Copyright © George Smitherman, 2019
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Cover image: Mitchel Raphael
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Unconventional candour / George Smitherman.
Names: Smitherman, George, author.
Description: Includes Index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190051760 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190051779 | ISBN 9781459744653 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459744660 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459744677 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Smitherman, George. | LCSH: Legislators—Ontario—Biography. | LCSH: Gay legislators—Ontario—Biography. | CSH: Cabinet ministers—Ontario—Biography | LCSH: Ontario—Politics and government—1995-2003. | LCSH: Ontario—Politics and government—2003-
Classification: LCC FC3078.1.S65 A3 2019 | DDC 971.3/05092—dc23
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Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
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To Michael and Kayla, who are my reason to live; to Canada, which made me possible; and to all of those who have been told they can’t and did anyway.
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
1 Early Years
2 1980s
3 1990s
4 Health
5 So-Called Scandals
6 Health Reform
7 Energy
8 Christopher
9 Mayoral Race
10 Worse Than Defeat
11 Carrying On
12 Life After Politics?
13 Run Over by a Ford Again (Different Model)
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
Prologue
A memoir always risks being seen as a bit of a vanity project. How could I reasonably expect that my life, starting as a kid in Etobicoke, would ever be book worthy? It was something beyond my wildest dreams.
I have always had an inner conflict in which the self-confident me says, “Look what I got to do on a Grade 12 diploma,” and the insecure me asks, “How could I warrant a book?”
I have watched others, people with lives certainly as interesting as mine, who have never managed to produce a memoir, often due to their own reticence or to their loyalty to those who might otherwise make the best fodder for their stories.
As you will see in my book, I have no reticence. And without it, I myself make the best fodder. That’s deliberate, because I want the book to help, and to help it has to be candid and expose some real truths about power: how to get it, how to use it, and how to walk away from it. The book also reveals some real truths about my own character and peculiar brain chemistry, and I am prepared to be judged for my complete body of work.
For every salacious, heart-wrenching, or embarrassing anecdote you might encounter in this book that leaves you asking how I can live with myself, please don’t ever forget that I choose to take my lumps and press forward despite the strong urge to toss in the towel, because I have experienced enough joy and hope to withstand and offset any downside.
I want this book to be a message to those people who feel that the circles of power are impenetrable: you can penetrate them.
I want this book to be a message to those people who struggle with addiction and can’t see the other side: you can get to a place where despair does not have to be your constant companion.
I want this book to be a message to those people who have been struck by trauma once or one too many times: you are stronger than you know and the resilience you show now will hold you in good stead for the rest of your life.
This is the story of an unremarkable kid who, when asked at age six what he wanted to be when he grew up, said, “Blood donor.” And who, thirty-three years later, as minister of health, was forbidden from giving blood because of his sexual orientation.
This is the story of a man who rose to the heights of power and risked it all.
This is the story of a man who loved and lost and loved again.
This is the story of a man who dreamed of having kids and had them.
This is a fairy tale without the candy coating.
But it is a personal journey interwoven with our politics, which have evolved over the four decades since I wandered into the Liberal party in Etobicoke Centre. During that time, I have served as a Liberal volunteer, a party staff member, an opposition MPP, a cabinet minister, and a candidate in two municipal elections, and I have seen an almost unbelievable change in how politics is practised. The friendly rivalry that characterized my early exposure to politics in the era of Bill Davis and David Peterson has deteriorated into a bitter partisanship that increasingly bypasses spin in favour of outright nonsense.
Back in the 1980s, it wouldn’t have been that hard to imagine Peterson or Davis sitting at each other’s cabinet table. Today, the disdain between Premier Doug Ford and his predecessor, Kathleen Wynne, is palpable, even in the legislative chamber.
Terrible as this transformation is, the fact remains that politics is a central part of our democracy. I have been privileged to participate in a significant way in the political process in Ontario and in Toronto. My book tells the story of our political evolution and my part in it, as well as that of my own personal evolution.
Introduction
I played golf on October 3, 2003. The night before, the Liberal Party had won the Ontario election and returned to power after a thirteen-year absence, and I had held my seat (Toronto Centre–Rosedale) in the Legislature. I remember it was a cold autumn day and I smoked a celebratory cigar during the round. Although I’m naturally competitive, the game didn’t matter. It was a way to relax. Besides, the bigger game had already been won. And I was expecting things to get better still. I was confident that premier-elect Dalton McGuinty would put me in his cabinet. I didn’t feel I had to lobby people in his inner circle for a seat at the table. They knew who I was.
Then I started reading all the speculation in the media about who would be in cabinet, and I began to get nervous. Some pundits ignored me altogether. One suggested I would be a minister without portfolio. So I called Gordon Ashworth, whom I knew from the days when David Peterson was premier and who was on McGuinty’s transition team, to ask what was up. “All you need to know,” said As
hworth, “is that when a tough assignment comes along and the question is raised about who can handle it, McGuinty always says: ‘George.’”
I concluded from that conversation that I was going to make it into the cabinet. But in what portfolio? My dream job was minister of transportation, both because I was the son of a trucker and because transit was a big issue in my riding. Also, in opposition I had served as the party critic on gridlock in the Greater Toronto Area. So transportation made sense.
A few weeks later — on October 22 — Tracey Sobers, McGuinty’s executive assistant, called me on my cellphone and asked me to hold for the premier-elect. I was on my way to the airport to pick up a friend who was coming into town to see the swearing-in ceremony the following day. (That shows you how confident I was that I would make it into cabinet.) McGuinty came on the line and said, “George, I want you to be minister of health.”
I gasped but managed to compose myself. “I’m your man,” I said.
McGuinty then added: “I want you to know that I’ve got your back and you can ignore the headlines.”
I thanked him and the call ended. So began a roller-coaster ride in government.
At the ceremony the next day, with my friends and family in attendance, I took the oath of office. But as I exited the stage, I tripped and fell down the stairs. “It’s an expectation-dampening moment,” I joked to the media.
In a later interview, I said that I had put a Curious George doll on my desk in the minister’s office. There was a photo of me with the doll in the Star the next day, and I was subsequently deluged with Curious Georges from people around the province.
“I’m looking forward very much to the opportunity to let my curiosities be satisfied, to really try to reach out and to add to the base of knowledge that I already have,” I explained. “My first priority is to take the time necessary to understand the breadth and complexity of the [health] ministry ... I’ve got a pretty good appetite for hard work that I think is well suited to this place.”
McGuinty echoed that comment with his own remarks. “I think George is chock-full of potential,” he said. “I think he’s a very hard-working guy. I’m absolutely convinced that he’s the right person for this particular job. It’s a huge responsibility, and I know that he is going to perform admirably.”
A Queen’s Park columnist opined afterward: “This could be an inspired choice, but it is also a risky one.” The son of a trucker from Etobicoke was on a roll. In trucker talk, it would be shiny-side-up and rubber-side-down.
CHAPTER ONE
Early Years
I was born just ten weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, coming into the world on February 12, 1964. My mother, Margaret, was a devotee of Kennedy. She saw him as the champion of the underdog — the poor, the dispossessed, racial and religious minorities. His assassination affected her profoundly. My sister recalls her reacting hysterically to the images on television. Subsequently, the family made not one but two pilgrimages to the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington to see his gravesite.
My mother’s values came from her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother was born here and attended Jesse Ketchum school in Yorkville, a fact I learned from my mom on the day I was attending the school’s hundredth anniversary. She and my grandfather were working-class people. He had emigrated from St. Anne’s-on-the-Sea in Lancashire, England. They weren’t particularly religious — they were mildly Anglican. Nor were they involved in politics, although after my grandfather’s death, at a time when I was really young, I recall seeing a poster of Pierre Trudeau in their home.
But both my mother and grandmother possessed a social-justice streak. When my grandmother was working at my father’s trucking business, she was transported there daily by taxis driven almost exclusively by immigrants from Lebanon, who politicized her with respect to the treatment of Palestinians. Similarly, my mother was imbued with a sense of the injustices visited on the Indigenous Peoples in Canada through her brother, who married a First Nations woman.
And although they had limited formal education, they both had an interest in learning. To a very large degree, I am who I am because of the influence of my mother and grandmother.
* * *
I was the fourth, and last, of the Smitherman children. My older brother was first, born in 1956 and named after my father, Arthur. My sisters, Joanne and Christine, followed in 1958 and 1962, respectively. Over that period, my family’s economic circumstances improved markedly. I have always told everyone that I am the son of a trucker, and that is true. But by 1964 my father’s single coal-hauling dump truck that served all purposes (including grocery shopping) had evolved into a growing fleet of tractor-trailers. Just months after my birth, the family moved from a combined home-and-truck-yard on Jay Street near Keele Street and Lawrence Avenue to a newly built bungalow in the West Deane Park neighbourhood of central Etobicoke. The house had a backyard swimming pool and bordered on the Mimico Creek ravine.
This was a big step up for my parents, especially my father. He had experienced extreme poverty as a child and was forced out of school in Grade 6 to work for a living. My mother’s own background was barely better and remembered by my uncle (her brother) as a lot of living in basements with summers in shacks alongside the Credit River. My mother’s father worked as a mechanic at Avro, the aircraft manufacturer that built the Lancaster, the famed Second World War bomber, and, after the war, the Avro Arrow, the Canadian interceptor jet cancelled by the Diefenbaker government in 1959. Over the years, he was regularly away servicing planes at air force bases across eastern Canada. His job paid him a good wage, but he gambled much of it away.
My father’s father had the same gambling propensity, without a steady job to go with it. Perhaps in reaction, my father was driven to be a reliable provider for his family, although sometimes at the expense of being a nurturing parent. He worked seven days a week building up the trucking business. Up at six every morning, and not home before nightfall. So we didn’t see much of him. The exceptions to this rule were Sunday breakfast (which he cooked), a yearly holiday in Florida (to which we drove both ways straight through), and summer Saturday afternoons entertaining customers around our pool.
* * *
Being the last-born child had its advantages. As time marched on, my father mellowed somewhat and found more time to spend with me. On weekends, he drove me regularly to the rink for my hockey games. (The fact that the games were often scheduled at six thirty or seven in the morning suited him, as he could still spend the rest of the day at work.) Hockey was a big deal for me. I started playing at age five or six in the West Mall league at an outdoor rink, right by the Etobicoke Civic Centre. I was inspired by stories of the Dryden boys, who hailed from the same area. While not a great talent hockey-wise, I really enjoyed the game and played right up until age eighteen (and again later in life). I was often the assistant captain of the team, mainly because my father’s business, Sure-Way Transport, was usually the sponsor. My mother was also involved as a volunteer helping to run the league. I remember spending hours at the newly opened Centennial Arena running the stairs and frequenting the snack bars.
My father also used to take me down to Maple Leaf Gardens to watch the Leafs play. Through his business, he had season tickets to Leafs games. We progressed from front row greys (the upper level of the Gardens) to somewhere in the middle of the greens (the next level down). I actually preferred the greys because there was a railing where we could put peanut shells and flick them down on the reds (the posh seats). My father also had season tickets for the Blue Jays and for the Toronto Toros, a team in the short-lived World Hockey Association. The Toros tickets were a lot cheaper, but I enjoyed watching their games just as much because we were so much closer to the action and the referees were within the sound of my voice.
My father also had a strong interest in stock car racing, which he passed on to me. In his day, he was a member of the pit crew for Jack Greedy’s super-modified, a class of open-wheel ra
ce car. They raced Saturday nights down at Exhibition Place. In 1972, during a trip to California, we “raced” our full-size station wagon both on Jack Greedy’s Delaware Speedway near London and on the famed Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The following year my father and his business partner rented a motorhome and took me and the other boys to an accident-plagued running of the Indianapolis 500. (In the late 1980s, I repaid my father in kind with some amazing seats for the Daytona 500, scored through a very senior businessman I had met through my then boss, Hugh O’Neil.)
Striking a pose — and always with the Lange skates!
I also inherited a love of off-road motorcycles from my father. Once he did a contra deal to get me a used Honda CT70 that was sitting on a front lawn on Jane Street north of Wilson, in exchange for a lot of painting. Having a motorcycle wasn’t too foreign a concept in the Smitherman family. My sister Joanne had one and had perfected avoidance of the police in the Mimico Creek Valley, which in the early days of suburban sprawl remained accessible to motorized recreational vehicles.
For a period we also had snowmobiles, and we would trailer up to faraway farm fields and golf courses on Highway 10 and around Shelburne to ride them. What I mostly recall of these times was brand new SnowCruiser (cheap and unproven) snowmobiles smoking or on fire and my father experiencing a lot of frustration. Like me, while he had some mechanical knowledge, he lacked an aptitude for repairs.
It’s no wonder that over the years I have had motorcycles ranging from a Honda CT70 to a 1200cc Honda GoldWing, along with three-wheelers, four-wheelers, and my own snowmobile. Later in life, I had some extraordinary experiences on snowmobiles, especially in the Algoma district of Ontario. I have a need for speed that can be quite intense.
* * *
Not only did I spend time with my dad snowmobiling and going to sports events, I also visited him at work. I went to work with my father frequently. It was “take-your-kid-to-work day” thirty to forty days a year for me. I recall lots of minor mishaps. I was a small kid wandering around a busy truck yard with a hundred pieces of moving equipment, an eleven-bay garage, arc-welding work, diesel smoke, and other attendant risks. From a very early age, I remember my father driving home a wide variety of “do not cross this line” messages.
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