Rafe Mair was a radio talk show host and B.C. icon.Nick Didlick/The Globe and Mail
Fearless in argument, a loudmouth with a restless intellect, Rafe Mair went from small-town lawyer to provincial cabinet minister to Vancouver's most popular and influential radio talk show host of the 1980s and 90s. He began his attention-grabbing radio work at CJOR, but it was CKNW, the leading private radio station in British Columbia, that enabled him to connect with a mass audience.
Mr. Mair didn't merely have opinions; he had convictions. Always well prepared, he could grill politicians in his studio mercilessly. His bluntness made him some enemies, but most listeners felt the passion behind his words and were won over to his causes, which included liberty of expression, preservation of B.C.'s salmon rivers, stopping fish farming, calling out bigots and racists, improving the teaching of Canadian history to correct its Central Canada bias, and safeguarding citizens' rights against corporate interests. Listeners west of the Rockies trusted him to give voice to their own sense of B.C. exceptionalism, and to their perpetual grievances against the federal government.
Mr. Mair, who died on Oct. 9 in Vancouver at 85, read widely and kept an open mind.
"When I first got to know him, he was a passionate right-wing politician defending big energy developments," recalled Howard White, whose company, Harbour Publishing, issued four of the 10 books Mr. Mair wrote after his broadcasting work began to taper off.
"At the end, he was a passionate left-wing environmentalist attacking big energy developments. His political migration was the opposite to what most [people] follow. I valued his passion for current affairs in B.C. and welcomed each new manuscript dramatizing issues of the day. I wish there were more writers doing that."
While his books of essays and memoirs were popular, Mr. White added, they were "never as influential as his radio show."
Of all the times he influenced the events of his era, two examples stand out: the Kemano Completion Project and the Charlottetown Accord.
Working with broadcaster and writer Ben Meisner, he turned public opinion against the Kemano Completion Project, a controversial scheme by Alcan Aluminium Ltd. to generate more power for its Kitimat smelter.
The massive project would have reduced water levels in the Nechako River to 13 per cent of its original flow and raised the water temperature. Since the Nechako is a tributary of the mighty Fraser River, which Mr. Mair called the soul of the province, the development would have endangered the sockeye salmon runs important to the province's economy and to its Indigenous people.
Mr. Mair argued so convincingly in his monologues – he called them editorials – on CKNW and he brought so many experts on his show to explain the harm Kemano would do that the outcry he provoked forced then-premier Mike Harcourt to cancel the project in 1995, though it was already well under way.
He led an equally vigorous campaign against the Charlottetown Accord, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney's proposed constitutional amendment that would have instituted "asymmetrical federalism," putting in place what Mr. Mair saw as an unacceptable inequality among the provinces. On air, Mr. Mair analyzed the proposed agreement to declare Quebec a "distinct society," urging his listeners to think this through for themselves and resist the pressures from Central Canada for a "Yes" vote in the coming referendum.
The Vancouver Sun dubbed him "Dr. No," and John Crosbie, the Progressive Conservative MP from Newfoundland at the time, said Mr. Mair was "the most dangerous man in Canada." Mr. Mair wore these labels proudly.
Clyde Wells, the premier of Newfoundland at the time who started asking tough questions about the Charlottetown Accord in 1989, was a frequent guest on Mr. Mair's show and became a folk hero in B.C. In his book Canada – Is Anyone Listening? Mr. Mair wrote that Mr. Wells received, in the days before e-mail became common, more than 10,000 letters, faxes and even flowers after appearing on CKNW.
In the 1992 referendum, 68 per cent of B.C. voters said "No" to Charlottetown, the highest proportion in any province.
Mr. Mair is also remembered for his advocacy for a better understanding of mental illness, having frankly discussed his own bouts of depression on air. He told his listeners that there was no difference between taking medications to control his depression and taking them to control his diabetes.
For his work on Kemano, he won a Michener Award, and he was later honoured with a Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in journalism.
Kenneth Rafe Mair was born in Vancouver on Dec. 31, 1931, the elder of two sons of Kenneth F.R. Mair, whose family had moved to Vancouver from New Zealand in 1913, and Frances Leigh Mair, a Vancouver woman. His mother read to him from an early age and passed on to him her love of books.
His given name was spelled Ralph, which his family (but no one else) pronounced in the English way, to rhyme with "safe."
"When he went to kindergarten, his teacher kept calling him Ralph, so when he was about 5 or 6, he just changed the spelling to Rafe," his wife, Wendy, explained. "He had it changed legally when he was in his 40s."
His father, Kenneth, was a salesman but when Japanese-Canadians living on the coast were forced to sell their businesses and move inland during the Second World War, he took over a Japanese-owned business making paper boxes. It proved sufficiently lucrative to send his son to St. George's, a private boys' school. That he benefited from this injustice weighed on Rafe Mair all his life.
He went to the University of British Columbia, studying arts, but he partied hard and was an indifferent student. After his father gave him an ultimatum to get down to work or get a job, he entered law school. Before starting third-year law, he married Eve MacInnes, the sister of one of his fraternity brothers.
After graduation, he found that an articling student could not make enough to support a family, which by now included a son, also named Kenneth Rafe. He went to work for Imperial Oil in Edmonton, then was briefly an insurance adjuster and a golf pro. He returned to law, articled with a small Vancouver firm, and was called to the bar in 1961. He worked for the next eight years with the firm of Lambert, Kroll and Mair, while three daughters were added to the family – Cindy, Shawn and Karen.
The great tragedy of his life was the death, in 1976, of his beloved Shawn in a car collision in which alcohol was involved. She was just 17.
In 1969, he moved his family to Kamloops, to work as counsel with his one-time classmate Jarl Whist. After a year in Mr. Whist's firm, the volatile Mr. Mair struck out on his own. In Kamloops, he discovered that he was a political animal and joined the Liberal Party but he later broke with the Liberals over then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau's handling of the October Crisis.
In 1973, he ran successfully for alderman, and in 1975 won the Social Credit nomination for his riding in the provincial election that made Bill Bennett premier, replacing NDP premier Dave Barrett. The austere Mr. Bennett was the son of W.A.C. Bennett, who had ruled the province for 20 years, but he was his own man. Mr. Mair later reportedly said that, for Mr. Bennett, he would have crawled through broken glass.
In Mr. Bennett's cabinet, he held four successive portfolios, including Environment and Health. He is credited with negotiating with Washington State to prevent the trans-border Skagit River valley from being flooded to provide power to Seattle, thus protecting the Skagit's salmon runs. During his five years in government, he also became responsible for constitutional affairs and served as one of two B.C. representatives on the national committee chaired by Jean Chrétien that was tasked with finding an amending formula prior to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution.
The committee's solution came to be called the Vancouver Consensus Formula.
Talk radio has long been a big deal in Vancouver and, in 1980, the offer of a job at Jimmy Pattison's radio station CJOR appealed to Mr. Mair's outsized ego. He resigned his cabinet position and his seat, and left politics. The station fired him in 1984 over a contract dispute but he landed on his feet at CKNW, where he initially helmed a show that ran from midnight to 2 a.m., but later ended up in the prestigious morning slot.
His first marriage broke up after the death of his daughter and he married Patricia Ballard, who had been his secretary when he was in government. She became his radio producer.
Mr. Mair's opinions, mostly sensible and cogent, could cross into wacky territory. He believed, for instance, that Terry Fox collected too much money for cancer research (at the expense of other diseases) and that breast cancer was caused by women's brassieres.
His take-no-prisoners style of commentary sometimes led to lawsuits or threats of lawsuits.
One such suit, brought by a family-values advocate named Kari Simpson, who did not want school children taught about homosexuality and opposed gay rights, went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008. Mr. Mair had compared Ms. Simpson to the Nazis on the air and, on appeal, she won her libel action. The appeal judge found that Mr. Mair's language went beyond fair comment.
The Supreme Court saw it differently. Explained Daniel Burnett, the lawyer who had acted for the radio station and Mr. Mair: "They said, 'Look, the law protects even outrageous comment.' Ever since it came down, it is quoted by every court in Canada. There is evidence that the number of libel suits successfully defended has increased."
After his divorce from his second wife, Mr. Mair met Wendy Conway, a nurse at Langley Hospital, while on a trip to England. She was looking for her roots and he was the celebrity tour leader. Four days after they met, he proposed; they married in 1994.
Mr. Mair, who suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure and complications from diabetes prior to his death, leaves Ms. Conway Mair; his brother, Leigh Mair; three children; two step-children from his second marriage; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
A hell-raiser to the end, Mr. Mair was fired by CKNW in 2003 after he made a scathing attack on his own station's journalistic standards. He returned to his earlier home on the dial, now called AM600, but was let go from there in 2005 when he failed to draw new listeners. In the past decade his commentaries were aired on CBC Radio, CTV and Omni TV, and he wrote for the online magazine The Tyee. The last of his books was I Remember Horsebuns, a fond account of the Vancouver of his childhood.
The funeral will take place in Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver on Oct. 30 at 11 a.m.