Maurice Foster died last Saturday. "Maurice Who?" most of you might ask.
From 1968 to 1993, through six elections, Dr. Foster (he was a veterinarian) represented Algoma in the House of Commons, a time when his Liberal Party dominated Northern Ontario, and the Ottawa Valley, too. He was almost dead centre in what we might call the red crescent of seats that stretched from the Manitoba border, across the North and down the Ottawa Valley to Cornwall.
Here and there, now and then, a Conservative or a New Democrat would steal a seat, or hold one for a few elections. But that band of seats was overwhelmingly Liberal.
Dr. Foster was nominated in 1968 in Algoma, the seat into which Lester Pearson had been parachuted in 1948. It was as Liberal as the rocks of Northern Ontario. He never made it to cabinet - there being so many Liberal MPs from the North vying for a spot - but he did his constituency labours well, served on House committees, and was admired as a decent, hard-working, straight up kind of man.
Northern Ontario produced a bunch of that kind of Liberal MP. (Keith Penner was another.) And the region produced the kind of people around a cabinet table who stuck up for the North, men such as Bob Andras from Thunder Bay, Jean-Jacques Blais from North Bay, Jim Jerome from Sudbury and, briefly, Doug Frith from Sudbury and the maverick John Reid from Kenora. Go far enough back - into the 1940s and 1950s - and you'll remember the most powerful Northern Ontario Liberal of them all: C.D. Howe from Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay).
The Ottawa River Valley (leave Ottawa out of the picture, it being a largish urban area) was mostly Liberal red, from Pembroke to Cornwall. It produced ministers such as Ed Lumley in Cornwall and Don Boudria from east of Ottawa, and solid MPs who won time after time such as Len Hopkins in Renfrew.
Franco-Ontarians across the red crescent were overwhelmingly Liberal. The names of former Liberal MPs reveal the deep roots among francophones: Ethier, Marleau, Bonin, St. Denis, Blais, Bélair. Liberals were very popular among so-called ethnic groups (Italians being the largest) that flocked to northern industrial cities and mining towns.
Mau Foster's death reminds us that the days of the red crescent are no more. The Liberal fortress has been crumbling for a few elections, with most of the remaining bricks falling in 2008. Only two Liberals remain in the North, and are a vanishing breed in the Ottawa Valley. When people analyze the decline of the Liberal Party nationally, the red crescent gets overlooked, but it shouldn't be.
The NDP, which always had a presence in the North, has been the principal beneficiary of the Liberal slide there, although the Conservatives now hold Kenora. The Tories have surged in the Ottawa Valley.
Some French-speaking voters have deserted the Liberals, and the franco-Ontarian population in the North and along the Ottawa Valley is in decline anyway. Third- and fourth-generation descendents of arrivals in Canada don't have the attachment to the Liberals of previous family generations. Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien (part of the Trudeau team) were greatly admired, their successors Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff much less so. Mr. Chrétien had an earthiness and approachability that his erudite, professional but not very political successors lacked.
The North has had its share of economic troubles, and the Liberals appear to have struggled to come up with answers. The same can be said for the Ottawa Valley, where only the city of Ottawa flourishes, while Renfrew, Pembroke and Cornwall suffer. It would appear that unionized voters, many of whom once ignored their pro-NDP leadership and voted in a majority for the Liberals, have slid somewhat toward the New Democrats.
Every riding in the old red crescent is different. Redistribution shuffled the boundaries repeatedly. Lots of riding-specific reasons, therefore, exist for the Liberal decline. But what would today's Liberals not give for a bunch of MPs such as Mau Foster, solid, hard-working, friendly politicians without airs but with convictions?