John Reid abandoned an academic career to become MP for his home constituency of Kenora–Rainy River in Northwestern Ontario in 1965, serving in the House of Commons for the next 19 years.DAVE CHAN/The Globe and Mail
John Reid, a self-described “maverick” Liberal MP who stuck to principle even at the expense of his political ambitions and became a passionate crusader for increased access to government information, has died at the age of 85.
A historian by training, Mr. Reid abandoned an academic career to become MP for his home constituency of Kenora–Rainy River in Northwestern Ontario in 1965, serving in the House of Commons for the next 19 years. Described by colleagues and family members as an independent thinker, he spoke out in favour of government transparency and didn’t hesitate to criticize his own government as a backbench MP.
“He was a man of tremendous principle and that didn’t always sit well with the various politicians he had to deal with,” recalled Angus Reid, the pollster, who first met Mr. Reid just after he was first elected to Parliament in the 1960s. They ended up becoming brothers-in-law after they married sisters. Angus Reid continued. “He was principled in everything. If you played chess or poker or a board game, he played by the rules.”
John Mercer Reid was born in Fort Frances, Ont., on Feb. 8, 1937, the eldest of four children. His father, who shared the same name, was a businessman, and his mother, Ena (née Harrington), was a high-school teacher.
“Politics was always a topic at the dinner table and Dad was always involved in elections, both federal and provincial,” according to Mr. Reid’s youngest brother, Patrick.
Mr. Reid earned a BA and an MA in history at University of Manitoba and was studying for his PhD at University of Toronto when he got a job as special assistant to William Benidickson, the federal minister of mines and a family friend, who was MP for Mr. Reid’s home riding of Kenora–Rainy River.
When Mr. Benidickson was named to the Senate in 1965, Mr. Reid won the Liberal nomination to replace him in the coming federal election and won. He was 28. Like his mentor, Mr. Reid ran briefly under the Liberal-Labour label, a tradition in northwestern Ontario where Liberals had developed an informal alliance with left-wing trade unionists.
Three years later, his brother Patrick was elected in the same riding as a member of the provincial legislature, also under the Liberal-Labour label. He remained at Queen’s Park until 1984.
John Reid was active in the House of Commons as chair of the Commons Committee on Broadcasting and as parliamentary secretary to the President of the Privy Council. But despite his electoral success (he won six elections in a row) and a prodigious intellect, ministerial roles long eluded him.
Finally, after 13 years as an MP, Mr. Reid was named to cabinet in 1978. It was in the runup to the first Quebec referendum on independence and Mr. Reid was named minister of state for federal-provincial relations by prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
A profile in Maclean’s at the time said Mr. Reid’s long path to cabinet had resulted in part from a personality that could rub some colleagues the wrong way. The magazine noted that he wasn’t necessarily seen by his colleagues as “one of the guys” and Mr. Reid himself admitted, “I’m not the smoothest team player available.”
Within months of Mr. Reid’s appointment to cabinet, the Trudeau government was defeated in a general election and was replaced by a minority Progressive Conservative government under Joe Clark. With uncertainty about whether Mr. Trudeau would stay on as leader, Mr. Reid is reported to have spoken out in caucus and suggested that it was time for Mr. Trudeau to go. But he stayed on, leading the Liberals back into power in the February, 1980, election.
Mr. Reid was never invited back into cabinet and remained a backbencher until he was defeated in the Mulroney sweep in 1984.
Following his election loss, Mr. Reid promoted democracy internationally as a UN elections observer in Namibia and later as an electoral adviser in Eastern Slavonia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He also served as executive director of the Forum for Young Canadians, an organization whose goal is to educate youth on political engagement.
Mr. Reid also served as president of the Canadian Nuclear Association from 1990 to 1995 and was founding chair of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians from 1987 to 1990, later receiving the group’s Distinguished Service Award.
But it was as a promoter of access to information where he left his greatest mark. As an MP in the 1970s, Mr. Reid had teamed up with Gerald Baldwin, a Progressive Conservative MP to research ways of developing a freedom of information regime, producing a report that eventually led to passage of the Access to Information Act.
In 1998, when it was time to appoint a new Information Commissioner, a House of Commons committee went about interviewing potential candidates for the post. With his maverick background, he was clearly not the Chrétien government’s first choice but he found favour with opposition MPs.
In a remarkably frank self-assessment, he admitted to the committee that he had developed a “reputation of being somewhat of a maverick. I was told by some of my cabinet colleagues that I would be a great parliamentarian if I would only be as nasty to the opposition as I was to government ministers.”
“I was certainly a partisan in the sense that one has to be a partisan to be elected to the House of Commons, but I was also a partisan for my own ideas,” he continued.
Mr. Reid eventually got the job. During his seven years as information commissioner, he displayed his feisty independence, taking the government to court for failing to live up to its obligations under the law and issuing a series of report cards on government departments, ranking them for their performance and timeliness involving access requests.
He was always the definition of a straight arrow. When George Radwanski was forced to resign in 2003 as privacy commissioner in the wake of a scandal over his expense account spending, journalists began to dig into the spending habits of Mr. Reid, who was serving in the parallel role of information commissioner.
“I think they found he had been out on expenses twice and both times he had gone to Harvey’s [the burger restaurant],” his brother-in-law, Angus Reid, recalled.
Historian John English, himself a former Liberal MP, said that Mr. Reid may have been a maverick but never in a negative sense. “He was a congenial person. He didn’t have sharp edges. … He was really determined to be his own man but he always had a gentle smile.”
Mr. Reid died in Ottawa on Aug. 25, after a five-year fight against bile-duct cancer. He leaves his wife, Marie Ellen (née Balcaen); children, Katherine, John, Arianne and George; 10 grandchildren; and his siblings, Michael, Patrick and Mary.