An era has ended. It was the time of Lester Pearson. It was the time of Pierre Trudeau. The political strength of those men was that of Keith Davey.
Keith was a mentor, a friend and a fellow conspirator. He was a playmate that I missed as a child. We reveled in the sandbox of politics, theorizing, scheming, arguing and working together to build our sand castles of the political left. We earned our enemies, our detractors, our supporters and followers. Our trust was such that one could make the bombs and the other would throw them.
You never knew when Keith would call. He played the telephone as a virtuoso. His voluminous lists of contacts across the country kept him in constant touch with the opinions of the party and the nation. He recorded it all each day in small crabbed handwriting on a single sheet of paper.
Keith hated hypocrisy. This led to one of our greatest failures. After writing about the politics of city hall for years, I was convinced that city politics needed to be openly based on party politics and accountability instead of the covert system then in place. To my surprise, Keith told me he agreed and he wanted to help. Keith took more of the blame for the fiasco when the party took the plunge than he deserved.
Lost to us in the veil of Alzheimer for his last years, Keith’s understudy, Hon. David Smith took the political reins for Jean Chrétien’s years as Prime Minister. Keith was unaware of the sorry state of his party under Paul Martin and the ensuing regime of Stephen Harper.
Canada is a better place for Keith having been with us. He is missed.
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