Ralph Klein was fine but Peter Kormos was the real deal

Two great populists died last week. For Ralph Klein, the former Conservative premier of Alberta, kudos poured in. For Peter Kormos, the former New Democratic Party MPP from Welland, the praise was more guarded.

Yet of the pair, Kormos was the real deal.

Both were beloved by voters. Klein was Alberta’s premier for 14 years. Kormos held his Ontario seat for 23.

Both had more than their share of human appetites. The Alberta premier famously drank too much. The Welland MPP, perhaps less famously, indulged in his own brand of extravagant behaviour.

One colleague recounts a tale of Kormos, clad only in his underwear, standing atop a car late at night in Toronto’s tony Riverdale district to metaphorically howl at the moon.

But unlike Klein, Kormos was consistent — often to his own disadvantage.

Klein was always happy to trim his sails to the prevailing wind.

In 1987, the then Calgary mayor made a tentative bid for the leadership of the Alberta Liberal Party. When the Liberals rejected him (and, to add insult to injury, chose the mayor of Edmonton instead) Klein switched to the Conservatives.

In 1992, he ran for the leadership of his new party promising to maintain health care. Once he became leader and premier, he set about immediately to cut health care.

Like most premiers in boom and bust Alberta, Klein slashed government spending when oil prices (and thus tax revenues) were low. And like most, he goosed spending when the opposite occurred.

When his 2001 scheme to privatize power production sent Alberta’s electricity prices sky-high, Klein just shrugged and handed out millions of dollars in rebates to voters.

By the time of his 2006 exit from politics, Klein’s magic was beginning to wear thin. His plans to privatize great chunks of medicare were unpopular. His own party was tiring of him.

Some even whispered that he had forgotten his humble roots and was spending far too much time hobnobbing with wealthy businessmen.

That was never Kormos’ problem.

First elected to the Ontario legislature in 1988, Kormos was a guy with a grin who promised to “rattle the cage.”

And rattle he did. A working-class boy from a working-class town, Kormos had left home at 16 and put himself through both university and law school.

But he never forgot who he was. Welland is a chippy town, and Kormos was the same. He had a fast mouth and a faster car. As a criminal lawyer, he didn’t hesitate to take on the police.

Politically, he gravitated to the NDP, the closest thing Ontario has to a working-class party. And from his predecessor as Welland’s MPP, a New Democrat named Mel Swart, he inherited a passion for public auto insurance.

Kormos was suspicious of cant and mistrustful of authority. As a teenager, he had been suspended from high school for leading a student strike. As an adult and cabinet minister in the province’s first NDP government, he made life a misery for then premier Bob Rae.

He did so by being a consistent advocate of all the NDP claimed to stand for.

In opposition, Rae’s NDP had promised to introduce public auto insurance. In government, it backed off. But Kormos never did.

Nor could he resist tweaking his own NDP colleagues for their often sanctimonious ways. In the end, he was turfed from Rae’s cabinet not over auto insurance but for daring to appear, fully clothed in suit and tie, as a SUNshine Boy in the vehemently anti-NDP Toronto Sun.

The last time I saw Kormos was at the January Liberal leadership convention that chose Kathleen Wynne to be premier. Theoretically, he was there for a Hamilton television station. In reality, he couldn’t resist the sheer politics of the spectacle.

What were his plans? Kormos, 60, was a Niagara regional councilor at the time. But that, it seems, wasn’t enough.

“I need a pension,” the boy from Welland said. “I gotta get another job.” And then he grinned that grin.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author:  Thomas Walkom