How Brampton offered a lesson in honouring political icons
For years now, people have been trying to figure out how to honour Bill Davis, Ontario’s premier from 1971 to 1985 — and a man who, objectively, has one of the most stellar records of any of the 26 leaders who have held that job.
But those efforts have always run into the buzzsaw of political reality. Before Ryerson University became Toronto Metropolitan, someone with a long history in the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario called me to ask about starting a campaign to get Davis’s name on the place. I suggested to him, putting it rather bluntly, that if they were going to take one old deceased white man’s name off the university, they weren’t likely to replace it with another old deceased white man’s name. The caller agreed, and that was the end of that.