Vaughn Palmer: A few words from Ted Hughes could end the career of a politician
Credit to Author: Massey Padgham| Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2020 20:02:06 +0000
VICTORIA — When I heard that Ted Hughes had passed away Friday after a brief illness, I thought back almost 30 years, to the day when I sat in a room at the legislature with other reporters, reading his findings on Premier Bill Vander Zalm.
At the premier’s behest, the province’s then acting conflict commissioner had investigated whether Vander Zalm mixed his private interest with the public interest in selling his Fantasy Garden theme park. Hughes concluded he had.
“It’s over,” said one of us in the room.
Sure enough, Vander Zalm resigned a few hours later.
He thus became the first, but not the last, B.C. premier to discover the sobering effect of a verdict from Ted Hughes.
In the spring of 1996, then NDP Premier Glen Clark tried to outsmart the Opposition B.C. Liberals by installing one of their estranged former members to take over from Hughes as conflict commissioner.
Hughes was initially prepared to go along. But he was talked back from the brink by Helen, his formidable wife of more than 60 years. She persuaded him that Clark’s political stunt was bringing the office of the conflict commissioner into disrepute.
There followed a tour-de-force press conference where Hughes announced he was staying. “I feel like a gun was put to my head.” he told reporters. “I succumbed to an incredible amount of pressure and in doing so I now believe I failed this office.”
Then-premier Bill Vander Zalm faces the press in March 1991.
A chastened Clark backed off and apologized. Hughes remained in office until a successor was chosen unanimously by all parties in the house. This is not to say he retired.
A third Ted Hughes moment was in the spring of 2006, when he reported back on a government-commissioned review of the Children’s Ministry, which had been fumbling cases and letting down the vulnerable children in its care.
Then premier Gordon Campbell had insisted the tragedies had nothing to do with his government’s drastic budget cuts. What did Hughes think of Campbell’s claim, a reporter asked. “He was wrong,” Hughes fired back, demolishing the premier’s credibility with a single blow of his tongue.
Another critic might have blamed faceless bureaucrats and the system itself. But when Ted Hughes got to finger pointing, he went after Mr. Big himself.
Plus he would remain on the case. Weeks later, speaking to social workers about his findings, Hughes spotted a member of the press gallery in the audience and decided it was time to blast the Campbell government for foot-dragging on his recommendations.
“Got your notebook?” he asked Les Leyne of Victoria Times Colonist. Leyne said he did. “Then we might as well make a little headline,” returned Hughes and proceeded to provide the raw material for a Leyne column headlined: “Hughes aims rocket at Liberal MLAs.”
Periodically, Hughes would remind the news media of the duty to hold governments of every political stripe to account. Or as he put it, coyly describing the role, “there’s a word that goes first, then comes the word ‘disturber.’ There are times when you have to play that role. Keep on it.”
Ted Hughes, circa 1993, conducted the inquiry into Bill Vander Zalm.
He himself kept on disturbing the peace well into the retirement years. One of the most determined of his latter-day exercises was in Manitoba, where he headed an inquiry in an awful child welfare case of a five-year-old girl who was beaten to death.
Hughes fought to make the inquiry open and transparent, broadening its findings to cover the whole, flawed system for children in care. But through it all, he never lost sight of Phoenix Victoria Hope Sinclair, the little girl who died.
He was determined that the little girl’s face would be on the cover of his three-volume report. Advised that government policy would never allow such a thing, he replied: “Leave it to me.”
Hence the break-your-heart cover, depicting (as Hughes biographer Craig McInnes put it) “A small girl in a big hat, with a new toy, smiling shyly at the camera.”
While Ted Hughes was taking on the biggest among us, he never let us forget our obligations protect to the most powerless.
His unwillingness to retire became a running joke that Hughes himself shared. “The sand has gone pretty much through the egg timer,” he told reporters, amid much laughter, when he was a mere 78.
But after 92 years and six decades of unparalleled public service, the sand finally did run out. Visiting him in hospital last week, McInnes, author of the 2017 biography The Mighty Hughes, found that the great man was ready to go.
That bit about the Mighty Hughes, started as a spoof. When he served as conflict commissioner, reporters joked that MLAs should begin their days with a prayer to the secular god who held their political fates in his hands.
Eventually it seemed an apt way to characterize the man who’d toppled one premier and shaken others.
Hughes was protective of his reputation, as Vander Zalm discovered when he suggested, in a self-published book, that the conflict commissioner had ulterior motives in rendering the finding that drove the premier from office.
Hughes sued and won $60,000. All that and more went to cover the legal bills, but for Hughes it was not about the money. “I couldn’t let that stand,” he said of Vander Zalm’s assault on his integrity.
He was defending his most valuable asset: his good name. Irreplaceable, you see. Like Ted Hughes himself.
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