There is something tragic yet inspiring about how Dalton McGuinty became the most successful Liberal premier of Ontario since the 19th century’s Oliver Mowat. McGuinty’s entrée into politics happened only because his father, Dalton Sr., suffered a fatal heart attack while shovelling the snow in front of his Ottawa home. McGuinty Sr. was only 63.
The story goes that, when the 10 McGuinty children gathered to figure out which one would put their name forward to contest their father’s old seat, Dalton Jr., the eldest son, said, “Well, we’ve got a garage full of campaign signs with my name on them.”
McGuinty Jr. successfully contested the 1990 election, became party leader six years later, then won three straight general elections, making him the most successful Liberal premier in nearly 130 years. But his father saw none of it.
Before that experience befell the McGuinty family, much the same thing happened to the Nixons of Brant County. Harry Nixon had been a senior cabinet minister in the Liberal government of the 1930s and ’40s. He even became premier for a short patch in 1943, but he lost the subsequent election and then served as an opposition MPP until 1961. On October 22 of that year, he was driving to his home in St. George, near Brantford, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. At 42 years in the Ontario legislature, he remains the longest-serving MPP of all time.
Bob Nixon, then Ontario's treasurer, in 1985 with Barbara Sullivan. At the time, she was his executive assistant; she later became an MPP. (Courtesy of Steve Paikin)
His son Robert then picked up the torch, and 62 years ago today won a byelection to replace his father as the MPP for Brant. For 40 of those 62 years, I’ve been watching Nixon do his thing, first as an MPP for nearly 30 years, then as the elder statesman of the provincial Liberal party. Since Nixon’s retirement from public life, I've been part of a group of politics nerds who have regularly visited the former Liberal leader in Brant County, west of Hamilton. We constantly try his patience by asking him to tell us stories from the old days, which we find endlessly interesting, while he pretends to be miffed at having to indulge us yet again. But the fact is, the stories are alternately interesting and hilarious. The interesting ones can be told here (if you get a chance, ask him about riding a camel with comedian Jack Benny during the 1967 election campaign); the hilarious ones aren’t fit for reproduction in this space.
Our visits have become more important to our group as Nixon has moved from his 80s into his 90s and even more so since the death of his wife and mother of his four kids, Dorothy, in 2017. Nixon now lives in a seniors’ residence in Paris, Ontario, and while he has plenty of friends where he lives, almost none of them follows politics. So our visits give him a chance to pop off about the state of the country and politics today, which he also does (if you can believe it) in a daily blog he’s written for a decade. In fact, he no doubt ruffled a bunch of Liberal feathers when he recently suggested in one of his columns that Justin Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister should come to an end and a successor should be found. Not too many Liberals are prepared to say that out loud these days. But when you’re 95, you can say whatever you want —and Nixon does.
Bob Nixon with then-Ontario Liberal leadership candidate Yasir Naqvi. (Courtesy of Yasir Naqvi)
Visiting Nixon has been almost a rite of passage for Liberal leaders or those seeking the leadership. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King visited the farm in St. George eight decades ago. Pierre Trudeau did it in the 1970s. Strangely, the current Prime Minister Trudeau and Nixon have never met. However, before she won the Ontario Liberal leadership, Bonnie Crombie visited Nixon (they were cousins for three decades through Crombie's ex-husband). Previous leadership candidates Sandra Pupatello, Michael Coteau, and Yasir Naqvi visited as well. So did premiers Kathleen Wynne, McGuinty, and David Peterson. It’s just the thing you do.
Last weekend, Nixon and I were joined by another former MPP for Brant, former Speaker Dave Levac; long-time Liberal stalwart Howard Brown (who’s known Nixon for almost 50 years); and two of Nixon’s grandchildren, Bobby and Alex, the sons of his daughter Jane. And it doesn’t take long for the old stories to come out.
Left: Bob Nixon (left) and the author during a recent visit. Right: Bob Nixon with fellow former cabinet minister Greg Sorbara. (Steve Paikin0
Today, politics has become a full-time profession. MPPs have offices, policy advisers, constituency staff, and more. Back in the day, there was none of that.
“Back then,” Nixon begins, “I had a desk in the legislative chamber. In it, there was a fountain pen with a nib, paper, envelopes, and that’s it. There was a box under the Speaker’s chair, and that’s where we put mail for posting.”
When the legislature sat, Nixon stayed at the Royal York Hotel, until it raised its rate from $3 to $5 a night. As a result, he moved to the King Edward Hotel, where $3 still got the job done.
Nixon was acclaimed as Ontario Liberal leader in 1967, but unlike McGuinty, he had the misfortune of contesting three elections against two of the greatest Tory premiers of all time: John Robarts and Bill Davis.
Nixon never liked Davis. The two had a legendary screaming match at the 1975 election leaders’ debate, and even 40 years later, when I interviewed Nixon for a biography I wrote about Davis, he was still spitting bullets when telling stories about his old nemesis.
On the other hand, Nixon liked and admired Robarts immensely. He described himself as a “38-year-old kid who’d fallen off the back of a turnip truck” when he became leader. He ran against Robarts in an election 10 months later. It really was no contest. Robarts was a partisan Tory but understood that the opposition had a job to do in a healthy democracy, so he treated his opponents, including Nixon, with respect. In 1967, Robarts convened the Confederation of Tomorrow conference in Toronto, invited all the premiers to attend, and had the most important discussion about the country’s future in a century. Nixon attended and sat with the premier at Robarts’s invitation, in Ontario’s box — something unimaginable in today’s politics. But Robarts wanted to show a unified Team Ontario to the country. So Nixon was there, and he never forgot the premier’s generosity.
Bob Nixon visits his father Harry's grave at the St. George cemetery. (Steve Paikin)
Ontario had a pavilion in Montreal at Expo 67, and Robarts told Nixon to go enjoy himself, stay at the pavilion (gratis), and take his whole family, which Nixon did. “It was the best family vacation we ever had,” he now says.
"I personally paid the full cost of the family lodging in Habitat at Expo ‘87 in Montreal. Premier’s office rented the space and re-let it to ministers and opposition leaders on a first-come, first-served basis, recovering all costs. There was even room for my mother to join us and have meals ready for the gang of four kids as we all scattered through the great fair."
Fortunes did turn, and Nixon eventually managed to get off the opposition benches. When the Liberals and New Democrats joined forces in 1985 to end the Progressive Conservative dynasty, Premier David Peterson made Nixon his treasurer (today, minister of finance), putting a Nixon family member back on the government benches for the first time in 42 years.
Alas, his stint in government lasted only five years, as the Liberals unexpectedly lost to the NDP in 1990. Nixon went back to the opposition benches, was installed by the caucus as interim leader, and tried to rally the shellshocked troops.
“He looms large in my memories of my early days at Queen's Park,” says McGuinty, the lone new Liberal MPP after that 1990 election. “Those were rough days, and our party was in shock given the drubbing we had received at the polls. But Bob was steady as a rock. He was the leader we needed to get us back on our feet and stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We had work to do, and he turned our minds to getting it done.”
But not for long. The new premier, Bob Rae, offered Nixon the Ontario agent-general's job in the United Kingdom, and the days of a Nixon in partisan politics at Queen’s Park came to an end after 72 years. (The family tradition continued in Ottawa, however, as Jane Stewart, Nixon’s daughter, was elected as the MP for Brant in 1993.)
Nixon was replaced as leader in 1976 by Stuart Smith, a Jewish psychiatrist from Montreal, but not before the two men had a sensitive conversation about the leadership question.
“Bob,” Smith asked him, “do you think the Liberal party is ready for a Jewish leader?” Nixon says he assured him it was, and I guess he was right about that, because Smith defeated Peterson on the third ballot at the ’76 convention by 45 votes. (Smith was less lucky at general-election time; he lost twice to Premier Davis.)
Left: Bob Nixon with his wife, Dorothy. Right: Nixon with son John (right) and grandson Nixon Stewart in 2018. (Steve Paikin)
Time for some more of our questions. “Mr. Nixon,” (I have never, ever called him Bob), “how are you feeling these days?”
“I feel excellent,” he says, and he means it. Nixon has all the typical maladies of a 95-year-old — fading eyesight and hearing, for example. He takes a cocktail of meds every day for various ailments. But he seems to take delight in boasting that he’s enjoyed his longevity without ever exercising, beyond doing whatever activities were required to run his farm years ago.
These days, Nixon reads (only on a Kindle, because of his eyesight), he watches TV, and he’s become quite a good painter, although, oddly enough, none of his own work graces the walls of his bedroom. He loves the fact that former prime minister Jean Chrétien, his good friend, turned 90 last week and takes pride in the fact that Jane sat beside Chrétien at a grand birthday bash for 300 people that took place in Ottawa.
It’s inevitable in a family that’s had three generations in politics for the fourth generation to be grilled about its potential interest. At this lunch, Alex immediately shakes his head. Elective office isn’t for him. Bobby doesn’t reject the idea out of hand. He works for a local homebuilder and lives on the old Nixon homestead/farm, which has been in the family for a century and a half. Bobby’s a definite maybe. Maybe more.
After an hour-long lunch and then another 45 minutes of gossip back in Nixon’s room, it’s time for our visit to end. As full of life as Nixon is, I know someday, these visits will end, and every time I leave, I feel sad at the thought of that inevitable day. But in the meantime, our group is going to continue to enjoy the hell out of seeing one of this country’s great political characters.
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