COPPLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-01-16 published
Bluesman made his mark
Canadian harpist's brush with greatness was frustrated by his
battle with the bottle
By Bruce Farley
MOWAT
Special to The Globe and Mail Thursday,
January 16, 2003, Page R9
He will be remembered for creating some of the high water marks
in the history of popular music in Canada. Blues harpist Richard
NEWELL, also known as King Biscuit Boy, has died. He was found
dead at his house in Hamilton on January 5.
Richard NEWELL's story is the stuff of legend, but not legendary.
The Oxford Canadian Dictionary defines legend as "a traditional
story sometimes popularly regarded as historical, but unauthenticated."
Nearly all the career anecdotes surrounding King Biscuit Boy
have been verified. Yes, he really was recruited for the Allman
Brothers in 1969, for Janis
JOPLIN's Full Tilt Boogie Band in
1970 and for a mid-seventies session with Aretha
FRANKLIN.
The
stellar Houston blues guitarist, Albert
COLLINS was recording
a version of Mr.
NEWELL's
Mean
Old
Lady, before he died in 1994.
Mr. NEWELL, though, would rarely volunteer to offer up such information,
unless you prodded him for it. He didn't think it was important.
He was born the
son of Lily and Walter (Dick)
NEWELL, an Royal
Air Force airman stationed in Canada during the Second World
War. Richard
NEWELL developed an early interest in music, from
the country of Hank
WILLIAMS
Sr. to the jump blues of Louis
JORDAN,
to the frenetic sounds of such original rock 'n' rollers as Little
Richard. At age 12, he purchased his first harmonica after discovering
the blues via late-night AM radio.
Mr. NEWELL spent seven years rehearsing his ever-expanding collection
of blues 45s, which he purchased on regular hitchhiking forays
to Buffalo. Few of his Friends at the time were even aware that
he played harmonica and guitar.
In 1963, Ronnie
COPPLE's sock-hop rock 'n' roll group, the Barons,
recruited Mr.
NEWELL as its lead singer. Mr.
NEWELL had heard
a recording of their instrumental original, Bottleneck, and came
by with an record by the prototypical American electric blues
slide guitarist, Elmore
JAMES.
Within weeks of his joining, the group was transfigured into
the flat-out, deep blues band, The Chessmen Featuring son Richard.
The sound was guitar driven and harmonica-heavy, certainly not
the type of thing you'd find at the average mid-sixties Southern
Ontario teen dance. The band made it to Europe the following
summer, playing successful shows at U.S. Army bases to predominantly
black audiences.
Back in Canada, Mr.
NEWELL would go on to become the lead singer
of Richie Knight and The Mid Knights in 1966. He also made his
debut professional recording at this time, as a session harmonica
player on a recording by country singer, Dallas
HARMS, best known
for writing such hits as Paper Rosie for American country singer
Gene WATSON.
When ex-Mid Knight and future Full Tilt Boogie band member Rick
BELL was recruited for the Ronnie
HAWKINS band in 1968, Mr.
NEWELL's
name came up. After one audition, he was hired on the spot and
rechristened with the royal King Biscuit Boy moniker, a title
he was never totally comfortable with.
Back in his native Arkansas,
HAWKINS had rehearsed in the basement
of the old
KFFA radio station where blues harpist, Sonny Boy
Williamson 2nd (Rice
MILLER,) did his King Biscuit Flour Hour
broadcasts. To
HAWKINS,
Mr.
NEWELL must have sounded like a letter
from home.
When JOPLIN scooped
BELL and guitarist John
TILL from
HAWKINS's
band early in 1970, Mr.
NEWELL and drummer Larry
ATAMANUIK were
left with the task of re-assembling the band. That group would
become the first King Biscuit Boy-led outfit, Crowbar. In a fit
of pique, HAWKINS had inadvertently given the band its name in
an exchange of parting shots at the Grange Tavern in Hamilton.
"You guys are so dumb," he yelled, "you could fuck up the moving
parts of a crowbar."
As the bandleader, singer, harmonica player and guitarist on
Official
Music,
Mr.
NEWELL was responsible for building a razor-sharp
and singularly intense sound. The rehearsals for these sessions
were apparently tension-laden affairs, but the payoff came when
the album muscled its way on to the Canadian charts, (without
the benefit of Canadian-content regulations), the fastest-selling
domestic release to date.
Mr. NEWELL and the band would part ways after King Biscuit Boy
and Crowbar had scored on the singles chart with the traditional
piece, Corrina, Corrina. In 1971, Crowbar (without King Biscuit
Boy) earned a place on the bestseller charts with a song that
was to become a perennial Canuck rock anthem. Oh, What a Feeling
was the first domestic single to take advantage of the newly
legislated Canadian-content rules for broadcasting.
Fate intervened throughout the following years to rob Mr.
NEWELL
of his career momentum. The backing band he assembled to promote
Good 'Uns, the 1971 followup to Official Music, was beginning
to work on a third album, when the funding for it ran out.
With the momentum lost, that unit disintegrated, with guitarist
Earl JOHNSON leaving to form the hard-rock outfit, Moxy.
In 1974, sessions produced by Allen
TOUSSAINT, the architect
of many a New Orleans Rhythm and Blues classic, would culminate
in the Epic label release of a self-titled recording. Mr.
NEWELL
would tour the United States the following year with The Meters
(featuring future members of the Neville Brothers) as his backup
band. When the Epic label cleaned house later that year, though,
he was one of the acts dropped.
In 1972, Mr.
NEWELL wed Jacqueline
WILLETTS but found that married
life did not curb his increasingly frequent drinking binges.
The couple divorced in 1979. Alcoholism was also the source of
most of his professional woes for the better part of his life,
as key shows were either cancelled, or worse, rendered into shambles.
Musicians who worked with him tended to admire him, but found
it incredibly frustrating that such an enormous talent was being
squandered.
At several junctures in his career, Mr.
NEWELL managed to quit
drinking. Of the three albums he recorded and released in the
eighties and nineties, two were the direct dividends of his abstinence.
Those recordings earned him Juno nominations, in 1988 for Richard
NEWELL aka King Biscuit Boy,and in 1996 for Urban Blues Re:
NEWELL.
The latter is still in print on Holger Peterson's Stony Plain
label. Official Music, along with Good'Uns and Badly Bent, a
best-of compilation, are available on the Unidisc label (http://www.unidisc.com).
The rest of the King Biscuit Boy catalogue, including the 1980
Mouth of Steel album, is out of print.
In 2000, Mr.
NEWELL's mother died and he left regular stage work,
preferring the seclusion of his home in the central Mountain
neighbourhood of Hamilton. His last recordings include a version
of Blue Christmas, available on the Hamilton Hometown Christmas
Compact Disk compilation assembled by saxophonist and long-time
friend, Sonny
DEL
RIO. An original composition, Two Hound Blues,
along with material recorded by
DEL
RIO and Mr.
NEWELL in the late
seventies (the Biscuit With Gravy sessions) is planned for release
this year.
Mr. NEWELL, who leaves his father Dick, brother Walter (Randy,)
and son Richard James Oddie, made his last public performance
in a cameo appearance with The Little Red Blues Gang on September
12, 2002, at Mermaids Lounge in Hamilton. The 60 or so audience
members present were treated to a version of his hit, Corrina,
Corrina, which is strange, because he never particularly cared
for that song.
Richard Alfred
NEWELL, musician; born March 9, 1944, in Hamilton
died in Hamilton, January 5, 2003.
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COPPS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-01-22 published
She danced on tabletops of Ottawa
Former reporter with capital connections hosted parties for the
powerful and waged a spirited campaign to save railway cabooses
By Randy RAY
Special to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, January
22, 2003, Page R5
Most who knew her have a story to tell about Starr
SOLOMON, a
journalist and public-relations practitioner who for years hosted
glamorous parties in Ottawa that attracted a who's who of cabinet
ministers, bureaucrats and media people.
Ms. SOLOMON, the widow of Hy
SOLOMON, former Ottawa bureau chief
for The Financial Post, has died in Toronto. She was 64.
Long-time friend and colleague Walter
GRAY/GREY remembers the time
Ms. SOLOMON convinced former Prime Minister Brian
MULRONEY and
Liberal
Member of Parliament Sheila
COPPS -- for years Mr.
MULRONEY's
nemesis -- to sing together at the National Press Club in Ottawa
in the mid-1980s, following the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery
dinner.
"They sang a duet. The song was You Made Me Love You," says Mr.
GRAY/GREY, a former Globe and Mail bureau chief in Ottawa, who played
the piano while the two politicians crooned in tandem. Ms.
COPPS
is now Canada's heritage minister.
Edna HAMPTON, one of Ms.
SOLOMON's closest Friends, said acquaintances,
colleagues and politicians always looked forward to dinner parties
at the SOLOMON home in Ottawa's trendy Glebe neighbourhood. Trouble
was, you never knew when the meal would be served.
"I always used to eat first because the parties would zip along
and she would let dinner go. You might eat at 8, you might eat
at 11 . . . but you always knew the food would be good," said
Ms. HAMPTON, a retired journalist.
Ms. SOLOMON was born in Ottawa and moved to North Bay, Ontario,
as a child, where she attended elementary and high school. In
the late 1950s, she landed a reporting job with The North Bay
Nugget, where Ms.
HAMPTON was a senior reporter at the time.
Later, The Ottawa Citizen hired her as a reporter and she wrote
under the byline Starr
COTE, the surname of her first husband.
"She was always full of energy and fond of fun assignments,"
recalls Ms.
HAMPTON. "
She would cover anything from a royal tour
to a St. Patrick's Day event up the Ottawa Valley."
Among her plum assignments was the visit to Ottawa by U.S. president
John F. KENNEDY and his wife, Jacqueline. She also wrote restaurant
reviews for The Citizen, where she developed a reputation as
a lively writer who was quick-witted, entertaining and personal.
Ms. SOLOMON often fought it out for the big local stories with
Joyce FAIRBAIRN, a reporter with the now-defunct Ottawa Journal.
Ms. FAIRBAIRN later became a Senator.
Ms. SOLOMON left The Citizen in the mid-1960s and moved to Toronto,
where she worked with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as
a writer/producer. She married Mr.
SOLOMON on January 23, 1966.
The couple lived in Toronto until Mr.
SOLOMON was transferred
to Washington to open a bureau for The Financial Post.
When the
SOLOMONs returned to Ottawa, Ms.
SOLOMON and a partner
formed a public-relations firm. She quickly became a fixture
in the city's media and political circles, a move Mr.
GRAY/GREY calls
"networking at its best. She had a wide range of Friends and
she used these connections to her greatest advantage. I wish
I had her Rolodex."
For about 10 years in the 1980s, Ms.
SOLOMON and Mr.
GRAY/GREY worked
at the same public-relations firm, where they teamed up on a
variety of projects.
"There was the day the African chief Butelezi arrived in Ottawa
as a front for a group of Canadian businesses trying to develop
business relations with South Africa. I was assigned to shepherd
the chief around town," says Mr.
GRAY/GREY. "
Starr was to accompany
his lady, the lovely Princess Irene, whose sole interest was
to shop -- especially at Zellers. As they made their departure
laden down with Zellers bags. I think the princess gave Starr
a tip for her services."
The pair also worked together on an unsuccessful campaign to
stop the Canadian National Railway from eliminating railway cabooses.
"The cabooses disappeared, but to this day, the Save the Caboose
sweatshirt has been the most comfortable sweatshirt in our respective
wardrobes," says Mr.
GRAY/GREY.
Over the years Ms.
SOLOMON volunteered her public-relations skills
for many campaigns. She was a founding member of the Legal Education
and Action Fund, which was established to advance women's equality
rights, and served on the board of directors of the Ottawa Civic
Hospital.
As a couple, the
SOLOMONs were known in Ottawa for throwing glamorous
parties, some planned, some spontaneous, that attracted the leading
cabinet ministers, writers and journalists of the day. Ms.
SOLOMON
entertained and amused guests with her wit and political insights,
while her husband was an engaging conversationalist whose business
and political insights held the attention of politicians and
bureaucrats.
Those who attended their soirees remember Ms.
SOLOMON as a welcoming
hostess and terrific cook, whose specialty was Greek and Mediterranean
dishes. When guests arrived, she was always beautifully dressed
and "the records were on the turntable," recalls Mr.
GRAY/GREY. "
Patsy
Cline was her favourite. But also lots of jazz -- her friend
Brian Browne, Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones." Often guests would
sing and dance around the
SOLOMONs' dining-room table.
"We did have serious discussions on serious subjects, from time
to time," adds Mr.
GRAY/GREY.
Former Ottawa Citizen food editor and restaurant reviewer Kathleen
WALKER remembers Ms.
SOLOMON as "literally . . . the kind of
person who danced on tabletops. She was just wonderful and wild.
We had a ball together. Great sense of humour. A terrific lady."
She will also be remembered as a great friend "who was there
in thick and thin if you had a problem," says Mr.
GRAY/GREY.
After her husband died in 1991, Ms.
SOLOMON moved back to Toronto,
where she did volunteer consulting and public relations work
for various organizations, including Legal Education and Action
Fund and a Greek nursing home. She was also a trustee of the
Hyman SOLOMON
Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism,
established to honour her husband's legacy.
Ms. SOLOMON leaves her two sons, Adam and Ben, two grandchildren
and two brothers. A celebration of her life is to be held at
the National Press Club in Ottawa on January 29 at 5: 30 p.m.
Starr SOLOMON, journalist, public-relations specialist; born
Ottawa, February 27, 1938; died Toronto, January 3, 2003.
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COPPS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-20 published
Trudeau-era cabinet minister John
MUNRO dies, aged 72
By Jeff GRAY/GREY
With reports from Campbell
CLARK and Canadian Press
Wednesday, August 20, 2003 - Page A2
Former
Trudeau cabinet minister John
MUNRO, whose federal political
career ended with a lengthy legal fight, died yesterday of a
heart attack in his Hamilton home. He was 72.
Former colleagues remembered Mr.
MUNRO, the member from Hamilton-East
from 1962 to 1984, as a politician who fought hard for working
people around the cabinet table, where he held several key portfolios.
"I think he was a feisty, progressive person of conviction, and
was, I guess, part of a somewhat diminishing breed called a real
Liberal," said Lloyd
AXWORTHY, who served in cabinet with Mr.
MUNRO in the early 1980s.
Mr. MUNRO, a Hamilton lawyer, was re-elected eight times and
was a cabinet minister for most of the years between 1968 and
1984, handling health and welfare, labour and Indian affairs.
As minister of welfare, he brought in the Guaranteed Income Supplement,
which helped lift many senior citizens out of poverty.
But in 1989, after he left government, an Royal Canadian Mounted
Police investigation accused him of corruption during his time
as a minister. The charges were eventually thrown out, but Mr.
MUNRO, hobbled by an estimated $1-million in legal bills, launched
a civil suit to get the government to cover his costs. He eventually
received about $1.4-million in a settlement.
Prime▼
Minister▼
Jean▼
CHRÉTIEN, who was elected to Parliament a
year after Mr.
MUNRO, remembered him as a hard-working minister.
"We were very good Friends, and I'm terribly sorry that he passed
away, and I would like to offer my condolences to his family,"
Mr. CHRÉTIEN told reporters. "He was a very good member of Parliament,
and he was a very good minister and a guy who worked very, very
hard in all the files that was given to him."
Heritage
Minister
Sheila
COPPS, the minister from Hamilton and
daughter of the city's former mayor, said Mr.
MUNRO gave her
some political lessons when she served as a poll captain for
his election in 1968.
"He was a great Canadian; he was a great parliamentarian, and
also someone who will be sorely missed in Hamilton. He was well
loved, and had politics in his blood."
Tom AXWORTHY, who was prime minister Pierre
TRUDEAU's principal
secretary, said Mr.
MUNRO was a key figure in Mr.
TRUDEAU's cabinet.
"He was a man who always had a great heart. He had tremendous
empathy for the disadvantaged," he said.
Mr. TRUDEAU looked to Mr.
MUNRO to fight for his social liberal
positions at cabinet meetings, his former aide said. "When we
had those kind of debates, he would kind of look over to
MUNRO
when he wanted to hear the liberal perspective on the issue."
The▼ complex political scandal left Mr.
MUNRO fighting for his
reputation, instead of Liberal policies.
"That was a sad and distracting end to what had been a pretty
good career," Tom
AXWORTHY said.
"He'd spent his whole life fighting battles for the little guy,
and then he ended fighting all kinds of battles against allegations
and so on."
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police filed more 37 charges against
Mr. MUNRO -- corruption, breach of trust, fraud, conspiracy and
theft -- going back to his time as minister of Indian affairs.
At the centre of the case was the allegation that part of a $1.5-million
grant to the National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of
First
Nations) actually went toward Mr.
MUNRO's usuccessful 1984
Liberal leadership bid.
The 1991 trial lasted several months, but the judge tossed out
the charges before even hearing evidence from the defence.
Things did start to turn around. In mid-1998, Hamilton's airport,
which he fought hard to expand, was named after him.
"In a time when Canada, I think, needs liberal voices, we've
lost a great one," Tom
AXWORTHY said.
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COPPS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-30 published
A man of uncommon passion and drive
Despite hints of scandal, the scrappy former Liberal member of
parliament, who spent a lifetime fighting for social safety nets,
earned a reputation as a tireless crusader for the working people
By Ron CSILLAG
Special to the Globe and Mail; With a report from
staff Saturday, August 30, 2003 - Page F8
He died with his boots on.
John MUNRO, a Trudeau era Liberal warhorse once described as
a rumpled fighter who had gone too many rounds, had just put
the finishing touches to a barn-burning speech, to be delivered
to a Rotary Club, on the evils of concentration of media ownership
when he suffered at heart attack at his desk in his Hamilton
home on August 19. He was 72.
It was almost just as well that he went suddenly, his daughter,
Anne, said in a eulogy, for her father could not stand suffering.
Rather, he would not abide it. Suffering had no place in Canada,
he reasoned, which is why his name is so closely associated with
such social safety nets as medicare, the Canada Pension Plan
and improvements to Old Age Security.
More than 500 well-wishers, including old political pals, steel-workers,
artists, business people and labourers, packed the James Street
Baptist Church last Saturday to laud Hamilton's favourite son,
a scrappy lawyer who earned a reputation as a tireless crusader
for working people, despite the recurring taint of scandal.
As the Member of Parliament for Hamilton East from 1962 to 1984
and through five cabinet posts, he was proudly on the left of
the Liberal Party, alongside people such as Allan
MacEACHEN,
Judy LAMARSH,
Lloyd
AXWORTHY, Eugene
WHELAN -- and probably Pierre
TRUDEAU himself -- fighting for medicare, against capital punishment
and in favour of a guaranteed annual income. As minister of national
health and welfare, he didn't win the battle for a guaranteed
annual income, but he did get the Guaranteed Income Supplement
that has made life easier for many seniors. He was also known
and often ridiculed -- for being a chain-smoking health minister.
Prime▲
Minister▲
Jean▲
CHRÉTIEN, who entered Parliament a year after
Mr. MUNRO, mourned the death of his former cabinet colleague.
"We were very good Friends, and I'm terribly sorry that he passed
away. He was a very good member of Parliament, and he was a very
good minister and a guy who worked very, very hard in all the
files that were given to him."
The▲ political bug bit early. At 18, Mr.
MUNRO ran for president
of the Tribune Society at Westdale Secondary School in Hamilton.
Mark NEMIGAN, a lifelong friend, remembers his resourcefulness:
"He went to a local bus stop and festooned all the park benches
with banners reading, 'Vote for John.' It worked too. He had
uncommon drive and passion, even then."
Born in Hamilton on March 26, 1931, to lawyer John Anderson
MUNRO
and Katherine
CARR, a housewife, John Carr
MUNRO became a municipal
alderman at the age of 23 while attending law school at Osgoode
Hall in Toronto.
"I have no idea how he did that," Mr.
NEMIGAN says. "The guy
didn't sleep."
Mr. MUNRO took his first run at federal politics in the seat
of Hamilton West in 1957, but was beaten by Ellen
FAIRCLOUGH,
who went on to become Canada's first female cabinet minister.
In 1962, he switched ridings, and won the seat he would hold
for the next 22 years.
With the election of Mr.
TRUDEAU in 1968, a string of cabinet
positions followed for Mr.
MUNRO: minister without portfolio,
amateur sport, health and welfare, labour and Indian affairs
and northern development, the last earning him the hard-won respect
of aboriginal groups.
In the 1968 general election, an aggressive young poll captain
named Sheila
COPPS worked on Mr.
MUNRO's re-election bid. She
would go on to replace him in the seat in 1984.
Tom AXWORTHY, who was Mr.
TRUDEAU's principal secretary, recalled
that the prime minister often turned to Mr.
MUNRO for support
on progressive positions at the cabinet table: "When we had those
kind of debates, he would kind of look over to
MUNRO when he
wanted to hear the liberal perspective on the issue."
Mr. MUNRO's support for the decriminalization of marijuana led
to a perk in December, 1969: A 90-minute chat about drugs with
John LENNON and Yoko
ONO, fresh from the duo's "bed-in" at Montreal's
Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Documents unearthed this spring by a researcher
for an Ottawa Beatles Web site revealed that Mr.
LENNON joked
that while Mr.
TRUDEAU and Mr.
MUNRO, then health minister, were
members of the "establishment," they were both "hip."
"Mr. MUNRO's speech [on the decriminalization of marijuana] was
the only political speech I ever heard about that had anything
to do with reality that came through to me," Mr.
LENNON is quoted
as saying in the 12,000-word document.
Contacted by a reporter in May, Mr.
MUNRO recalled that the incident,
and his stand on cannabis, didn't go over well. "Yeah, I was
in a little hot water at the time," he laughed. "Everybody thought
I wanted to give the country to the junkies."
Mr. LENNON and Ms.
ONO made a distinct impression, he said. "The
more I think about it, the more I remember he and his wife were
very polite and committed people."
In 1974, the water became considerably hotter when the Royal
Canadian
Mounted
Police raided Mr.
MUNRO's campaign headquarters
during a probe into kickbacks and bid rigging on Hamilton Harbour
dredging contracts.
Around the same time, Mr.
MUNRO was criticized for accepting
a $500 campaign donation from a union whose leaders were under
investigation.
In 1978, he was forced to resign from the cabinet when it was
revealed that he had talked to a judge by telephone to give a
character reference for a constituent on the day of the person's
sentencing for assault. But he bounced back with a tenacity that
Mr. TRUDEAU was said to have admired and in 1980 won reappointment
to the cabinet.
Mr. MUNRO's stamp on Hamilton was legendary, from the reclamation
of land that gave the city Confederation Park, to the Canada
Centre for Inland Waters, to the fundraising of more than $50-million
for the local airport, renamed in his honour in 1998. "Without
a doubt, he was the feistiest, most stubborn person I knew in
public life," former mayor Bob
MORROW remarked. "I don't think
we will ever meet his equal of scaring up funds for Hamilton."
When Mr. TRUDEAU retired in 1984, Mr.
MUNRO ran for the Liberal
leadership and prime minister. He finished a poor fifth in a
field of six. There began what his daughter called the "decade
from hell," starting with a four-year Royal Canadian Mounted
Police investigation so vigorous, the Mounties even considered
using a helicopter to track Mr.
MUNRO because the officers assigned
to tail him couldn't keep up with his car.
That investigation killed a re-election bid in 1988 and scuttled
his marriage to Lilly Oddie
MUNRO, a minister in the former Ontario
Liberal government. It eventually produced 37 flimsy charges
of breach of trust, conspiracy, corruption, fraud and theft stemming
from his years as Indian affairs minister. After a trial that
dragged on for most of 1991, the judge threw out nearly all the
charges without even calling for defence evidence. The Crown
later withdrew the rest.
Mr. MUNRO welcomed the verdict as "complete exoneration" but
was left with legal bills estimated at nearly $1-million and
a reputation in ruins. Swimming in debt (he had to rely on Ontario
Legal Aid), he filed a civil suit in 1992, claiming malicious
prosecution and maintaining he had been targeted by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police to embarrass him. He attempted a political
comeback in 1993, only to have Mr.
CHRÉTIEN refuse to sign his
nomination papers. Mr.
MUNRO responded by filing an unsuccessful
court challenge seeking to strip Mr.
CHRÉTIEN of his power to
appoint candidates.
Mr. MUNRO, who had returned to an immigration law practice in
Hamilton, felt betrayed by the government's refusal to pay his
legal bills, and it took an emotional toll.
"I'm not mad at the world," he said in 1996. "I realized this
could totally destroy me if I didn't live a day at a time. You
have to impose discipline, or you're finished. The motivation
to carry on is voided. There's nothing to look forward to except
endless grief."
He finally won nearly $1.4-million in compensation from Ottawa
in 1999, but most of the money went to pay taxes, legal bills
and other expenses. He could have avoided problems by declaring
bankruptcy, but insisted on clearing his debts.
"He was no saint, but he was dedicated and hardworking," said
his daughter Susan. "He was deeply hurt."
Mr. MUNRO had no interest in the personal trappings of wealth,
she said, adding that he had a weakness only for Chevy Chevettes
and homemade muffins. Good thing too, for a proposal for bankruptcy
he filed in 1995 showed a monthly living balance of $476.
His last political gasp came in 2000 when he ran unsuccessfully
for mayor of Hamilton. Asked in 1996 about writing his memoirs,
he said: "I'm not ready. There's no last chapter yet."
Mr. MUNRO leaves his third wife, Barbara, and four children.
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