Like any journalist who has been around for more than four decades, I’ve seen thousands of political speeches in my time.
I’ve never seen a better orator in Canadian politics than Stephen Lewis.
I’ve never seen anyone move audiences like Stephen Lewis did.
I’ve never seen anyone bring more passion to the job than Stephen Lewis did.
“The guy could read the phone book and make it sound like Shakespeare,” Robert Nixon once told me. Nixon would know. The former Ontario Liberal leader had the misfortune of competing against Lewis in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1975 election, Lewis bested Nixon, becoming official opposition leader at age 37, and relegating the Liberal leader to third place. Nixon, now 97, once told me he always thought Lewis was a much tougher leader to compete against than Premier Bill Davis ever was.
Five years ago, I got a tip from someone who said Lewis was suffering from inoperable abdominal cancer and might not be long for this world. He urged me to call him right away and get some reflections on his life before it was too late. So, I did.
Lewis sounded good on that phone call; not quite as energetic as I’d always remembered him, but we did talk for an hour, so he must have been having a good day. He told me, “I look in the mirror, and it’s curious. It’s abnormal to look fine but deal with the unpleasantness of this pain.”
Lewis had had surgery to get rid of the cancer, but the cancer had returned, putting him both in pain and into a philosophical state of mind.
“When you come to a point in your life where you’re battling a disease like cancer, you reflect philosophically on life and what you’ve done and what the future might or might not hold. Fortunately, I lived an interesting life, surrounded by bright and principled people and a loving and supportive family.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Stephen Henry Lewis’s life is so memorable. After all, he was born on Remembrance Day, November 11, in 1937. For two reasons, people had their eyes on him from an early age. First, his father was leader of the federal New Democratic Party, going to bat for the little guy and railing against “corporate welfare bums.” But second, the younger Lewis was just so utterly brilliant when he spoke; he could dazzle anyone.
I asked him if his father ever told him what a good speaker he was. “Yes,” Lewis said, “but he would have said it to mollify me. I’m not sure how much he meant it!”
The younger Lewis was just 26 when he won a seat in the Ontario legislature in Scarborough West in 1963. He won the seat, in part, because before the campaign, he’d received an inordinate amount of attention for debating an American senator at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. That senator’s name was John F. Kennedy, and the event put Lewis on the political map as never before.
Stephen Lewis (left) with Bill Davis, Ian Macdonald, Darcy McKeough, and Steve Paikin. (Courtesy Steve Paikin)
Seven years later, he became Ontario NDP leader. And strangely enough, one of his most cherished friendships from those days was with Premier Davis. In later years, when Lewis created a foundation to fight against the scourge of AIDS, Davis called him up and volunteered his services. (Lewis also put Davis's former attorney-general Roy McMurtry on the board of the foundation.) He described Davis as “an exceptional politician with whom I had profoundly different political views. But he was such a decent human being.”
Lewis loved to use twenty-dollar words. His vocabulary was legendary. One day during question period, he excoriated “Premier Davis and his sycophants,” then went on to blast the Tory government. Whoever was doing Hansard that day had clearly never heard the word “sycophant” before, because when you checked the transcript of the exchange, Lewis was quoted as blasting “Premier Davis and his psychopaths.” But at the end of the day, he and Davis had a great friendship.
That was apparent to then CKEY reporter Jim Maclean, who covered the 1977 election.
“One morning, when both the NDP and Tory buses began an election day at Queen’s Park, Stephen got off the bus to greet Bill Davis, who had just pulled up, saying, ‘I must go say hello to the premier,’” Maclean recalls. “They then had a nice chat in front of the Pink Palace.”
Needless to say, that does not happen anymore.
And it was Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney who appointed Lewis to be Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, in large measure because the two were in complete alignment on the need to rid South Africa of apartheid.
“It’s an example of how you can form relationships with people that you may have visceral differences with, but also a shared understanding,” Lewis told me five years ago. “It was a joy to be engaged with a prime minister who was so active on the case. Brian Mulroney was really the heart and soul of that.”
How did Lewis manage to have such good relationships with such political opposites?
“Political behaviour was civilized back then,” he said. “It did not raise malice to an art form.”
Lewis was also capable of poking fun at himself. At one of his AIDS Foundation events, the crowd burst into laughter at this line: “When I reflect back on my career in elected politics, I realize it was one of almost transcendent futility!”
“He was a class act and a treat to listen to when in full unscripted oratorical flight,” says Maclean.
When then-Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae won an unexpected majority government in 1990, Lewis was at party headquarters that night and exclaimed to anyone who’d listen that “This victory exceeds my wildest fantasies.” Lewis doubted the NDP would ever form a government in his lifetime. He could scarcely believe it or contain himself.
During our conversation, Lewis didn’t completely abandon his partisan stripes. “I’m hoping Avi is on the cusp [of entering politics] and hoping I can stay around long enough to watch him take down Justin Trudeau’s engaging smile.”
While Trudeau is gone from the political scene, Lewis achieved his wish. He stayed alive long enough to see his son become federal NDP leader, last Sunday in Winnipeg.
Lewis’s last major foray into politics took place during the 2015 federal election. Tom Mulcair was the NDP leader, and he gave a good speech in downtown Toronto, exhorting the party faithful to get out the vote. At that moment in the campaign, the three main parties were essentially tied, and the outcome was far from clear. After Mulcair finished his speech, he invited a special guest to come to the microphone. The nearly 78-year-old Lewis then worked the crowd into a frenzy. He was so good that he no doubt had many in the room wondering why he wasn’t the leader.
The last thing Lewis and I spoke about during that conversation was the inevitable end of his life. “No, I don’t worry about death,” he said carefully. “I just don’t like the dying part of it: the pain, the discomfort, the sadness that accompanies it.”
Lewis and I emailed a little bit after that phone call. Usually, it was him sending me a note about a column I’d written. I tried phoning on a few other occasions, but he was never strong enough to take the call.
Many people will be sad at the news of Lewis’s death. I’m sad that we’ll never again have an opportunity to hear the greatest orator of his time speak again.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Bill Davis served on the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. In fact, while Davis was deeply involved with the foundation, he did not serve on the board. TVO Today regrets the error.