Sean Conway has forgotten more about Ontario political history than the rest of us combined will ever know. He was also, nearly four decades ago, the architect of one of the most complicated and controversial policy implementations in the province’s history — one that can still get blood boiling all this time later.
So it’s odd to hear the former 28-year veteran MPP from the Ottawa Valley admit that, when he arrived at Queen’s Park as a newly elected 24-year-old Queen’s University master’s student, he didn’t know a damned thing.
“I knew the square root of bugger all about how government worked,” is how he described it last week.
He learned fast.
Conway was honoured with the Distinguished Service Award by the Ontario Association of Former Parliamentarians in a ceremony at the Legislative Assembly filled with laughs and nostalgia. In his acceptance speech, Conway fulfilled two traditions he’s well known for: He got deep into the weeds of Ontario political history with arcane minutiae surely no one else in the province knows. And despite an admonition from former PC MPP Chris Hodgson (“I’ve gotta be out of here by 2 p.m.”), Conway’s acceptance speech ran for 45 minutes, as he spoke until 2:35 pm.
As everyone who knows him can attest, brevity has never been his thing.
Former premier David Peterson shakes hands with former Liberal education minister Sean Conway. (Steve Paikin)
Conway got elected for the first time in 1975 in an election the Liberals were supposed to win. Premier Bill Davis’s PC government was on the ropes and vulnerable to defeat. But the Liberals’ sure thing somehow turned into a third-place finish; Davis held on to a small minority government, while the NDP under the brilliant Stephen Lewis vaulted into second place.
But in 1985, the tables turned. Conway was sure the Liberals were in for another defeat, yet the party’s new leader, David Peterson, led them to victory for the first time in 42 years.
Politics is a funny business.
Both Peterson and Conway revealed new details at the event about that 1985 transition from the Big Blue Machine to the Grits’ tiny minority government. In fact, the Liberals were the party with only the second-most seats in the legislature. But thanks to an “accord” that Conway helped negotiate with Bob Rae’s New Democrats, the Tory government was defeated, and the Liberals took over, backed by the NDP.
Before Peterson’s Liberals were even sworn in, the new premier did something that might be unprecedented. He essentially told Conway he was going to be the new minister of education, responsible for implementing the promise to offer full public funding for the Roman Catholic school system to the end of high school. (At that point, the separate-school system was funded only to the end of Grade 10.)
“Go see Ed Stewart,” Peterson told Conway, referring to the secretary of cabinet. “He has something for you.”
Phil Gillies, former PC MPP for Brantford (left); Dave Cooke, former NDP MPP from Windsor-Riverside. (Steve Paikin)
What Stewart had waiting for Conway was a firehose-like blast of ministerial briefings on the Catholic-schools question. Conway, who had been “living in the 19th century” as a Queen’s student, well understood the divisive nature of the toxic mix of religion, education, and politics. And with all his political experience in opposition, he was shocked by some of what emerged during the briefings — information he hadn’t had a clue about.
“How could I have been here for 10 years and known so little?” he thought to himself.
It wasn’t an exaggeration to say the new government’s fate was in Conway’s hands, as he stickhandled the issue through the creation of a bill, committee oversight, court references (to both the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada), a determination on whether the separate system could favour Catholics when hiring new teachers, and, eventually, the implementation of the policy. It was one of the most complicated legislative undertakings in recent history.
“There was a month when I was effectively the minister but didn’t belong to any government,” Conway said. “It was unlike any other experience of my life.”
From left to right: Jim Bradley, current chair of Niagara Region and a former Peterson environment minister; Sean Conway; and David Peterson. (Steve Paikin)
But having spent 1975 to 1981 in a minority parliament under Davis, Conway did have some understanding of how to handle the opposition. He took former U.S. Speaker Sam Rayburn’s words to heart: “Any jackass can kick a barn door down. It takes a carpenter to build a one.”
Conway wanted to be that carpenter.
Nearly 40 years after the bill’s passage, there’s still widespread unhappiness in Ontario with Catholics having their own publicly funded school system (despite the agreement at Confederation that they would). But the Liberals and New Democrats promised it, and Conway led the effort to make it happen.
“This was all orchestrated by Sean, and it was a heroic performance,” former premier Peterson said at the luncheon.
Conway became one of those MPPs who, as fellow former MPP Phil Gillies put it, “if you could get away to catch part of their speech, you would do it. These were the days when oratory was prized. We didn’t read speeches from a script.”
Gillies marvelled at how Conway, while in opposition, “surgically took apart a minister with his supplementary questions. That was really something to watch — until I got into cabinet.”
Conway and the NDP’s Dave Cooke were both part of the negotiations that led to the end of the Tory dynasty in 1985.
“It felt like a new Ontario was entering a new age” after the PC defeat, Cooke said.
David Peterson (left); Sean Conway. (Steve Paikin)
But Cooke also remembers that, in 1987, after the Liberals were re-elected with the largest majority government in Ontario history, he had some tougher confrontations with Conway.
“We [in the NDP] kinda misbehaved, and then you brought in new rule changes that destroyed democracy,” Cooke joked. “One day, I brought up the rule changes. Then Sean got up to speak. It took me about five seconds to realize he was very upset with me. I was in therapy for several years getting over that.”
Conway left Queen’s Park in 2003, at which time TVO was looking to refresh its weekly provincial-affairs panel on a show called Fourth Reading. We decided to put three former education ministers together: Conway, Cooke, and the PCs’ Janet Ecker.
“We became the best political panel in the history of Canada!” Cooke said, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “Because Sean has so much history in his brain, Janet and I would often look at each other and think, ‘Maybe next week, we’ll get a chance to say something.’”
Peterson told the former parliamentarians he’s never seen a politician with such a combination of “back concession political acumen, plus a deep understanding of policy. He’s a custodian of so much knowledge, it’s falling out of his ears.”
Anybody who sees the 73-year-old Conway today is shocked at how young he still looks. Peterson, who arrived at Queen’s Park in the same 1975 election as Conway, recalled a caucus mate “who’d never had a job before — hell, he hadn’t even shaved before.” But Conway’s youthful visage is even more surprising when you learn he’s been fighting Stage 4 metastatic cancer for several years. He’s been on immunotherapy, and, despite insisting he finds himself frequently fatigued, there was no evidence of it on this day.
From left to right: Former premier David Peterson, former Liberal education minister Sean Conway, former PC MPP Phil Gillies (Brantford), and former NDP MPP Dave Cooke (Windsor-Riverside). (Steve Paikin)
Most of Conway’s speech focused on the past, but he did have one word of warning about the future. Remembering his own time at Queen’s Park when both Davis (in 1977) and Peterson (in 1990) called early elections only to see the decision blow up in their faces (Davis failed to get the majority he so cherished, while Peterson lost to Rae), Conway offered, “I see today someone with a massive parliamentary majority who wants to have an early election. I have two personal experiences with an early call — and I’ll say no more.”
Hmmm… I wonder whether Doug Ford is listening.
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