Tom Kent, key figure in Canadian politics and journalism, dies at 89

Tom Kent, former Liberal Party mandarin and one of the key figures in 1960s Canadian public policy, has died. He was 89.

Kent had a long and varied career in journalism and public life but is best known to most Canadians for his work in federal policy circles and as chairman of the Royal Commission on Newspapers in the early 1980s.

“He was a deeply committed, curious individual, who wanted to be in the town square to make a difference,” said Sean Conway, a fellow at the School of Public Policy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., with which Kent was associated at the time of his death.

“He really believed in government and the powerful and positive role government could play in society and wasn’t afraid to take a position and hold it and debate.”

Kent died of cardiac arrest following a surgery to remove his appendix, his son Oliver Kent said by phone from his Ottawa home.

Thomas Kent was born in England in 1922 and served during the Second World War at the top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking facility which unravelled the Nazis’ Enigma code.

In 1946 he joined the staff of the celebrated U.K. newspaper The Guardian and in 1950 became assistant editor of the Economist. In 1954 he moved to Canada to take over as editor of the Winnipeg Free Press.

Kent would later become the intellectual driving force behind the federal Liberal party’s shift toward a more active role in social policy in the 1960s, helping to create the features of Canada’s modern welfare state.

He helped organize the party’s famous Kingston Conference in 1960 that attracted 200 leading thinkers. His speech at the policy conference contained many of the radical ideas that later became party policies, such as medicare and federal funding for welfare.

Kent wrote the party’s election platform in the 1962 and 1963 elections, and joined the Pearson administration in 1963 as a senior policy aide to the prime minister. Kent eventually became the founding deputy minister of two federal departments before moving in 1971 to take over as CEO of the Cape Breton Development Corporation.

Kent became dean of administrative studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1980. That same year, he was appointed chairman of the Royal Commission on Newspapers, which was struck in response to mergers and closures in Canada’s media sphere.

Kent’s commission warned that increasing concentration of media ownership was squeezing out diversity of opinion and recommended newspaper owners be prevented from holding radio and TV broadcasting licences in the same market – an idea that was accepted in principle by the Trudeau government but later abandoned by the Mulroney government.

After leaving the Liberals, Kent had a fraught relationship with his former party, especially during the austerity years of the 1990s.

In 1997, Kent lambasted the Chretien government for betraying medicare, an attack that was viewed as the first by such a senior and well-respected party figure.

In a blistering critique written for the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, Kent accused the federal government of putting the 30-year-old social program at a critical crossroads by neglecting to properly fund it.

“Medicare has been sustained by the public will,” wrote Kent. “For this medicare, we owe no thanks to the present generation of federal politicians. It survives despite them. Though they pose, because of its popularity, as the defenders of medicare, in fact, they have destroyed the financial basis on which their predecessors created it. That political betrayal is the root cause of the tension that, despite the public will, now pervades medicare.”

Kent repeated his criticisms in 2000, saying the federal government of the time was the biggest threat to the future of medicare.

At the time, the respected Liberal mind told a Senate committee that the Chretien government was starving the public health system of badly needed cash, and holding up any chance of meaningful reform negotiations with the provinces.

Brooke Jeffrey, a Concordia University professor and author of a Liberal history and former party member, said Kent cast a long shadow over the party.

“As late as the run up to the 2003 leadership convention, Tom Kent was still writing op-eds, books . . . about the direction of social policy in Canada,” Jeffrey said. “People paid attention when Tom Kent spoke. His comments on social policy were always viewed seriously in the Liberal party.”

Jeffrey said Kent was an “icon” who was integral in shaping the policies of the Pearson-era Liberals. Those, she said, were the key to ousting John Diefenbaker’s Tories and returning the Liberal party to government.

But Kent continued to make a mark on Canada in the years after he left the political realm, said Queen’s University research chair of public policy Keith Banting.

“One of the things that was quite striking is how lucid and engaged and intellectually alive he remained throughout his years,” Banting said. “He was still writing thoughtful, cutting-edge policy papers in his 80s – papers that people paid attention to. I hope I am half as acute in my 80s. He was remarkable in that way.”

Oliver Kent said his father, who came from humble origins, would want to be remembered for his “selfless service” to the country. And despite his Liberal legacy, Oliver Kent said his father was always more concerned with ideas than partisanship, which showed in his close friendship these last years with the NDP’s Ed Broadbent.

Kent was the founding editor of the public affairs magazine Policy Options. He continued to write until very late in life; his most recent major paper, “Federalism Renewed,” was published in March 2007.

Kent was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001. He had been married since 1944 to Phyllida Kent, who was also involved in wartime intelligence.

Banting described the former Queen’s scholar as “a consummate gentleman” saying that Kent, “remained somewhat very British in his style and he was a man who valued clear thought and reasoning.

“I always learned something from him while talking to Tom,” Banting added. “He’s stunningly interesting. It’s sad he’s gone.”

Ron Watts, professor emeritus of political studies at Queen’s University, praised Kent’s “enormous” contribution to the development of the country’s public policy.

“Tom, I think, as I knew him, was a great, rational, liberal thinker,” Watts said, noting that Kent was a less common figure around the school as he grew more frail.

“I liked him very much. It was his rational, clear, imaginative thinking that always impressed me. He was a great model for those interested in thinking about policy issues.”

Kent leaves Phyllida behind as well as sons Oliver, Duncan and Andrew, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The family will hold a private memorial.

With files from the Ottawa Citizen