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Former premier Bill Davis, who ushered in Ontario’s modern era, dies at 92​

From link.
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William Grenville Davis, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario for 14 years, has died at home in Brampton. He was 92.

Seldom in Canada — perhaps anywhere in the world — has a political leader described his formula for success in such succinct and self-effacing terms as Davis once did.

“Bland works,” he told a journalist who inquired why he ran so boring a government.

For Bill Davis, who retired from electoral politics in 1985, bland certainly did.

He was an unstinting booster of his Brampton hometown, a peerless fan of the Toronto Argonauts, father of Ontario’s community-college system, a key figure in Canada’s constitutional repatriation, unrivalled master of oratorical circumlocution and — most of all — a devoted family man.

“What made Mr. Davis special was his inbred decency,” his former press secretary Joan Walters told the Star. “He was an immensely modest man tied to the tenets of small-town Ontario, the love of God, country and the Queen.”

Davis died Sunday morning at home, his family said in a statement. “After spending much family time in his favourite of all places, his cottage in Georgian Bay, he died of natural causes at home in Brampton, surrounded by members of his family,” they wrote.

“A private family funeral will be held, followed at a later date by a subsequent public celebration of his life and many contributions to Ontario and Canada.”
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On his Twitter account Sunday, Premier Doug Ford expressed his “deepest condolences” to Davis’ family. “He served the people of Ontario with dignity and class. We will be lowering flags to half-mast across the province in his honour,” Ford wrote.

In a written statement, Toronto Mayor John Tory said he was “deeply saddened” by the death of his “one-time boss, a law firm colleague and most of all a friend and mentor through most of my life.”

Tory noted Davis’ knack for being ahead of the curve, creating North America’s first Ministry of the Environment 50 years ago and taking the “first of many important steps to strengthen protection of human rights as Ontario became more diverse.”

“He was a pragmatist who just wanted to make life better for all people, without exception. He achieved that and more,” Tory said. “We need more Premier Davis today.”

For Davis, a good day was when his name wasn’t on the front pages.

Hugh Segal once described his former boss as a man who believed “that an opportunity missed will most probably come again, but an opportunity improperly seized or executed can make things considerably worse.”

Yet, through what one opposition leader called “government by stealth,” Davis steered Ontario through the transition from a prim, prosperous, Protestant bastion of the mid-20th century to the emergence of the vibrant, diverse, modern province that exists today.

In a 2016 biography of the former premier, the first authorized account, veteran broadcaster and author Steve Paikin concluded that, in many ways, “it’s still Bill Davis’s Ontario.”

Jim Maclean, a radio reporter at Queen’s Park during the 1970s, said that even decades after Davis left office “I and many others always called him Premier, because he always deserved it.”

To some former MPPs and Queen’s Park veterans, the Davis years were the golden age of civility and collegiality in the government of Ontario.

For the generation that came of age while he was premier, Davis remained the archetypal Ontario leader — straddling the vast middle, scrupulously observing the proprieties of the time, practising politics as art of opting for what his instincts (and the polls of which he was fond) suggested was possible.
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While “bland works” will be cited as the pipe-puffing Davis’s political epitaph, the truth, as always, is somewhat more complicated.

Along the way, he had sufficient initiative and taste for controversy that he halted the Spadina Expressway, created TVO, built the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre), founded the community college system, established rent controls, bought a stake in an oil company, extended full funding to Roman Catholic high schools, bought a corporate jet that he was soon shamed into selling it.

Al Dickie, a former press gallery reporter who went to work for a Davis cabinet minister, said “I never met a more unflappable politician” than Davis, but “beneath the bland exterior there lurked a competitive personality.”

And beneath the placidity of Davis’s manner and times, forces were roiling that would end the 42-year run of the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario and shift the tectonic plates of provincial politics for a generation.

William Davis — whom his mother called Billy — was born in 1929 and, from childhood, steeped in the political gossip of his Crown attorney father. He played university football, graduated from law school, taught Sunday school.

At just 29, Davis was elected MPP in June 1959, taking over the riding held by former premier T.L. Kennedy. “I was old for my age,” he once quipped. From the lips of Bill Davis, quips were the camouflage for his basic shyness.

Early on in life, Davis knew tragedy. He lost his first wife, Helen, mother of his four children, to cancer shortly after entering the legislature.

In a decision of uncharacteristic alacrity, he was remarried within a year to Kathleen, a friend from childhood summers at Honey Harbour, with whom he had a fifth child.

In 1962, he was appointed education minister in the government of John Robarts – a man as bibulous and ribald as Davis was abstemious and reserved. And in 1971, Davis succeeded Robarts and became premier.

He led the PC party through four elections, the first and last — in 1971 and 1981 — producing majority governments, the campaigns of 1975 and 1977 ending in minorities.

To be sure, Bill Davis didn’t get off to a Justin Trudeau-like start as first minister. His first term was studded with scandal, and he was spanked with a minority government in 1975.

It was then that he began evolving in demeanour, the change so gradual it was only really noticeable in retrospect.

He swapped the cigars that gave him the look of a smug, well-fed Bay Streeter for the pipe that cast a more avuncular image. His awkwardness dissipated as his confidence grew. The folksy, dependable Mr. Ontario persona emerged.

As former attorney general Roy McMurtry recalled in his recent memoirs, Davis maintained “a cautious but forward-looking outlook, and while he believed that government should be progressive, he did not think it should be constantly in people’s faces.”

For journalists, assignment to the Queen’s Park press gallery was like joining Alan Turing’s Second World War team trying to crack the Enigma code.

Rick Haliechuk, a former Star reporter, said Davis perfected the art — smiling his way through oratorical detours, jests, cryptic musings — of using a lot of words to say not much of anything.

His decisions would be revealed, Haliechuk recalled, “in the fullness of time.” In the meantime, the premier had “no plans to have plans.”

Davis was famously unworldly, Joan Walters recalled.
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In 1984, she travelled with the premier and another Davis aide to Buffalo to an international business event at the old War Memorial Auditorium. Across the building’s face a huge banner said: “Welcome to the Boss.”

Davis, she said, blushed and thought it was a somewhat over-the-top welcome for a routine speaking engagement.

Capsizing in laughter, Walters and her colleague had to inform their boss it was a welcome for Bruce Springsteen, playing the Aud that evening. But Davis laughed along.

“He was always an exceptionally good sport,” Walters said.

After regaining a majority in 1981, Davis played a key role in the patriation of Canada’s Constitution and establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

His national profile produced inevitable pressure to seek the federal PC leadership in 1983. But with animosity from Alberta over his support for the federal Liberals and Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, and from Quebec over his support for a constitutional agreement that excluded that province, it became clear a unilingual anglophone from Ontario stood little chance.

By the early 1980s his own party’s right wing was growing restless under Davis’s investment in the Suncor oil company, his penchant for governing with the support of a kitchen-cabinet of cronies from his Tuesday morning breakfast club at the Park Plaza hotel.

When Davis announced in June 1984 his decision to extend full funding to Roman Catholic high schools, his caucus was shocked by a reversal they’d been informed of only an hour before, and the rural and hinterland base of the party was outraged.

Davis knew in his conscience, he would later say, that it was a constitutional obligation and “the right thing to do.”

But egged on by outraged Anglican Archbishop Lewis Garnsworthy, the small-c conservatives in the party tipped toward revolt.

Three months after Davis announced his retirement from politics at Thanksgiving 1984, the right-wing Frank Miller was elected to succeed him, in large part as pushback against the Catholic schools decision and the Davis agenda of moderation in almost all things.

The rightward lurch produced the slimmest of minorities for Miller in the May election that year. Six weeks later, a Tory regime that had lasted more than four decades fell to an historic Liberal-NDP accord.

In the decade that followed, Queen’s Park, the former sleepy hollow of Canadian politics, became a game of musical chairs: the David Peterson Liberals followed in 1990 by Bob Rae and NDP, the NDP followed five years later by the hard-right shift of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution.

Through those years, Davis remained accessible to successors who valued his views.

“I came to treasure the occasional pearls of wisdom offered to me by Premier Davis, even as I served as premier,” Dalton McGuinty wrote in his memoir.

“He would phone sometimes or I would see him at events, where he would inevitably receive more applause than me.”

In his critical biography of the former premier, journalist Claire Hoy recalled how, on Davis’s first trip to Israel, he looked out at the landscape and said: “It’s nice. It reminds me of the Caledon hills.”

To Davis, Hoy wrote, all the world was measured against Brampton.

Just as in Ontario, all the premiers that followed have been measured against Bill Davis.
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From 2018...

Former premier Bill Davis speaks out against Doug Ford’s use of the ‘notwithstanding’ clause​

From link.
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Former premier Bill Davis is not amused.

Davis, one of the most respected figures in the Progressive Conservative party and a key player in the 1982 repatriation of the Constitution, has expressed grave concern about rookie Premier Doug Ford’s unprecedented use of the “notwithstanding” clause.

The man who governed Ontario from 1971 until 1985, told TVO’s Steve Paikin on Tuesday that “making the Charter a central part of our Constitution, Canada’s basic law, was a deliberate and focused decision by the prime minister and premiers.”

Davis warned “the sole purpose of the notwithstanding clause was only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when a province wanted to bring in a specific benefit or program provision for a part of their population — people of a certain age, for example — that might have seemed discriminatory under the Charter.”

“The notwithstanding provision has, understandably, rarely been used, because of the primacy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for all Canadians,” he told Paikin, who wrote the 2016 definitive biography, Bill Davis: Nation Builder, and Not So Bland After All.

“That it might now be used regularly to assert the dominance of any government or elected politician over the rule of law or the legitimate jurisdiction of our courts of law was never anticipated or agreed to.”
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Davis is one of just three living first ministers — along with Newfoundland’s Brian Peckford and Nova Scotia’s John Buchanan — who worked closely with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau to repatriate the Constitution almost four decades ago.

His alarm at the situation roiling Queen’s Park was echoed by former NDP premier Bob Rae, who governed from 1990 until 1995 and hailed Davis for speaking out “with force and clarity.”

“The trouble is it’s not a ‘gambit,’ or about ‘positioning’ or ‘branding,’” Rae said on Twitter.

“It’s about disrespect for democratic and lawful processes. The abuse of power is never a good thing. Populism turns democracy into dictatorship very quickly,” he cautioned.

Former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney — whose daughter, Caroline Mulroney, is Ford’s attorney general — has also weighed in.

“Everybody knows I’m not a big fan of it and I never have been,” Mulroney said Tuesday of the provision, which he stressed he has not discussed with his eldest child.

“Look, to me, the backbone and the enormous strength of Canada is the independence and the magnificence of our judiciary … That is a major thrust of our citizenship,” he said, referring to the notwithstanding clause as “the most abject surrender of federal authority in our history.”

For her part, Caroline Mulroney insisted she was not fazed by Tory luminaries like her father and Davis entering the fray.

“I’m worried about two things. One, I’m making sure we appeal this decision,” she said of Justice Edward Belobaba’s ruling that Ford’s legislation downsizing Toronto council was unconstitutional.

“Our government believes it was wrongly decided and I’m worried that the voters in Toronto have clarity on Oct. 22 around the rules governing their election.”
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My only quarrel with Bill Davis is that he became a grumpy NIMBY in his old age, helping to kill the Hurontario-Main LRT into Downtown Brampton. Otherwise, a transformative education minister and premier, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

At least one other true Progressive Conservative is still alive - Joe Clark. Unmemorable for his short stint as PM, but one of the best Foreign Affairs ministers Canada ever had.
 
Doug Ford will ignore this report...


IPCC | Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis​

From link.

Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying. That is the key finding of the latest scientific report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It finds changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system. Many changes are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Some, such as continued sea-level rise, are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years. The report points to strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit climate change. Benefits for air quality would come quickly, while global temperatures would take 20-30 years to stabilize. The report, issued by the IPCC’s Working Group I and approved by 195 member governments, is the first in a series leading up to the 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. It includes a closer look at the regional dimensions of climate change and builds on advances in attributing specific weather and climate events to climate change.
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From https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

AR6 Climate Change 2021:​

The Physical Science Basis​


The Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.
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Summary for Policymakers​


The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) provides a high-level summary of the understanding of the current state of the climate, including how it is changing and the role of human influence, and the state of knowledge about possible climate futures, climate information relevant to regions and sectors, and limiting human-induced climate change. (39 pages)

Technical Summary​


The Technical Summary (TS) is designed to bridge between the comprehensive assessment of the Working Group I Chapters and its Summary for Policymakers (SPM). It is primarily built from the Executive Summaries of the individual chapters and atlas and provides a synthesis of key findings based on multiple lines of evidence. (150 pages)

Full report​


The thirteen chapters of the Working Group I report provide an assessment of the current evidence on the physical science of climate change, knowledge evaluation gained from observations, reanalyses, paleoclimate archives and climate model simulations, as well as physical, chemical and biological climate processes. (1300 pages?)
 

No agreement between Ontario and Ottawa leaves hundreds of millions of dollars for long-term care on the table​

From link.

Amid a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario is missing out on hundreds of millions of federal dollars — earmarked for long-term care — because of the lack of an agreement with Ottawa.

The federal government says it is nowhere close to an agreement with Ontario to provide money from its $1-billion long-term care fund, while the Ford government says there’s been no discussion this year with Ottawa about it.

“We have not heard from the federal government on this program since the start of 2021,” said Ivana Yelich, Premier Doug Ford’s spokesperson, saying Ontario remains committed to “working co-operatively with the federal government on a meaningful commitment.”

A federal government official speaking on background said that “we followed up as recently as last month” about an agreement.

“We’re not anywhere near one with the Ford government.”

The Safe long-term care fund was announced last year as part of the federal government’s fall economic statement. The money can be used for improving ventilation, infection control, hiring more staff and wage top-ups.
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Those dollars come with strings attached. A province must agree to provide a detailed spending plan, and commit to making it public.

Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Yukon and British Columbia have so far reached agreements with Ottawa , all announced in the past week — just days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to call a federal election on Sunday.

The B.C. agreement — $134 million for improvements to ventilation and creating single-bed rooms, among other measures — was announced Friday afternoon by Liberal MP Terry Beech in Burnaby.

“While the administration of long-term care falls under provincial and territorial jurisdiction, we have a shared responsibility to protect our most vulnerable populations,” Beech said.
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“After all, I think this is something that all of us, regardless of our political stripe or level of government, can agree upon.”
Thousands of residents have died in Ontario long-term-care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation was especially dire during the first wave of the pandemic last year, when the armed forces had to be brought in.

“I’m just flabbergasted that in Ontario we don’t have a deal yet,” said Vicki McKenna, president of the Ontario Nurses’ Association. “I don’t understand why there would be such a delay. I certainly hope it is just a bureaucratic issue.”

The president of a major Ontario union representing over 60,000 front-line health-care workers said Ford should be proactive with Ottawa, and took issue with the response from his office on why Ontario doesn’t have an agreement in place.

“Answers like that aren’t appropriate when there’s a crisis happening in his province, he should be reaching out to the federal government, get together and negotiate,” said Sharleen Stewart, president of SEIU Healthcare.

“He should be calling on the federal government to get that money and to negotiate with them so that we can get some support and improvements in the long-term-care system in Ontario. It should be a priority for this premier.”

She questioned whether the fact that the money comes with conditions could make it less appealing to the province.

“We’ve asked the federal government over and over again to hold these provinces accountable, so absolutely they should have to provide an explanation as to what they’re doing with that money to ensure it goes into providing better quality care and staffing levels,” Stewart said.

Federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu’s office said in a statement that the tragedies in long-term care during the pandemic have to be met with action by all levels of government.

“This funding reflects our commitment to work with provinces and territories as quickly as possible, to make sure those living in long-term care receive safe, quality care and are treated with dignity,” said the statement.

Ottawa’s conditions with the funding are reasonable, said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of health policy research at the National Institute on Ageing, pointing out that the larger provinces have had a tendency to ask for more federal funds but without the strings attached.

Some of that pushback has been evident in the discussion around establishing a national set of standards for long-term care, with some larger provinces — notably Quebec — vehemently opposed, viewing it as an unnecessary encroachment into provincial jurisdiction.

“The requirement to ensure that these spending plans at the provincial and territorial level with these federal dollars are detailed and made public, I don’t think that’s too big an ask, when the vast majority of Canadians have lost trust in our long-term-care systems,” Sinha said.
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