Posted by Greater Sudbury Northern Life
Toronto – Many stories are being told about Ontario’s most revered hockey arena, but no one has mentioned the time a cabinet minister blocked its powerful media baron owner from adding more lucrative seats and got cross-checked out of his political career.
Memories revived on this tenth anniversary of the last hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens have included Dalton McGuinty in opposition bravely telling reporters at a game he hoped his hometown Ottawa Senators would win the Stanley Cup.
Health minister and later Progressive Conservative premier Frank Miller was playing in a charity game there when he suffered a heart attack and MPP Eddie Sargent from the opposing Liberal team kicked off his skates and drove him in stocking feet to hospital, where he took a month to recuperate.
Miller said Sargent “probably saved my life.” Sargent, one of the legislature’s great characters, owned the then fairly novel constantly changing advertisements around the rink.
The convention that chose William Davis as Conservative leader and premier was held there in 1971 and was notorious as the first to use voting machines, which took 11 instead of the expected four hours to count and were leased through a well known Liberal who owned the franchise, which raised suspicions of mischief.
The event no one has recalled happened in the 1960s when the autocratic John Bassett, then part-owner of the Gardens, Toronto Telegram newspaper that no longer exists and area’s biggest privately owned TV station, CFTO, wanted to add another 4,000 seats to its existing 13,718.
These would have been welcomed by fans and brought the owners a lot more money, but there was no room inside the building, so Bassett proposed installing them in overhangs built at each end, sticking out 22 feet over the streets.
The only obstacle was such overhangs required municipal and provincial approval, because they shut out the sun.
Bassett usually got what he wanted, because he had powerful media to support his aims and did not hesitate to use them. He also was a Conservative and the Conservatives were in government provincially under premier John Robarts.
Toronto city council obligingly rubber-stamped his plan, but an obstinate municipal affairs minister, Wilfrid Spooner, a northerner who did not think big city slickers should get all they want, took it in his head to oppose it.
Spooner took such an interest he went with his old-fashioned box camera to the then Varsity Stadium, where overhangs had been allowed, and took photographs. He showed them to a committee of MPPs, which this reporter attended, and said they blocked out the sky, were ugly and violated desirable community planning.
MPPs in all parties supported him and the legislature committee turned down Bassett’s request.
Spooner had been a solid workhorse of a minister without problems. But after Spooner stopped Bassett getting his extra seats, the Telegram published no fewer than 26 editorials in three years saying he was inept, complacent, lazy, arrogant and insulting, had weakened municipalities by interfering in their decisions and being unwilling to speak for their interests, and might as well not exist for all the good he did as a minister.
The paper said Spooner was an embarrassment and liability and unfit for office and Robarts should fire him. Spooner lost his seat in the 1967 election largely because the paper kept on throwing mud at him and some of it stuck. This is not a proud chapter in Toronto newspaper history and media today may have failed to remind of it partly because newer, able reporters would not even know of it.
But news media here at the best of times are not inclined to expose failings of others in their industry, for reasons including they might bite back.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
