Toronto – Why isn’t the most articulate, fearless and colorful and sometimes most effective member of the legislature running for the vacant leadership of the New Democratic Party?
Peter Kormos has had these attributes for years, but rarely is mentioned among possible successors to Howard Hampton, who is stepping down after leading through three elections in which he showed a lot of heart, but won few seats.
To know how dominating Kormos has been in the legislature the past decade you need to have been there. He was House leader for his party when it had an average of only eight seats, so he spoke in almost every debate, but second bananas in the third biggest party rarely are reported by news media.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has just announced Ontario will pay for an expensive drug to treat colorectal cancer, the second deadliest cancer in Canada, and Kormos led the push for it.
He typically was able to dramatize his cause by finding a constituent having to rely on community fund-raisers to pay for the drug and keep himself alive.
Kormos led the call with Liberal Gerry Phillips for a public inquiry into the fatal shooting by police of a native Indian demonstrator at Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995 that a decade later showed a Progressive Conservative government demanded police act and produced new guidelines for avoiding such conflicts.
When former Conservative minister John Snobelen escaped leniently with an absolute discharge for carelessly storing a restricted weapon, so he could continue jaunts to the United States, Kormos was the only MPP who broke the legislature’s clubby atmosphere and criticized the judge.
The Liberals and Conservatives properly expressed concern on International Human Rights Day that rights were being violated in Zimbabwe, but Kormos reminded Ontario forbids farm workers forming a union, an issue on which there are pros and cons, but does not get much debate.
Kormos spoke in technicolor, castigating McGuinty for failing to prevent lottery ticket retailers cheating buyers: “Back when I was a kid living in the south end (of Welland), Nick Penkov ran his craps game upstairs at Bill’s Pool Hall on Saturday night. All the Niagara Falls guys came in and they had names like Joe Mountain and names like that.
Thousands of dollars passed the table and, let me tell you, every single bettor got paid off when they won.
"Nick ran a straight game and everybody knew it. That’s why guys were prepared to bet Nick’s games upstairs at Bill’s Pool Hall. The pool hall’s gone now. Nick’s gone too. I was a pallbearer at his funeral.”
This is a little livelier than the yarns other MPPs tell of high times at the Rotary and Kinsmen’s clubs.
Kormos got in Premier Bob Rae’s cabinet, but was soon out for posing as a newspaper’s Sunshine Boy, which may have seemed harmless but boosted a feature many felt normally demeaned women, and hiring an aide convicted of wife-beating, whom he hoped to rehabilitate.
In a leadership campaign to succeed Rae, Kormos made his main theme an attack on Rae for re-writing public servants’ sacred collective agreements to save money, but could not win much support.
Kormos since has undergone a remarkable transformation and been almost a statesman, but a party would be wary of choosing a leader who once showed such tendencies to turn on its establishment.
Kormos seems resigned to this and told this writer recently politicians can’t do their own thing as leader and have to choose where they are most effective — and Kormos doing his own thing is something the legislature should not lose.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
