A Note from Doug Draper
One of the last of the truly compassionate Conservatives from the Joe Clark/Flora MacDonald era, Joe Reid passed away earlier this August at age 97.
Joe Reid, a lawyer by trade, was a mayor of the Niagara, Ontario municipality of St. Catharines in from 1979 through the 1980s served as a federal Member of Parliament under the leadership of then-Progressive Conservative prime ministers Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney when there was still a streak of progressive running through a party that has nothing in common with what has metastasized under the jackboots of Stephen Harper today.
I was covering the environment beat fulltime at The St. Catharines Standard during the years Joe served as an MP and will never forget him coming over to me at some meeting and encouraging my reporting efforts even though I was painting pretty unflattering portraits of some of the polluting industries at the time. I could hardly imagine a politician from federal or provincial Conservatives offering that kind of encouragement today.
Back in 1987, when the Mulroney Conservative government held a free vote in Parliament on whether or not to bring back the death penalty, an editor asked me to pitch in for a vacationing court reporter and do a story on how MPs in our region voted on a pro-death penalty motion that was ultimately defeated.
When I contacted Joe Reid, he offered to send me the full transcript of his address to the legislature on whatever primitive fax machine was around at the time. The address he delivered against bringing back capital punishment was so well thought out and moving that I talked the editorial page editor at the newspaper to run the whole thing. I wish I still had a copy of it because I am sure it would be just as relevant to any debate over the death penalty today.
I only crossed paths with Joe Reid a couple of times after I decided to leave The Standard in the late 1990s which by then the local Burgoyne family sold to the now-defunct Southam publishing group and finally found itself in the clutches of one of the Darth Vaders of newspaper owners, Conrad Black. And Joe was still there to greet me with a big smile and handshake.
He was a genuinely nice person who served his community and his constituents with passion and class.
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