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.
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| name="valign" top > ERIC DOWD |
“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 Toronto
newspaper, was a feisty MPP noted for living briefly on welfare
benefits and sleeping in streets to draw attention to the poor. He
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. 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 are
more important than ideology. 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,” 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, an 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.
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 in 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.
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.
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, which was 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.
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s
Park press gallery.
