THE ‘EVERYMAN PREMIER’
Ralph Klein, the former outspoken and popular Alberta leader, passed away in a Calgary care home on Friday aged 70.
CALGARY — Ralph Klein, the plain-spoken, hard-living son of a former wrestler whose homespun conservatism made him one of the most popular premiers in Alberta history, died Friday.
“My beloved husband Ralph has slipped away after 42 years of marriage and 70 years of life,” his wife, Colleen Klein said.
“In his public life, while many will now debate what he stood for, he himself simply believed that public service was important, that it need not be complicated, and that it revolved around people,” she added, in a statement on behalf of the extended Klein family.
Klein was also devoted to family, she said, calling their home his “sanctuary,” where politics “stopped at the door. If the public will love him for all the things he did for them, his family will forever love him for all the things he meant to us.”
Condolences poured in Friday from around the country for Klein, who had been afflicted with frontal lobe dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.
“Alberta and Canada have lost a unique and significant leader,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement Friday. “While Ralph’s beliefs about the role of government and fiscal responsibility were once considered radical, it is perhaps his greatest legacy that these ideas are now widely embraced across the political spectrum.”
“While Ralph had opponents, he made few personal enemies,” Harper said. Klein was “a man who said what he believed and did what he said.”
Alberta Premier Alison Redford issued a statement Friday, offering her condolences to Klein’s family and praising his dedication to Alberta and Albertans.
“Ralph Klein’s ability to connect with Albertans from all walks of life was absolutely remarkable ... Ralph was a real man of the people,’ Redford said in the statement.
Born to working-class parents, the man who would be dubbed “King Ralph” in Alberta — while also earning national notoriety for his take on Eastern “bums and creeps” — rose from being a highschool dropout to the dean of Canadian premiers.
Klein ruled Alberta for 14 years, continuing the four-decade dynasty of the Progressive Conservative Party in Alberta. During his leadership, the Tory premier slashed government spending, privatized liquor stores, eliminated Alberta’s $23-billion debt and presided over one of the province’s most prosperous periods.
“My dad was a wrestler and he trained fighters,” Klein said following the leadership review that forced him out as premier in 2006. “I got into politics instead, and it’s the same kind of (thing). Not physically bloody, but it’s bloody.”
Born in 1942, Klein’s climb to the top of Alberta politics was as unconventional as it was surprising.
As detailed in King Ralph, the biography penned by former Calgary Herald columnist and CTV pundit Don Martin, Klein left high school at age 17 to pursue a career in the Royal Canadian Air Force. But it wasn’t a good fit and — after receiving an honourable discharge — he enrolled in vocational training at Calgary Business College, where he excelled and graduated with honours. The college offered him the chance to teach and he took it. A year later, he was principal.
Last November, Klein received admission to the Order of Canada.
With the former premier unable to attend the ceremony at Calgary’s historic City Hall, an emotional Colleen accepted the honour on his behalf. Tucked inside her suit jacket was her husband’s 1992 leadership campaign button.
“Politics is not a perfect science by any stretch,” Ralph Klein once said during the mid-1990s.
“If the public is starting to tell you, ‘Hey, look this is a problem,’ then you’d better do something about it. The bosses are the people. I’m not the boss; I’m just an employee.”