Some days, I look at that mammoth building on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto — the one that, from a certain angle, looks very much like a turkey — and I think to myself: Do any of the thousands of students who frequent the place have any idea who it’s named after?
That question popped into my head again the other day, when the university unveiled its new Robarts Common, a gleaming glass addition to the main facility. But the article about it never mentioned who the place is actually named for.
It’s the nature of things that most people enter a building named after someone and then go about their business without a thought as to whom that building is named after.
My hope is that some of the people who frequent “Fort Book,” as the compound is more familiarly called, will read this piece and come to know that one of North America’s biggest and most important libraries was named after Ontario’s 17th prime minister, John P. Robarts. (Yes, you read that correctly. Our premiers carried the title “prime minister of Ontario” until Robarts’s successor, Bill Davis, had it changed simply to “premier.”)
After Robarts retired from politics in 1971, Davis was looking for a way to honour the man who had been so instrumental in his own political career. When Robarts, who was then education minister, had become premier in 1961, he’d decided to keep both jobs for nearly a year because the man he wanted to tap for the education file was going through a personal crisis.
The Life of Premier John P. Robarts (with Steve Paikin)
Davis’s first wife had, shockingly, died of cancer at age 31, leaving him a widower with four young children. So Robarts remained both premier and education minister until Davis could get his life better organized. Then Davis became the most important education minister Ontario has ever had, as Robarts tasked him with modernizing everything. The province went on a school-building spree: Davis often cut ribbons on new buildings three times a day. We got five new universities (hello York, Trent, Laurentian, Brock, and Lakehead), the entire college system, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and a new state-of-the-art public-television station called TVOntario.
I once asked Davis, after U of T finished Fort Book in 1972, whether he’d ordered the university to name its new mega-library after his predecessor.
“Ordered? No, I didn’t order it. Strongly suggested? Yes, I may have done that,” Davis allowed, in his typically understated way. (Amusingly, when Robarts found out the library would bear his name, he told his one-time cabinet minister Darcy McKeough: “It’s the ugliest goddamned building in the city, and it’s got my name on it!”)
And, so, over the past half-century, no doubt hundreds of thousands of students have burned a lot of midnight oil in a building named after someone who died 40 years ago today — someone whose story they need to know.
Ontario has had 26 premiers, and history agrees that Robarts was one of the most successful. First and foremost, he had the good fortune to win the job during one of the province’s best decades. The 1960s were go-go-go. The economy was booming, the revenues flew into the treasury, historic investments were made, and budgets were balanced.
Robarts was nicknamed the Chairman of the Board because he didn’t micromanage government. He was, however, undoubtedly the boss and ultimately made good decisions that formed the fundamental building blocks of the Ontario you see today.
As suburbs began to proliferate, the Robarts government created GO Transit for the increasing number of people who’d have to commute to their jobs. As the world got dirtier, Ontario got its first anti-pollution laws. As the province became a manufacturing powerhouse, we got our first nuclear-powered electricity-generating stations in Pickering. He thought science ought to be fun and thus built the Ontario Science Centre. And for those kids who weren’t lucky enough to go away to summer camp, his government built Ontario Place so city kids would have a place to go have fun in the summer.
The Construction of the John P. Robarts Library (ca. 1973)
When the government mistakenly overstepped, attempting to pass a draconian law that would have trampled on civil rights, Robarts struck a royal commission in 1964 under Justice James McRuer that led to an enhanced protection of rights. Robarts later confessed that might have been the best thing his government ever did.
The 1960s also saw bombs blowing up in mailboxes in Quebec. Robarts, a unilingual anglophone from London, couldn’t understand why. So he mounted the most important first ministers’ meeting since Confederation and, during our centennial year, invited all the premiers to gather on the top floor of the newly constructed Toronto-Dominion Centre to explore Quebec’s grievances. The Confederation of Tomorrow conference was a good-faith effort to keep the country together, and no other premier besides Robarts had the gravitas to pull it off. The proceedings were even televised so citizens could stay on top of things.
Robarts left a stellar public life after back-to-back majority governments and, in 1971, seamlessly entered the private sector, where he was a much sought-after corporate director and rainmaker at a law firm.
But his private life was another story — mostly happy but punctuated by tragedy. He shocked the province when he split up with his wife Norah, who refused to leave London even though Robarts’s life was now deeply rooted in Toronto. Norah eventually abused alcohol, and she choked to death on a TV dinner while alone in her London home.
Robarts’s son, Timothy, was haunted by demons. He abused drugs and eventually wrote a 12-page, single-spaced suicide note in which he expressed no anger at anyone but simply concluded he was meant to be on this Earth for only a short time. He took his own life in 1977 at age 21.
John Robarts is buried at Toronto's St. James Cemetery. (Steve Paikin)
Robarts got married again, to an American divorcée 28 years his junior, and the couple were deeply in love for a time. But, in 1981, the former premier suffered a series of debilitating strokes. He looked nothing like the handsome Chairman of the Board anymore. He began wasting away, no longer able to do any of the things he loved: socializing, hunting, and fishing. He became depressed, and that adversely affected his new marriage as well. His second wife hadn’t signed up to be nursemaid to a debilitated senior citizen. She’d married a suave, big-man-on-campus, corporate bigwig. Robarts was anything but that anymore, and he knew he never would be that again.
And, so, on October 18, 1982 — 40 years ago today — Robarts walked into the shower stall of the second-floor bathroom of his Rosedale home, taking with him the shotgun the Ontario Progressive Conservative party had given him as a parting gift, and took his own life. He was 65.
(As if the family hadn’t experienced enough tragedy, Robarts’s other child, his daughter, Robin, died of cancer in 2010 in her mid-50s — thus, all four family members died tragically and prematurely.)
Nearly two decades ago, I became fascinated with the contrast between Robarts’s brilliant premiership and his too-tragic private life and wrote Public Triumph, Private Tragedy: The Double Life of John P. Robarts. Ever since, I’ve visited his final resting place at the St. James Cemetery at the corner of Parliament and Bloor Streets, in downtown Toronto, on this date. It just feels right to remember a life that was so consequential to millions of Ontarians.
I hope the people who frequent Fort Book will now understand why this man deserved to have his name on a building of significance in the capital city of the province to which he contributed so much.