Feet
By Eric Dowd
Toronto – A former candidate for leader of the Ontario New
Democratic Party and scourge of any in it who dared backslide has been
pictured in wide-brimmed straw hat, sitting on his tractor in his
vineyards and musing on his life as a gentleman farmer.
`Red
Richard’ Johnston is the latest in a long line of NDP politicians,
fighters for the underdog, who have managed to land on their feet.
Johnston,
who was pictured in a newspaper here, was a feisty MPP noted for living
briefly on welfare benefits and sleeping in streets to draw attention to
the poor, who once reprimanded his party leader Bob Rae as evasive for
refusing to call himself a Socialist.
Since
leaving the legislature, Johnston has been appointed president of a
community college and chair of a council overseeing colleges and he has
now retired at the ripe old age of 58 with appropriate pensions to
concentrate on making wine on an historic 200-acre farm he acquired in a
trendy area east of Toronto.
Johnston
was the heart of far leftists in his party, but says he has learned
relationships between people sometimes are more important than ideology
and one can hope his wines have similarly mellowed.
Rae,
when opposition leader, accused Liberal yuppie premier David Peterson of
making Ontario a haven for the `lifestyles of the rich and famous,’ the
name of a popular TV show, and ignoring the poor.
But
Rae, who ousted Peterson as premier, now spends his time as a lawyer
advising wealthy corporations and restoring harmony to this city’s
troubled symphony orchestra.
Stephen
Lewis, as earlier NDP leader who grew up in austere surroundings, has
lived for many years in swanky Forest Hill and sent his children to
expensive private schools while preaching the need to strengthen the
public system.
He
once had a small farm where he kept exotic animals and a llama went
missing, prompting the oddest question ever at a legislature news
conference, `Stephen, have you found your llama?’
Donald
C. MacDonald, NDP leader before him, put out messages every Christmas and
New Year complaining the Tory government neglected the poor, but phoned
them from the Caribbean, where he found the warmer festive season more
congenial.
The
NDP had a couple MPPs who were self-made multi-millionaires. But Morton
Shulman made his pile in the stock market and wrote books including Anyone
Can Make A Million before he became an MPP and was only nominally a New
Democrat.
Shulman
had been chief coroner and supported a Tory government until it fired him
for accusing it of cover-ups and he devoted all his efforts as an MPP to
pushing it out and never expressed enthusiasm for left-wing philosophies.
John
Brown, an innovative and often praised social worker, made big money
setting up homes to which the province sent emotionally disturbed
children.
Brown
owned real estate all over the province and drove a Mercedes and reporters
remember him, nattily attired, swooping down in his private plane to join
ordinary MPPs on a rail trip getting to know the North in the 1960s and
taking admiring colleagues back with him.
But
Brown also billed the province for services he did not deliver and was
jailed for three years for defrauding it.
Ian
Deans had a firefighter’s pay before being elected an MPP and, upset
after losing a race for leader, switched to the federal parliament, where
he found prime minister Brian Mulroney needing to name an opponent to a
high-profile post to muffle complaints he was appointing only Tories.
He
made Deans chair of a public board, so he collected its salary, and
pensions for having been an MPP and MP, totaling $120,000, big money for
the times.
Almost
all these New Democrats also were among the most effective MPPs and there
is no reason NDP MPPs should live in penury after they retire, but in
looking after the underdogs they often also looked after themselves.
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