There was a time, back in the day, when being a member of the Ontario Liberal party meant perpetual opposition with little to no hope of victory. If you think things are tough for the party these days, let’s remember that they were actually in power for 15 straight years (2003 to 2018) before giving way to Doug Ford’s PC party.
No, I’m talking about the days when the Liberals spent 42 straight years in opposition, between 1943 and 1985. And despite having some fine men as leader, the party, for a bunch of reasons, could just never get within a sniff of the finish line.
That’s why the events of 50 years ago yesterday were so important to the eventual success the Liberals would enjoy, eventually putting David Peterson, Dalton McGuinty, and Kathleen Wynne in the premier’s office.
On January 25, 1976, Liberals gathered in downtown Toronto and selected a Jewish psychiatrist from Montreal named Stuart Smith as their new leader. He never did become premier. But he began a transformation of the Ontario Liberals that would prove to be so important that it eventually set up the party for the victories it would enjoy over the four decades that followed.
Smith was a rising star in Quebec Liberal politics and was on his way to becoming the party’s federal candidate in the riding of Mount Royal. But a guy named Pierre Trudeau came along, and the party brass wanted that Montreal riding for Trudeau in the 1965 election. So Smith stood aside. Trudeau would later joke that, if not for Smith’s graciousness, he, Trudeau, would have become an Ontario MPP and Smith would have become prime minister.
In 1975, Stuart Smith won election as the Liberal MPP for Hamilton West. (Courtesy of Paddy Smith)
A couple of years later, Smith and his wife, Paddy, moved to Hamilton, where McMaster University had just opened a new medical school and promised him his own ward. But he never quite got rid of the political bug and in 1975, won election to Queen’s Park as the Liberal MPP for Hamilton West.
Meanwhile, there was another new MPP elected in 1975 who was also turning heads. His name was David Peterson, all of 31 years old, who’d won London Centre. When Liberal leader Robert Nixon told his caucus he was stepping down after a third consecutive loss in the ’75 election, Peterson suddenly found himself in the spotlight.
“The Globe and Mail’s Charlotte Montgomery walked over to me after the caucus meeting and asked, ‘Are you going to run for leader?’” Peterson told me in a phone call last week. “And I answered, ‘Charlotte, I haven’t even found the bathrooms yet at Queen’s Park. How can I run for leader?’”
But that didn’t deter a lot of Liberals from beginning to champion Peterson’s candidacy. He’d had an enormous crowd — 2,500 people — show up for his 1975 Liberal nomination meeting, and much of Nixon’s organizing team gravitated toward him.
But Smith, also a rookie MPP, was capturing his share of attention, too.
“Stuart didn’t exactly lack confidence” is how his wife, Paddy, whom I spoke to over the weekend, explained why her then 37-year-old husband ran for the leadership as a rookie MPP.
“Stuart was Trudeauesque,” Peterson adds. “He was extremely bright, very good on his feet, idiosyncratic, with a very high IQ.”
He also had long hair and, being Jewish, was considered a somewhat exotic candidate by many party members. You have to remember, the Ontario Liberals at this point had almost no representation in any of the province’s larger cities and were very much a rural rump, dominated by agricultural interests.
“Stuart was definitely not what Liberals were used to having” is how Paddy Smith now puts it.
He also had a tough mission trying to chip away at the Tory domination of urban Ontario. Believe it or not, half a century ago, the province’s capital city was called “Tory Toronto” because of the strength of the Big Blue Machine.
On convention day, January 25, 1976 — 50 years ago yesterday — a Smith-Peterson showdown was shaping up.
“It was right down to the wire,” says Paddy Smith. “And it was my first ever exposure to a political event like that.”
On the third ballot, Smith prevailed by a narrow 51 to 49 per cent margin — only 45 votes out of nearly 2,000 cast. These were the good old days of truly exciting delegated conventions, not the much less interesting facsimiles that parties use today. Paddy Smith recalls watching in excited amazement as delegates moved to new leadership hopefuls after their candidates dropped off the ballot.
Smith’s son Craig, whom I spoke to last week, was six years old and wildly enthusiastic when he heard the announcement proclaiming his dad the winner.
“It’s one of my earliest memories, actually,” he says. “I remember the signs were going crazy, and then there was a big camera lens in my face!”
Far from being devastated by the loss, Peterson’s strong performance made him an instant and important player in Liberal politics, and he was just 32.
“I’m a competitive guy and I hate losing,” he says, “but I learned so much and made so many friends. And it set me up for next time.” Peterson would win the next leadership convention in 1982, then become the first Liberal premier in more than four decades in 1985.
Former premier David Peterson and former OLP leader Stuart Smith at the Liberal leadership convention in 2013. (Steve Paikin)
Smith might have been a fascinating character on the political scene, but he also had the misfortune of having to face Premier Bill Davis, who was entering the most popular phase of his nearly 14-year career as premier. In Smith’s first election as leader, in 1977, he garnered 31 per cent of the total vote (compared to Davis’s 40 per cent), but he held Davis to a minority government and, for the first time in ages, managed to win some seats in Toronto and other larger urban centres.
“I think he set the tone for what the Liberals became,” says Craig Smith, who now works for CPA Ontario. “He moved the party to the middle and set the tone for what the Liberals became. I think that’s his legacy.”
“Stuart started us down the road of dragging the party into the cities,” agrees Peterson.
Unfortunately for Smith, Davis’s popularity grew and in the 1981 election, the Tories garnered 44 per cent of the vote, winning a majority government. Smith improved Liberal fortunes again (mostly at the expense of the NDP), but it wasn’t enough. He quit politics altogether within a year and pursued an eclectic post-political career that included chairing the Science Council of Canada and being the commissioner of the semi-pro Intercounty Baseball League.
I will confess, I’ve always had a fascination with Dr. Smith. I was born and raised in Hamilton, and Smith was a Hamilton MPP, so even as a sports-obsessed teenager, I was well aware of him. Then, in 1976, after Smith won the leadership, my parents purchased at a charity auction the opportunity for my brother and me to take a bus into Toronto and spend half a day with him at Queen’s Park. I was a 16-year-old kid, my brother was 14, and there we were, having lunch with the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the legislative dining room, listening to him eloquently describe his vision for Ontario. He talked to us not as children but as curious fellow citizens, asking lots of questions about us. Then he asked us, “So, do you know any of the policy positions I’ve taken on anything?”
Thankfully, I knew of one: his party’s desire to get rid of OHIP premiums, which were a regressive health-care tax at the time. Regardless of income, individuals and families paid the same amount, and Smith thought it was wildly unfair and wanted them eliminated. He never got the chance to do it, but when the Liberals eventually gained power in 1985, Peterson’s government did just that. Smith was no longer at Queen’s Park by then, but I suspect he took a victory lap anyway.
I also remember going into the media studio during our visit and watching Smith record a radio editorial for his party in which he flawlessly and extemporaneously for several minutes and with no script described his hopes for the province. That was impressive.
That lunch, without question, had a profound impact on me. Six years later, I got my first job as a political reporter, eventually becoming a Queen’s Park correspondent for CBC-TV and then spending more than three decades at TVO, where my interest in and coverage of Queen’s Park continues. I still co-host a weekly show (the #onpoli podcast with John Michael McGrath) about Ontario politics. I’ve often credited Smith for lighting the spark of interest in provincial politics within me.
Stuart Smith (left) and the author in August 2016. (Howard Brown)
Over the decades, I stayed in touch with Smith, and we would reminisce about that first-ever meeting in the legislative dining room. Of course, I remembered it so well, but strangely enough, he always said that he did, too. We’d get together for lunch every now and then and reminisce about that day at Queen’s Park.
Smith died in 2020 from Lewy body dementia at age 82. To see somebody so brilliant lose his mental faculties was tragic.
Stuart Smith is a great example of a politician who never got to the top of the mountain, but he had an impact. That’s worth remembering on those days when you think that unless you win, it’s all a waste of time.
That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t today either.
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