By NAL publisher Doug Draper
To borrow from the words in the title of an old book by the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy, he was a ‘profile in courage’.
Peter Kormos, then an MPP for the Niagara, Ontario riding of Welland, speaking on the steps of Queen’s Park to a gathering of citizens, worried about their jobs and their future.
He was also a profile in integrity and in principles he acted on, without compromise, for the 99 per cent of us who are getting screwed by the upper one per cent.
At a time when politicians across this province, country and continent are about as popular as cockroaches in a kitchen, Peter Kormos was a rare exception which explains why so many countless thousands of people across this region and country mourned his loss when he died so suddenly last March 2013 at age 60.A full-blooded son of working class people living around the mills of a then-thriving industrial Niagara, Ontario community of Welland, where people got their hands dirty from their toil in those mills, Peter Kormos never forgot his roots.
He was expelled as a student from high school in his hometown of Welland for his political beliefs, yet he overcame an educational system (still at work today) in this province that almost only wants robots to work in or around the piggish finance towers on Bay Street and Wall Street.
Peter Kormos never let a system that started with the mind-numbing educational system in this province hold him down. He went on to become a lawyer, a Welland councillor, a representative in Ontario’s legislature, and finally a Niagara regional councillor for Welland, always speaking out for those fighting for their jobs or who have lost decent paying jobs to what he called McJobs at McDonalds, etc.
He fought for the underdog, even if it meant him losing a cabinet position in the short-lived Ontario NDP government of Bob Rae, which he did some 20 years ago, and he did so at whatever other cost to his health, which eventually brought him down to a point where, as the late Doors lead singer and songwriter Jim Morrison once sang; ‘No one gets out of here alive.’
I get the impression from what I read and hear, and from my own all-to-close encoutners with today’s politicians from all partisan stripes, that they wonder why they are held in such low esteem, even though they work so hard to win, win, win public support.
Well, let me offer this up as one possible answer.
In a follow-up to her father’s book ‘Profiles In Courage’, JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, in a 2002 revision entitled ‘Profiles in Courage for our Times’, there is a profile on the former U.S. senator of Connecticut, Lowell Weicker (some may remember him as one of the toughest members of the Senate Watergate committee of the 1970s), that quotes Weicker saying that a politician hardly fight for or do anything for the people they serve if winning is the only thing that matters.
“For God’s sake,” Weicker goes on to say in the profile piece, “don’t be afraid to lose. If you’re not afraid to lose, you’ll make your mark in politics.”
The problem today seems to be that too many of our politicians of all stripes are afraid to lose. Winning, at almost any cost to promises made and principles, is all that seems to matter.
Kormos knew differently. And he knew that if he had the guts to throw partisan politics and playing to special interests aside and stand up for the 99 per cent he represented, they would reward him, as they always did, with a huge electoral mandate to fight for them again.
God how that kind of down-on-the-ground, fight-for-the-people politics is missed in the passing in 2013 of Peter Kormos.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
Politicians like Peter Kormos are extremely rare! I never dealt with the man personally, but the fact that Bob Rae threw him out of cabinet was enough to make me like him! If you could piss Bob Rae and his toady special interest group representatives that much, you were worth your weight in gold in my estimation!
In all my years as a journalist and a government PR flak there were only few politicians that I ever met who were in the same class as Kormos.
Canada is in urgent need of more “Kormoses” if our country is ever to return to being a nation of strength and honesty. We need politicians who are in politics to help the common people of Canada.
We do not need more toadies who will lick their party leaders’ shoes to advance their own selfish careers. We need politicians who will stand up for the people who elected them and will do what is best for the country and all its people, not for this or that special interest group.
Please note: I am not talking about any particular political party. ALL our political parties are in need of overhaul! They have all bought-in to the “party-first” approach.
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I do take exception to your comment on our educational system as being “mind-numbing”. Boring, true. Antiquated, perhaps. However, we do have one of the best educational system in the world as can be attested to by OEDC studies. Further, Peter was never suspended for “political beliefs”. He was suspended for his behaviour. I knew Peter when he was a teen and even then he was abrasive to the point of being outrageous. You are correct however on the issue that he stuck to his principles and always fought for the underdog. He was a rare and honest politician as well as a very hard worker. And I do agree with you that politicians of today seem to have few principles or honesty. They seem more as representatives of corporate interests than the public.
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Peter Kormos did his best for his constituents as well as all Canadian Citizens, yet as a Niagara Regional Councillor he was called a maverick. Perhaps to the ‘Old Guard’ on council he was a maverick.
Ironically Peter Kormos appeared ‘conservative right wing’ when compared to the character of the core ‘Old Guard’ of Niagara Regional Council.
However, the rightful recognition and accolades of this man gushes forth only after his death!
There are other politicians, although very few, who are desperately trying to do their best for their constituents and all Canadian Citizens. These politicians appear to be suffering the same fate as Peter Kormos and that is to go without support until they too are dead.
Peter Kormos relied every bit as much on common sense as he did on ideology. How else could he find favour with politicians of all stripes? How else can his team-up with that other maverick on Regional Council, Andy Petrowski, be justified?
Peter Kormos is still with us in the form of other reasoned mavericks, however will we recognized them and support them in time to make a difference or will we stick to our nebulous ideological predilections?
SOSOS! Nail those standing for the Citizen yet voting for those standing for themselves!
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Doug, with all due respect, but comparing Kormos to Kenendy is a bit rich. Kennedy believed in the free market and was a fiscal conservative.
Here is one quote form Kennedy and you tell me if Kormos would have ever said such a thing,
“A bill will be presented to the Congress for action next year. It will include an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in both corporate and personal income taxes. It will include long-needed tax reform that logic and equity demand … The billions of dollars this bill will place in the hands of the consumer and our businessmen will have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy. Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary. And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries and more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy.”
Kormos was a hardcore socialist who believed in government unions and the redistribution of wealth from the private citizen to the government.
Doug, I have a hard time understanding how you can complain about politicians when you share the same values they do.
When I see you use the world social justice” , which is really cultural Marxism, I have to question just really what you are surprised about. Marxism and anything to do with social justice requires government force and the destruction of the private sector. The individual citizen means nothing in a Marxist country.
And I’m shocked that you never did a story on the loons trying to have me banned from filming council. The very politicians you complain about are the very politicians you protect when you fail to report the news.
That was really a national story, but in a Marxist country like Canada, social justice is all the matters.
A private citizen like me can go to hell.
Happy New Year’s Thailand Doug and I look forward to seeing you on the 16th and enquiring why that story never made the news.
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Doug when I read Fred Bracken’s comments on you and Peter Kormos it was a tirade that I would expect from Margaret Thatcher supporters or the Tea Party in the U.S.A. What Fred neglected to tell us is that Kennedy also stepped on the necks of Corporate America when he prevented and spoke out about corporate gouging in the form of unbridled price increasing. He also considers Canada a Marxist Country and we have Harper wow…Well there is always a remedy for that Fred as I see the bridges are still operating to the south or to Alberta.
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