Tom Kent, who was policy secretary to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, walks in the backyard of his home in Kingston.Merle Robillard For The Globe and Mail
Ed Broadbent had barely left the podium after announcing the foundation of the Broadbent Institute for Public Policy in June when he had a call from Tom Kent. A key policy guru for Lester Pearson, Kent wanted to write a paper for the new institute overhauling parts of the very same social network he had proposed, and which the Pearson Liberals had implemented, back in the 1960s.
With his customary journalistic dispatch, Kent, 89, sent an "incredibly lucid, very relevant" paper with a "progressive agenda for Canada" before the institute had set up the apparatus to process, let alone publish it. So, when Broadbent got an e-mail from Kent five months later, the former NDP leader thought he was being chivied about the delay in releasing the document. Instead, it was a message from Kent's family, delivered through Kent's own address list, saying that the former journalist and public intellectual had died of cardiac arrest after surgery for appendicitis.
It was a profoundly sad moment for Broadbent who had become close friends with Kent when they were both at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University a decade ago. Knowing him "was one of the great joys of my life," Broadbent said. "We had a total intellectual rapport." How a Liberal insider and a former leader of the NDP could share such an empathy, says a lot about Kent's own political values, which were unwaveringly left of centre, and his engagement –political and otherwise – with the well-being of his adopted country and everybody who lives here.
Kent, who retained his Geordie accent despite living here for 60 years, arrived in the mid 1950s with an Oxbridge education and an impressive résumé as a rising editorial star at The Economist. In Canada, he was primarily a behind the scenes thinker and strategist for Lester Pearson, but he was also editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, the founding deputy minister for two federal departments, the head of two crown corporations in Nova Scotia and the dean of the faculty of administrative studies at Dalhousie University.
Although he had found a home within the Liberal party, he wasn't a diehard partisan. He had openly criticized the deficit cutting measures of the Jean Chrétien/Paul Martin budgets in the mid- 1990s. As recently as six months ago, he had expressed his frustration with the Liberal Party in very strong terms with Interim Leader Bob Rae. Kent felt the party had "lost its sense of activism," which was a large factor in the party's drubbing in the last election; he suggested that Liberals should be more inventive about economic and social policy and the way the two came together, and he urged Rae not to forget that Canadians look to the federal government to play a leadership role in their lives. But that doesn't mean he was disillusioned with the Liberal Party, Rae said, arguing that he had never left the party or found one he preferred. To which Broadbent responded: he may have remained a Liberal, but he voted NDP.
The epitome of the backroom strategist and thinker, Kent's two most public forays were his least successful ventures. After two years serving as Lester Pearson's policy adviser, he was urged to run for the Liberals in the 1963 election, with the presumption that he would join the cabinet if he won a seat. He delayed seeking a nomination and ended up competing against Tommy Douglas in Burnaby-Coquitlam in what was probably "the safest NDP seat in the country," as Kent himself later said.
Kent was nobody's idea of a charismatic figure, and certainly not in comparison to Douglas, a fiery speaker who had honed his elocution skills as a Baptist minister. Still, Kent racked up 14,000 votes to Douglas's 19,000 tally – good but not enough to win a seat at the cabinet table for Pearson's first minority government. Instead, he became Pearson's chief of staff, although his title was the more long-winded, Co-ordinator of Programming and Policy Secretary.
Nearly two decades later, he went front and centre again. After the public furor about the simultaneous closing of the Thomson-owned Ottawa Journal and the Southam-owned Winnipeg Tribune in late August, 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed Kent to lead a public inquiry into media concentration. The other members were Borden Spears, a senior editor at The Toronto Star, and Laurent Picard, former president of the CBC. The trio held hearings across the country, which were avidly covered by print and broadcast media, and delivered wide-ranging recommendations in its 1981 report, calling for government oversight of newspaper acquisitions and barriers to cross-ownership of different media outlets. The recommendations about "freeing the press" were met with outrage in the editorial pages of the very newspapers the $3-million commission had investigated. They have never been implemented.
Mention the Kingston Conference of 1960, though, and Kent is talked about with reverence. Then, as now, the Liberal Party was in need of renewal. He was a key strategist for what was supposed to be a private, off the record, meeting of "liberally minded" thinkers. Kent was slated to deliver a paper on social security with economist and defeated Liberal candidate, Maurice Lamontagne, presenting one on economic policy. Instead, Pearson changed his mind at the last minute and opened the proceedings to the press and allowed many more participants to attend. Consequently Kent's discussion paper, which proposed an agenda for health care, unemployment insurance, training, regional development, public housing and equality of opportunity for post-secondary education, went public, caught the imagination of the press and the public and set the policy agenda not only for the Pearson government, but future generations of Canadians.
Thomas Worrall Kent was born into a working class family in Stafford in the English Midlands on April 3, 1922. Industry was hit hard in the worldwide economic depression in the 1930s and his father, Thomas, a mechanic who worked underground repairing machinery in the mines, was out of work for a time. He was "a man of principle, with strong political opinions and a major influence on his son," according to Kent's widow, Phyllida.
Secondary education was not free in those days, but Tom was a very smart boy who won scholarships to Wolstanton Grammar School and then Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He graduated in 1941, at barely 19, with a first in politics philosophy and economics, and was immediately recruited into the war-time intelligence service. He worked at Bletchley Park, with the code-breakers who had cracked what we now know as the ULTRA secret.
In his memoir, A Public Purpose, Kent writes that his "contribution to breaking ciphers was minor compared with the reward: it was this activity that brought my wife [Phyllida]and me together." She also worked at Bletchley Park. "He proposed to me on our first date and clearly expected me to accept him promptly," she said in an e-mail message, "which I surprised myself by doing." They were married on June 3, 1944, subsequently had three sons, Duncan, Oliver and Andrew, and celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary earlier this year.
After the war, Kent worked as an editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian, having been hired, in 1946, through connections forged at Bletchley. Kent more than earned his keep and by 1950 had a choice of becoming assistant editor of the Guardian or moving south to London to take on the same position at The Economist. How could he refuse, given that Geoffrey Crowther was editor-in-chief and Barbara Ward was foreign editor. Thanks to Crowther, Kent became the youngest member of the dining club that the late John Maynard Keynes had founded, sharing food and conversation with the likes of future prime minister Harold Macmillan and former chancellor of the exchequer, John Anderson, The next year, Kent made a trip to North America and spent three weeks in Canada at the invitation of the Winnipeg Free Press, for whom Kent, through his friendship with Frank Walker, the paper's London correspondent, had become a regular contributor. It was during this trip that Victor Sifton, publisher of the Free Press, invited Kent to become the paper's editor. Needless to say, the job offer seemed like thin gruel compared to London and The Economist.
By 1953, his dissatisfaction with the Labour government and its intransigent refusal to join Europe, which even then was contemplating a common market, made Kent rethink his rejection of the editorship of the Free Press. Fortunately the offer was still on the table. In the middle of 1954, the Kents sold up in England, moved into a rambling house in Winnipeg and began a new life. "We never regretted it," Phyllida Kent said.
Kent's editorship of the paper lasted five years, from 1954-1959 and ended in an editorial dispute with publisher Victor Sifton about the infamous firing of Harry Crowe, a professor at United College, the precursor of the University of Winnipeg. Sifton, who was Chancellor of the University of Manitoba, had aligned himself with the board of United College. Kent, accordingly, had muted the Free Press's editorial denunciations, but Sifton wanted more. He was incensed by the way reporters were covering the story, and during Kent's absence, the paper had run a piece favouring the administration of United College.
After leaving the Free Press, Kent worked in Montreal as a vice-president of Chemcell, part of the Celanese Corporation from 1959 to 1961, before moving to Ottawa with his family to join Pearson's staff. Pearson, who had won the leadership of the Liberal Party after the resignation of Louis St. Laurent in 1958, had led the party to a historic defeat in the election that year, in which Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won 208 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons.
Even as editor of the Free Press, Kent had been deeply involved in provincial and federal politics. An extraordinary spotter of political talent and a rapid and lucid writer, he was inclined, in an era when there weren't such stringent rules about conflicts of interest, to put his pen at the disposal of politicians he admired. They included the Red Tory, Duff Roblin, who became leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative party in 1954 and Premier in 1958 as well as Liberals. His links with Pearson preceded his own arrival in Canada. He drafted his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1957, his address to the Liberal Leadership Convention in 1958, and the party's campaign platform in the subsequent election. Kent was also close to Jean Lesage when he was a federal politician and especially after he switched to provincial politics and became Liberal Premier of Quebec in 1960 and began lighting the embers of the Quiet Revolution.
A significant Liberal politician with whom Kent did not have a strong rapport was Pierre Trudeau who succeeded Pearson as leader of the party and Prime Minister in 1968. By then, Kent had moved from Pearson's political staff to work in the bureaucracy as deputy minister of Manpower and Immigration (1966-68) and deputy minister of Regional and Economic Expansion (1969-71). Working with Jean Marchand, Pearson's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, he developed a plan for a superministry under Marchand that would combine manpower and regional development. Trudeau was not enthusiastic, so Kent made another career shift and moved to the Maritimes to put his public policy ideas into practice as the president and CEO of the Cape Breton Development Corporation (1971-77) and then as the head of the Sydney Steel Corporation (1977-79), before retreating into academe at Dalhousie University.
Those years living in the Maritimes deeply affected his sense of the regions and their relationship to the centre, a topic that, like so many other public policy issues, preoccupied him. Even on the verge of his ninth decade, he never stopped thinking and writing about the country and its institutions – for that alone he is an exemplar of the intellectually engaged citizen. He died on Nov. 15 in Kingston, where he had been living since the early 1990s with his wife Phyllida. He was 89.