Two Canadian originals: Ralph Klein and Peter Kormos

I do not know if they ever met and they certainly had little in common politically, but it seemed somehow appropriate that both Ralph Klein and Peter Kormos should pass away within a couple days of each other.

Two originals who shared an ability to simultaneously charm and outrage: One a rebellious, hard-living Tory cost-cutter, the other a rebellious, hard-living New Democrat battler for social justice.

I knew Klein only from afar, but can remember vividly his performance at a premiers conference in Banff a few years back.

I had been assigned principally to seek out opinions from provincial leaders about the need for a new crackdown on gun crime—Toronto having suffered from several horrendous incidents of violence.

In advance of the conference, Klein hosted a rodeo for his fellow premiers.  It featured a hokey cowboy pantomime in which a black-hatted villain threatened a fair maiden.  Riding out to the rescue was a masked avenger (with a suspiciously prominent belly) who quickly dispatched the bad guy with his trusty six-shooter.  Having saved the day, the hero pulled off his mask to reveal the Premier of Alberta, smiling broadly.

Here we all were at a conference where gun violence on the streets was to be at the top of the agenda, and there was King Ralph pretending to be Wyatt Earp, mowing down evildoers in a Wild West shoot-em-up.

Did he care?  Not very much.  Especially if quizzed about it by a reporter from Ontario.

Peter Kormos probably would not have approved.  But he also would have laughed.

I covered him from the time he was first elected to the Ontario legislature for Welland, the successor to legendary New Democrat Mel Swart.

Frequently I would kid Peter that those of us in the Queen’s Park Press Gallery feared that Mel’s replacement could only be a colourless bore by comparison.

No chance.

He was a maverick from the beginning — shunning ties and wearing cowboy boots in the legislature.  Legendary were the stories of his late-night adventures in the bars of downtown Toronto.

When the NDP won its shocking election victory in 1990, Premier Bob Rae thought long and hard before appointing Peter to cabinet—not because he was not bright and competent, but because he was not inclined to keep his mouth shut if he disagreed with the boss.

Desperately lacking experienced parliamentarians, Rae had little choice. Sure enough, Kormos lasted barely six months.  The premier fired him after he appeared (fully clothed) in the Toronto Sun as a “Sunshine Boy.”  Nobody believed that that was the real reason.

Years later, I enjoyed congratulating Peter for finding the most colourful means ever for getting dumped from cabinet.

“That (the Sunshine Boy thing) was not it.  It was public auto insurance,” he told me.

In opposition, the NDP had campaigned tirelessly for it, with Kormos taking the lead.  Shortly after winning power, Rae realized they could not afford it and shelved the idea.   He knew Kormos would never agree, and would never shut up about it.   It may not have been the only reason, but it was certainly symptomatic of the truth.

Peter was always more comfortable in opposition anyway.  Through the Ontario NDP’s lean years after the defeat of the Rae government, he always found a way to win attention for his causes—not through playing the clown or staging outrageous stunts, but with a sharp intellect that would cut to the heart of an issue and with an instinctual understanding of the needs of the media for a simple, punchy quote to sum up a point.

When the McGuinty government appeared ready to dump the troublesome ombudsman Andre Marin, it was Kormos who led the defence, questioning how some of Marin’s expenses had been leaked to the media, saying it was “revealing how desperate the government is to slander Mr. Marin and to derail the ombudsman’s selection process.”

Marin survived.

Kormos delighted in the absurd, as in the occasion in 2008 when a hapless minister unveiled an energy conservation program entitled “flick off”, where the logo made it look much more like f— off.

His response: “in the last four years the people have been getting flicked by Dalton McGuinty, so it’s really nothing new.”

When he stood to ask a question or raise a point of order, he always commanded attention because MPPs from all sides respected his encyclopedic knowledge of procedure and issues.  He may have been wearing a wrinkled shirt with no tie, but he had great respect for the legislature.

In that vein, I once observed him bailing out Dalton McGuinty from an awkward moment.  The premier was holding one of his usual scrums in the hallway outside his office when he was accosted by a performer from a satiric TV show.  Unfortunately, her timing was awful as we were in the middle of questioning him about a plant shutdown where hundreds of people had lost their jobs—not a joking matter.

McGuinty squirmed and smiled, trying to be a good sport and play along even as he knew there were still serious questions to be answered.  None of the reporters could say anything.  His media advisors were powerless to intervene.

Kormos, standing at the back of the media pack broke the deadlock by snarling at the comedian,  “Get the hell out of here!”  She slunk away, McGuinty continued with the scrum and afterwards Kormos faced the cameras for a withering critique of the premier’s jobs policies.

He was a regular visitor to our Queen’s Park office. On days when the building was virtually empty of politicians, he was always around and ready to deliver an incisive and credible comment.

On one occasion when we were chasing a particularly silly story, pulled from a tabloid headline he shook his head at our attention to the trivial: “You’re putting THIS on the air?  You guys…”

But he still gave us the clip we needed.

Even when Kormos was hit with a bout of Bells Palsy which left half his face paralyzed he was still on the job, still facing the cameras, unconcerned about his appearance.

Excruciating back pain forced him to take a few months off to recover and when he returned he was clearly still suffering — looking bent and aged.  It was well known that he did not take very good care of himself and it seemed that his lifestyle was finally catching up.

It was a shock when he announced he would not be running in the 2011 election and even more so when I heard of his passing at the young age of 60.  Appropriately, I first heard about it in a sympathetic tweet from Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird: “Shocked and deeply saddened to hear of the loss of our good friend Peter Kormos.”

Baird was a frequent target of Kormos barbs during the days of the Mike Harris government, but was also one of many political foes who became personal friends.

The Canadian political landscape was enlivened and enriched by both Ralph Klein and Peter Kormos.  I doubt they ever met for a beer, but if they had it would have been some conversation.