Our region was lucky to have Mr. Gray
Longtime MP a class act
If someone tells you they were a bosom buddy of the late Herb Gray, mark them down as either a barefaced bull-shooter or a privileged member of a minuscule band of intimates.
I followed the Windsor West MP, senior cabinet minister and future deputy prime minister around Parliament Hill for close to seven years in the 1980s but I would be lying through my teeth if I claimed to “know” him.
I was out to his South Ottawa home once, for a somewhat stilted backyard barbecue in honour of a Japanese trade delegation, and once spent a day, dawn until dusk, following him on a “routine” schedule that left me tuckered out, at age 35, and him just bouncing along (fuelled by greasy cafeteria burgers he wolfed down in the blink of an eye) like an omnivorous Energizer Bunnie.
There’s no politician I admired and respected more than this brilliant workhorse, Herb Gray. But know him? Not a chance. I never came close to breaking through that insulating barrier of inscrutable privacy that he wrapped himself in.
In another life, he would have made one hell of a profes- sional Vegas poker player with that mega-sized brain, remarkable endurance and unfathomable game face.
Was he angry? Disappointed? Gleeful? Who knew? Actually, there was one fleeting moment when the curtain lifted. I confessed to him that I had been calling his house repeatedly over the previous weekend, forgetting it was Passover and the phone was off-limits.
He grinned, and immediately launched into an animated soliloquy on the history and traditions of this all-important Jewish religious occasion.
He was in his element. Positively beaming. Good grief, I thought. Herb is actually talking to me, not just rolling policy points off the end of his tongue.
Not that I ever called him Herb. The press gallery called him lots of things behind his back, Gray Herb, The Herbster, The Badger, but he was always Mr. Gray to me. Something about him commanded that old-fashioned kind of respect. You could call his compatriots Eugene Whelan and Mark MacGuigan by their first names — Gene would have set you straight if you didn’t — but it just didn’t feel right with Mr. Gray.
Whelan, who shared a tiny Parliament Hill office and a single phone with Gray when they were first elected in 1962, the garrulous but shrewd hayseed and the reticent, buttoned-down city lawyer and boy wonder, the supreme odd couple, had a telling perspective on that relationship in his 1986 autobiography. “I’ve known Herb a long time but you could also say I don’t know him at all — you never really got to know Herb Gray. He’s a very private person.”
Still, Whelan loved winding Gray up.
“I did know how to get him going when we shared that office. I’d just pretend I was dictating a letter about crooked lawyers in my riding or some such. My secretary … knew I was teasing, but Herb didn’t. And he’d say, ‘You can’t send that kind of letter.’ And I’d say, ‘Mind your own business, Herb. I’ll run my side of the office and you run yours.’”
A true Canadian patriot and economic nationalist, Gray was instrumental in the introduction of the Foreign Investment Review Agency and its enforcement. Critics joked that he spent his weekends reviewing FIRA applications. It turned out that was no joke. This guy took his work seriously.
One 1980 image of Gray is indelibly etched in my mind. It was a Saturday night in downtown Ottawa and we were lined up waiting to get into a movie theatre after a nice meal. Across the street a hunched figure emerged from the federal industry building. It was Herb Gray lugging a couple of overstuffed attaché cases, heading home from yet another thankless night spent trying to hammer out a deal that would save Chrysler.
Gray did so much for Windsor. But his supreme achievement, surely, was the $200-million loan-guarantee agreement that kept Chrysler in business and brought Windsor some mysterious new product known as the T-115 “garage- able” van. It was the minivan, Windsor’s meal ticket for the next three decades and for God knows how long to come.
I can’t imagine the stress Gray was under as he tried to save his hometown’s most vital industry.
I remember then-Chrysler president Lee Iacocca showing up at Gray’s office, pale, jaws clenched, looking like an undertaker coming for the corpse. Those were scary days. Herb Gray wasn’t Mr. Excitement, but he was something way more valuable. He was Mr. Integrity.
When I hear idiots bellyaching about how all politicians are crooks and parasites, I’m reminded of Herb Gray and the lofty standards he set for honesty, decency and selfless dedication.
Mr. Gray, you were a class act and Windsor was damn lucky to have you.