10 reasons it’s worth remembering Premier Bill Davis today

Given that I've written a nearly 600-page book about Ontario’s 18th premier, you can’t blame me for pausing today to remember Bill Davis on this day, the third anniversary of his death.

Unless you’re over 60, you probably have no first-hand memories of Davis. Sometimes, people under 60 ask me what made him so good.

Here are 10 answers to that question, in no particular order:

1. He never lost. He won personal election in his own riding in Brampton seven times. He won the Ontario PC party leadership in 1971. He won four general elections in a row as leader: 1971, 1975, 1977, and 1981. No one had done that since World War I. No one’s done it since.
2. He made
3. He might have been our best education minister ever. He had the job for almost nine years in the 1960s in John Robarts’s government. Ontario got five new universities, the college system, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and financial solvency for French school boards. Oh, and TVO, too. (He used to joke, “Without me, Mr. Paikin, you’d have been unemployed for the past 25 years.”)
4. He wasn’t just a red Tory; he was a green one, too. He created the Ministry of the Environment and the Niagara Escarpment Commission and saved Quetico Provincial Park, all in the first half of his first term as premier.
5. He had a great sense of humour. Once in question period, then-NDP leader Donald McDonald asked him how it was that the PC party could be so badly managed that it had actually sent him a fundraising letter. Davis didn’t know the question was coming and yet came up with this on the spot: “Mr. Speaker, I apologize to the honourable member, but, you see, my party recently purchased the subscription list from
6. He stopped the Spadina Expressway
7. Ontario politics was never more collegial or collaborative over the past half-century than during his second minority government, from 1977 to 1981. The three parties often came together to get stuff done.
8. He appointed some awfully notable cabinet ministers: Ontario’s first-ever female cabinet minister, Margaret Birch; the first-ever Jewish finance minister, Larry Grossman; the youngest minister ever, Dennis Timbrell; arguably the best attorney general ever, Roy McMurtry (it’s either him or Ian Scott); the “minister for everything,” Darcy McKeough; the first “women’s issues” minister ever, deputy premier Bob Welch; the first female labour, education, and post-secondary minister ever, Bette Stephenson; and perhaps the most brilliant cabinet minister ever, Dr. Robert Elgie (a brain surgeon
9. Toronto got the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre) built downtown. Davis appointed a task force to recommend location options for a new domed stadium. He didn’t like any of the options, so he cleverly manipulated cabinet into approving his personal choice  — the foot of John Street — rather than something in the suburbs. No other decision has more meaningfully ensured that tens of thousands of people can keep downtown Toronto alive most nights of the year. And the dome undoubtedly prompted the Leafs and Raptors to stay downtown, too, at a renovated Air Canada Centre (now Scotiabank Arena).
10. Not all politicians like people. Bill Davis did. He was as comfortable with captains of industry at the Albany Club as he was with a group of seniors at a strawberry social on a Sunday afternoon in Brampton. He liked people, and they liked him back. When he retired from politics 40 years ago this October, the PC party had the support of 55 per cent of voters. He left public life on a high.

To be clear, no, Davis wasn’t a perfect premier. His decision to extend full funding to the end of high school for the Roman Catholic school system infuriated his party’s base. He took patronage appointments to a new, sometimes grotesque level. He never balanced a budget. The joke about Davis’s frequent indecisiveness was that he never put off till tomorrow what he could avoid doing altogether. There were scandals aplenty that nearly cost him the 1975 election.

But on this third anniversary of his death at age 92 — making him Ontario’s longest-lived premier ever — you’ll forgive me if I choose to remember his strengths more than his weaknesses.