Dave Barrett was magic onstage.
“He could play an audience like a violin, and they sang back to him,” said a former colleague, Bob Williams.
But Barrett was far more than just a gifted campaigner. Another former B.C. premier, Glen Clark, marvels at how much Barrett accomplished in his three years of power between 1972 and 1975.
“I think he’s the most underestimated or underrated individual that I can imagine in British Columbia,” said Clark.
“People don’t realize, but they passed a new law every three days that they were in government. I talked to him one time about what his biggest accomplishments were, and he didn’t say the agricultural land reserve or ICBC, he said protecting Cypress Bowl from development.
“I didn’t even realize he’d done Cypress Bowl. Robson Square, the SeaBus, the highest minimum wage in Canada at the time. Mincom, minimum income standards for seniors. The first daycare program in the history of British Columbia. More (social) housing built ever than in any other period in British Columbia — government housing, co-op housing, public housing.
“It was just extraordinary, the pace of progressive change in such a short period of time.”
Barrett died Friday at 87 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. The current premier, New Democrat John Horgan, lauded him as a giant.
“His visionary leadership and unflinching commitment to the well-being of ordinary people around the province led to lasting change,” Horgan said in a statement.
“In just one short term, his government delivered our first modern ambulance service, the Agricultural Land Reserve and public auto insurance. We are all better off, thanks to his tireless work and immeasurable contributions to public life.”
Williams was a key figure in the Barrett cabinet.
“We loved the guy,” said Williams. “There’s been nobody like him in our history. He was a wonderful, joyous figure. It was a pleasure to work every day in that government. I think he helped create the most innovative government in the history of this province.”
Barrett also may have been the only B.C. premier to do a jig on a cabinet table.
“All the stories of the fun and the depth of the guy are true,” said Williams. “It’s true, he did get on the cabinet table and dance in his socks. He did.
“He (also) saw past the nature of bureaucracies, and felt he was standing on the shoulders of historic socialists who had created enough of an atmosphere for us to come into power.
“So there were no holds barred, everyone was able to do a great deal of work. People have said ‘Isn’t it crazy, they tried to do so much.’ It wasn’t crazy. We and he did so much, and it was a great moment in the province’s history.”
Barrett is credited with modernizing B.C.’s civil service after two decades of government by W.A.C. Bennett and Social Credit.
“He told me the civil service were not allowed to use long-distance phone calls when (the NDP became) government,” said Clark. “The NDP government in that period were looking at bidding on the Olympics. They asked the bureaucrats, ‘Do some research on this. We haven’t decided, but we’re thinking about bidding on the Olympics.’
“A few days went by and he asked them ‘What have you found out?’ And they said ‘We’re waiting for answers to our letters.’ (Socred premier) W.A.C. Bennett had not authorized them to use long-distance phone calls. … It was an old, antiquated bureaucracy.”
That said, Clark thinks that may have been to Barrett’s advantage.
“Maybe that was one of the freedoms they had to make change,” he said. “Today there’s so many checks and balances and bureaucracy (that) to try and bring in a piece of legislation, it would take months. Building a rapid transit line, my goodness, it seems to take forever to get anything done.
“They were unencumbered by a bureaucracy — they built it,” he said of the Barrett government.
Williams said Barrett came by his socialist nature naturally — he was a working class kid from East Van whose father looked after people.
“His dad Sam Barrett had the Green Grocer down where Sunrise market is now, right opposite Oppenheimer Park,” said Williams. “The amount of groceries that went out of the store free was amazing.”
Clark said Barrett’s legendary sense of humour helped make things “understandable” for people.
“He was so quick and had such a great wit,” said Clark. “He could take radical progressive ideas and make them real for people. I remember a speech I was at maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and he was talking about the people who want to deregulate, how the business community wants less regulations, (as well as) right-wing governments across Canada.
“He asked everybody in the audience to stand up and take out their medicare card. Then he said ‘All you people in the audience who don’t vote NDP, who believe in free enterprise and don’t believe in regulation, I want you to rip up that card, rip it up right now.
“’You don’t believe in socialized medicine, clearly, that’s evil. And we should take out all the traffic lights, that’s clearly government regulation. Why would we have the government intrude and tell people to stop or go?’”
Williams choked up a bit talking about his old comrade.
“He was a gift,” he said. “He was a pleasure, he was a treasure.”
jmackie@postmedia.com
VICTORIA — For a politician who exited the premier’s office more than 40 years ago, Dave Barrett left behind him a long and, in many ways, a still living legacy.
The lasting protection of agricultural land. Public auto insurance. Pharmacare. Neighbourhood pubs. The Cypress Bowl recreation area. Robson Square. The B.C. Day public holiday.
The list goes on. The Art of the Impossible, a sympathetic account of the Barrett years, written five years ago by journalist Rod Mickleburgh and Geoff Meggs, chief of staff to the current premier, closed with a “partial and subjective list” of the Barrett accomplishments that ran to 97 items.
The Barrett government passed more than 400 pieces of legislature during its brief 3½-year term in office. Not all were good ideas and some were evidence of a government that tried to do too much, too soon.
Barrett would say that in coming to office after 20 years of increasingly ossified Social Credit government, the province’s first New Democratic Party administration had to realize that “we’re here for a good time, not a long time.”
But that’s a bit of historical revisionism. Premier Barrett tried very hard for a second term in the fall of 1975, legislating a cooling-off period for 50,000 workers in four separate labour disputes, then calling a snap election.
Labour didn’t like it and some unions sat on their hands. Still Barrett actually increased his vote count over the previous 1972 election by almost 60,000 votes, a considerable achievement given all the controversies that erupted during his term of office.
The NDP nevertheless lost 20 seats because the right of centre opposition, split three ways in 1972, combined under the leadership of Socred premier Bill Bennett, son of W.A.C. Bennett, whom Barrett had driven from office three years earlier.
Then a remarkable thing happened. Though Bennett and the Socreds rode to office by opposing many of Barrett’s actions, they proceeded to pay grudging tribute to the departed NDP premier by leaving many of his accomplishments more or less intact. The Insurance Corp. of B.C. and the agricultural land reserve were foremost among them.
Barrett, ever the street-fighter, kept at it. Having lost his Coquitlam seat in the legislature by a mere 18 votes in the December 1975 election, he arranged for a New Democrat Bob Williams to resign his in the safe enclave of Vancouver East and returned to the legislature in a byelection.
In the rematch with Bennett in 1979, Barrett came within a tantalizing 30,000 votes and five seats of returning to the premier’s office. The 46 per cent of the popular vote captured by the New Democrats in that election remains the high water mark for the party in any B.C. election, including the subsequent three occasions when it formed government.
Impressive as the 1979 result was in terms of a personal achievement for Barrett, it also set the stage for him to make a second try at a comeback four years later. Again, he held his vote, but so did Bennett, emerging with his third straight win over his NDP opponent. Barrett had to wear the defeat, having handed Bennett the edge with an ill-advised speech against fiscal restraint.
After that, Barrett had to go and did. As a last service to the party, he carried his defiance of the re-elected Bennett’s restraint program to such lengths that at one point he was physically dragged from the legislative chamber for defying the chair of the proceedings. He then gave up his seat to Williams who had been waiting, not all that patiently, to return to the house for the better part of a decade.
Barrett dabbled briefly in radio before getting elected to parliament in 1988. He also sought the national leadership of the NDP, losing to Audrey McLaughlin — and the country thereby missed a helluva show.
In the unforgiving modern-day arena, where defeated leaders seldom get a first shot at a comeback, never mind a second, it seems incredible that the New Democrats stuck with Barrett long enough for him to lose three in a row.
But the explanation resides with the other memorable aspect of the Barrett legacy, namely his powerful and ultimately personal hold on his own party and his share of the electorate.
No one who heard a Dave Barrett give a political speech full bore, all stops pulled, ever forgot it. He was a master of the populist style, able to segue from unforgiving denunciations of his opponents to withering ridicule in an instant, never unsure of himself, never less than formidable.
He could be funny as hell too as when opponents called him a Marxist and he fired back “Groucho, Harpo or Chico?”
I only covered Barrett in his last year in the legislature, but I got to see him in action several times over the years when he was called out to speak at party conventions or help out in provincial campaigns. “An old ghost” he would style himself, but there was nothing ephemeral about his energy level.
Sadly, near the end, he had faded from public life, plagued by similar mental decline as rival Bill Bennett, who passed two years ago.
But at his best he left a bigger mark on the province than many who served longer, but with less passion, vigour and determination.
vpalmer@postmedia.com
This column on Dave Barrett was published in the Times Colonist on Oct. 1, 2010, just before the former premier's 80th birthday. Barrett died Friday at the age of 87.
Dave Barrett is sitting at the dining room table in the Esquimalt home he shares with his wife, Shirley, reflecting on his political life.
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Barrett turns 80 tomorrow. He has had a remarkable time — first elected more than 50 years ago at 29, the province’s first NDP premier at 41, already a crafty political veteran who infuriated foes one moment and had them laughing the next.
The “people’s premier,” they called him. Or sometimes “the little fat guy.” No airs, no bodyguards. A quick wit, fierce commitment, social worker, rugby player.
Always a politician in a hurry, the brash upstart outsider who dared to challenge the system. And change it.
Barrett only served as premier for three years, from 1972 to 1975.
But out of those three years came Insurance Corp. of B.C., the Agricultural Land Reserve, Pharmacare, the first guaranteed income program for seniors in the nation, a ban on use of the strap in schools, a provincewide ambulance service, Hansard and question period, and full-time MLAs.
Asked what he considered his greatest accomplishment, Barrett scarcely hesitates. It wasn’t any of the big new initiatives that transformed life in the province to this day.
Shutting down two youth jails — the Willingdon School for Girls and the Brannen Lake Centre for Boys, says Barrett, who had worked with young offenders behind bars before going into political life.
That gave him the greatest personal satisfaction.
“We had kids going into adult prisons,” he says. “There were boys in Brannen Lake as young as nine years old.”
Barrett is still filled with energy and life. That energy was a virtue and a vice in his years in politics. It helped him drive all those changes — a new bill passed, on average, every three days when Barrett ran the show.
But it also led to big risks and a style of government that seemed to leap at changes without a lot of pondering about the risks.
Kind of like rugby — and Barrett looks as if he could still play, since he is strong and quick on his feet. Aging can be cruel, though. Barrett’s memory isn’t as good as it once was, his quick wit is a little slower and his mind can play tricks on him.
But there are still flashes of the man who transformed the province after ending W.A.C. Bennett’s legendary 20-year reign.
Bennett epitomized one British Columbia — a small businessman from the Interior who left school in Grade 9 and taught himself everything he needed to know about business and politics.
Barrett’s victory signalled more than just a big political change in B.C. He was a child of the Depression, an economic downturn so dramatic that it defined the lives of virtually everyone who got through it.
His grandfather Isaac Barrett came to Canada from Russia in the 1880s and worked as an interpreter and merchant in Winnipeg, where Dave’s father, Samuel, was born in 1897.
Sam Barrett trained as a barber, but there was a war on. He enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force a month after his 18th birthday and fought at Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. He was gassed once and wounded twice.
On his return to Canada, Sam moved to Vancouver, where he met Rose, a recent arrival from southern Russia. They were married in August 1924; their son David was born on Oct. 2, 1930 in Vancouver.
Dave Barrett was shaped by those childhood years. His father peddled fruits and vegetables from a wheelbarrow. The produce was always fresh, Sam promised. And it was — at the end of every day, he would give to the poor anything he had not sold.
Dave attended two Jesuit universities in the United States — hardly the choice expected of a Russian Jewish kid from Vancouver — then started a career with the provincial government in social welfare work.
He started challenging the system. In 1959, he was fired because he sought a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation nomination for the provincial election.
He won the nomination and the election — and his political career began.
Fifty years later, in his dining room with its stunning views of Juan de Fuca Strait and a selection of fine art on its restored walls, Barrett doesn’t hesitate when it comes to a great influence on his life — Tommy Douglas, the former leader of the federal New Democratic Party. Douglas led the CCF, a forerunner of the NDP, to power in Saskatchewan in 1944, setting the stage for NDP governments in four other provinces over the years.
Barrett says he met Douglas three or four times.
“I was cheeky, so I pushed myself closer,” he says. “I wanted to get to know him.”
How would Barrett define Douglas?
Committed. A free spirit. Sensible, decent and responsible.
Thoughtful, powerful but kind, serious but humourous. And strong.
Every one of those attributes could be used to describe Barrett as well.
When Barrett arrived at the legislature, Bennett had been premier for eight years. Barrett’s father, Sam, would come to the legislature to watch his son in action and, remarkably enough, became friends with Bennett. Sam and Cec, as Bennett was called, were of the same generation, born within a few years of each other.
“Cec would damn David, but chum around with Sam,” Shirley Barrett recalls. (Bennett asked the senior Barrett several times if he thought his son was ready to be premier. At first, Sam said no, but finally told Bennett that young Dave was ready.)
No surprise that Bennett would be irked by Barrett, who was known for his sharp attacks and irreverent tactics.
In 1972, Barrett was tossed out of the legislature for five days because he had asked the same question 67 times, defying the Speaker’s order to quit. He was upset that a young woman had been been badly served by private insurers after her husband died from injuries suffered in a car crash, and he wanted an answer about what the government would do about it.
When he was allowed back in, his father was there to witness his triumphant return.
Bennett stole Barrett’s thunder by calling for a round of applause for Sam Barrett just as Dave was about to walk into the chamber.
There were political battles inside and outside the party, Barrett recalls. His government was denounced as left-wing — “the Chile of the north,” some said — while the B.C. Federation of Labour attacked him over back-to-work legislation ending strikes in 1975.
Barrett smiles and says his worst critics were around his own dinner table. His children, Dan, Joe and Jane, would regularly challenge him about what his government had done that day.
“They kept him grounded,” says Shirley, who in turn deserves more praise for Barrett’s successes than she seems willing to accept.
Barrett’s NDP government left a strong legacy here in Victoria. It funded the reconstruction and expansion of the causeway and harbour.
Barrett launched a restoration program at the legislature itself, which had been allowed to deteriorate over the years.
His interest in history is reflected in the home he shares with Shirley, his wife of almost 57 years. The home is said to be the first house commissioned to noted architect P. Leonard James.
The century-old Beaux Arts masterpiece was known as Stonehenge Park when it was built for John W. Lysle, who had been the purser on the steamer Chippewa. It was a key social venue in Esquimalt for many years.
The Barretts bought the home after the 1972 election. By that time, it was showing its age and had been marred by awkward change. The Barretts went to work restoring the home to its original grandeur and acquiring suitable furniture.
Barrett spends much of his time in the home. He maintains a keen interest in current events, although he is no longer politically active.
The state of the country today makes him wonder, he says. “I can’t understand why kids don’t have access to the best training courses and education anywhere.”
In three and a half years in power, Barrett introduced massive changes in our province.
And one thing is clear, as we chat across the table: He wishes he could have done even more.
