Already in 2025, we’ve had two general elections in Ontario: one federal and one provincial. We’ve been inundated with some pretty tough and occasionally nasty talk all around.
But a lunch I shared with two old friends on the eve of the federal election reminded me that there’s a lot of affection in politics.
First, some backstory. Last week marked the 40th anniversary of one of Ontario’s most historically consequential elections. The Progressive Conservatives under Premier Frank Miller ostensibly won the 1985 election by a four-seat margin over David Peterson’s Liberals, who garnered more votes. It was a hung parliament. When the house reconvened, the Liberals and New Democrats (under Bob Rae) combined forces to oust the Tories, thus ending a 42-year-long dynasty, from 1943 to 1985.
Peterson’s finance minister (or “treasurer” as the job was then called) was Robert Nixon, whose father Harry was actually the last Liberal premier before the dynasty took hold. And one of the first people hired to work in Nixon’s office was a 25-year-old kid named Terry Fallis, today a much-respected, much-published writer of very funny novels — but back then, pretty wet behind the ears.
Fallis was known in Liberal circles, having worked in student politics at McMaster University and then on Jean Chrétien’s 1984 bid to lead the federal party. When Chrétien came second to John Turner, Fallis went home “and started weeping” on his parents’ couch.
But in an attempt to unify the party, Turner brought Fallis to Ottawa where he became a policy adviser to youth minister Jean Lapierre. When Peterson became premier in June 1985, the call went out to Fallis to become Nixon’s legislative assistant.
“I was making $20,000 a year on Parliament Hill,” Fallis recalls. “The job at Queen’s Park was for $33,000, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with all that extra money.”
Fallis described his job for the treasurer as “the easiest in the world.” His mission was to spend an hour a day prepping Nixon for question period. But since Nixon’s father had been premier, and Nixon himself had been an MPP for 23 years, he would glance at Fallis’s briefing books “for five seconds,” and then the two would just talk about life and politics.
Now to our lunch date. Fallis and I visited Nixon in Paris, Ontario, at the retirement residence where the 96-year-old former four-time Ontario Liberal leader now lives. The two have only seen each other a few times in the intervening decades, but you’d never know it. The connection forged in those heady days of the first Liberal government in 42 years remains. As do their shared stories.
Fallis had a big couch in his office on the seventh floor of the Frost Block. One day, he was working on a letter that Nixon intended to send to a constituent. “This big shadow was cast upon my desk as I was writing,” he recalls. Nixon was in the doorway, and he just tipped himself slowly onto the couch and lay down. “It had been one of those days.”
Fallis worked on four provincial budgets with the treasurer, one of which was partially leaked, causing a huge foofaraw at Queen’s Park. (That was a big deal back in the ‘80s. Not so much anymore.) The opposition forced a ringing of the bells and refused to show up for the budget’s presentation.
Nixon simply dropped the document on the clerk’s table and left the chamber. No budget speech. “That was the best way to do it,” Nixon says.
Reporters descended on Nixon in the hallway outside the chamber and caught him in full rhetorical indignance at the opposition’s conduct. I was in that scrum as a CBC reporter and at some point said to an infuriated Nixon, “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“I think I am. Maybe just a bit,” he responded, and then flashed a thousand-watt smile. Fallis, working for Nixon, would have been in the same scrum, recording the exchange on his little Dictaphone.
Here’s another story. Nixon has been a huge movie fan since he was a youngster. Back in the 1930s and ‘40s, when his father was in government, he’d stay in the Royal York Hotel with his mother while his dad was attending to business at Queen’s Park.
“From the time I was 10 years old, I’d walk by myself up Bay Street to the big theatre up there, which opened at 9 a.m.,” Nixon recalls. “Sometimes I’d see a double feature. Sometimes I’d see five movies in a day.”
Apparently, that was a hard habit to break even after Nixon became an MPP in 1962.
“One day, I was told: The treasurer would like to go to a movie this afternoon,” Fallis says. “So, four of us did. We went to the Eaton Centre so Mr. Nixon could see RoboCop. All I remember is Mr. Nixon laughing uproariously throughout the film.”
I ask Nixon: “What’s the best movie you ever saw?”
Fallis jumps in: “It’s not RoboCop!”
Nixon ultimately spent almost three decades at Queen’s Park as an MPP, leaving in 1991 after Premier Bob Rae appointed him to be Ontario’s representative in the United Kingdom. But even in his 90s, he finds echoes of his days at the legislature all the time. Two years ago, he needed a sore tooth extracted. After the procedure, the dentist took him into the office next door to meet somebody who happened to have been a page at the legislature when Nixon was Treasurer.
“Those were great days,” he says. “Wonderful times.”
After lunch, we retire to Nixon’s room, where the conversation continues. Nixon mentions that his daughter Jane, who was a cabinet minister during Chrétien’s time in office, turned 70 the day before. Then he mentions that Chuck Phillips, who’s married to his daughter Sara, is the Liberal candidate in Flamborough—Glanbrook—Brant North. The federal election is the next day. What does Nixon think?
“I think you’ve gotta be ready to lose,” he says from experience. While Nixon won personal election in Brant County a whopping ten times, he also lost a leadership convention in 1964 and three general elections as Liberal leader in 1967, 1971, and 1975.
(In fact, Phillips lost the next day.)
Fallis remained in Nixon’s office until 1988, when he moved into the government relations sector. Then, at age 45, he decided to become a novelist and, to his shock and delight, became hugely successful. He’s published nine books and twice won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. His first book, The Best Laid Plans (about, what else, an old, crusty, but funny politician and his relationship with a burned-out strategist) was turned into a CBC miniseries.
The clock ticks on, and it’s time to leave. Nixon and Fallis haven’t seen much of each other over the years, and being a fly on the wall to this reunion has been quite lovely. Fallis later writes on his Facebook page: “We told stories, some of which were true, and laughed a lot. It was wonderful to see [Mr. Nixon] after so many years.”
May it not be our last visit.