
Alas and alack, as a modicum of investigation revealed, Winston had never run a murder probe or come anywhere near one, and tragically, he had been fired from his old job.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.
Mea culpa: Due to what appears to be a grave case of late-onset dyslexia, while looking at the document Tuesday, I nonetheless got something wrong. Randy Ford is the 100 per cent owner of Deco Toronto, Doug Ford is the 100 per cent owner of Deco Chicago.