Victor Goldbloom spent his life building bridges, healing

Skills as public figure likely originated in medical career, Graham Fraser writes.

One of the many extraordinary things about Dr. Victor Goldbloom was that, at 92, he was fully engaged in public life. He was planning to testify before the National Assembly commission studying Bill 86 to express his dismay about the bill that will end universal suffrage for English school boards in Quebec. His commitment and passion remained undiminished to the very end of his life.

I first encountered Dr. Goldbloom, who died Monday, in the fall of 1976 when he was the minister of municipal affairs in Robert Bourassa’s government and I was a reporter recently assigned to Quebec. I was at L’Aquarium in Quebec City, a restaurant where journalists and politicians often gathered. Dr. Goldbloom passed our table, stopped to chat and, after some encouragement, burst into a chorus of O Sole Mio! I knew him by reputation, but I had no idea of his musical talent.

The chance meeting spoke to the respect and affection with which Victor Goldbloom was treated by reporters, colleagues and adversaries alike. He spent his life, as the title of his recent memoir suggests, building bridges; his is a story of the different threads of a life dedicated to healing and reconciliation, reinforced by a love of family, music, theatre and sport.

His father was a highly respected pediatrician, and Victor followed his path, not only as a doctor but as a lover of music and theatre. It was an interest that crossed barriers; Paul Robeson, the charismatic and controversial African-American bass, became a family friend, often visiting when he came to Montreal.

Victor grew up in a very different Jewish Montreal from that immortalized by Mordecai Richler, but he could not avoid some of the barriers that antiSemitism created, even though he was able to climb over most of them, quietly proving that excellence and charm could defeat prejudice. In life as in music, his interest was in creating harmony and resolving conflict.

I suspect that the skills he demonstrated as a public figure — patience, calm, reflection, respect for those he dealt with and an ability to listen carefully — were first learned as a doctor treating sick children and their worried parents.

After losing a federal nomination to Pierre Trudeau in 1965, Dr. Goldbloom was elected to the Quebec legislature in 1966. His reputation for fairness was such that Jean Lesage asked him to remain neutral in the 1970 leadership campaign and to preside over the voting. When Bourassa was chosen, he was unswervingly loyal.

In his memoir, Dr. Goldbloom tells how Bourassa designated him in 1976 to be the minister responsible for ensuring that the Olympic construction was completed on time — a request that, he wrote, “was, as in The Godfather, an offer I could not refuse. But I realized that I was at risk of political suicide.” He insisted that he did not deserve to be called “the man who saved the Olympics,” but his description of what he did shows an intuitive grasp of the critical elements of project management.

When he left politics in 1979, he became chief executive officer of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, another indication of his lifelong dedication to ending misunderstanding between groups and resolving conflict.

Then, in 1991, he became commissioner of official languages. It was a difficult period; the constitutional debates and the referendums of 1992 and 1995 stirred up language tensions. He responded by travelling across the country, speaking to service clubs and appearing on open-line radio shows, calmly absorbing the abuse and respectfully correcting the misconceptions.

Into his 90s, Victor Goldbloom was as passionate and as eloquent as ever about diversity, tolerance, mutual understanding and minority language rights. I learned to insist that, if I shared a platform with him, I should speak before he did and not after. He remained such a powerful and engaging speaker that he was, quite literally, a hard act to follow. As one of his successors, I cherished his commitment, his support and his friendship.