Former B.C. minister of lands, forest and water resources Bob Williams shares a funny story as former NDP premier Dave Barrett is remembered and celebrated during a state memorial service in Victoria, B.C., on March 3, 2018. Bob Williams died July 7 at the age of 91.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
An old-fashioned political kingpin, who liked to operate out of the public eye, Bob Williams left a mark on the province of British Columbia few can match.
A strong, committed socialist, yet with a seemingly unerring entrepreneurial skill that set him apart from most of his left-leaning colleagues, Mr. Williams was the most powerful and far-reaching of the “Dirty Dozen” cabinet ministers who spearheaded dramatic changes that transformed the province during B.C.’s first NDP government in the early 1970s.
While Dave Barrett, the government’s folksy, flamboyant premier, was front and centre, Mr. Williams operated behind the scenes like a latter-day Wizard of Oz, pulling the levers of half a dozen ministries to ensure they stayed on course with policies that were both radical and workable.
His legacies from that time abound. It was Mr. Williams who oversaw legislation creating B.C.’s cherished Agricultural Land Reserve, preserving precious farmland throughout the province and putting a halt to urban sprawl on prime agricultural land.
Working closely with Nancy Greene Raine and her husband, Al Raine, Mr. Williams created a special resort designation for the village of Whistler – the first of its kind in Canada – that laid the foundation for its rise to one of the top winter sports destinations in the world.
In Vancouver, Mr. Williams quickly scrapped plans for a 52-storey office tower in the centre of the city. Calling celebrated architect Arthur Erickson from a phone booth on the proposed site, he hired him to do something different. The result was Robson Square, a much-lauded, low-rise complex consisting of a glass-roofed courthouse, an urban park and a people-friendly plaza with an open-air skating rink that, decades later, remains the heart of the city’s downtown.
He doubled B.C.’s provincial parkland, established the Islands Trust to protect the popular Gulf Islands from being overrun by development, and set up the B.C. Assessment Authority, another Canadian first, to provide a searchable database of the market assessment of all privately held property in the province.
Former NDP MLA Bob Williams responds to questioning at the so-called Bingogate inquiry in Vancouver on May 2, 2000.CHUCK STOODY/CP
Spurring a wave of public ownership, Mr. Williams also intervened in the private sector, with bold government purchases of two failing sawmills and pulp mills in Prince Rupert and Ocean Falls. Under Mr. Williams’s stewardship, all made money, and jobs were saved. When Canadian Pacific cancelled daily ferry service from Victoria to Seattle aboard the Princess Marguerite, the last of its renowned coastal steamships, Mr. Williams snapped it up, along with a large swath of the Victoria waterfront. The vessel was refurbished and the Seattle run relaunched to great public acclaim. “With my socialist roots, I didn’t realize I had entrepreneurial instincts until we were in government,” Mr. Williams reflected later.
During its abbreviated 39 months in office, the Barrett government chalked up a dizzying array of groundbreaking changes. Mr. Williams was its backroom catalyst. Not one for process or bureaucracy, he embraced the gospel of doing, rather than dithering, regardless of what people thought, and there were those who loathed him on both sides of the political spectrum. His self-confidence, “take-no-prisoners” approach and occasionally caustic tongue was tough on those seeing things differently.
Mr. Williams, who died July 7 at the age of 91, would not return to political power, after the NDP lost the 1975 provincial election. But that did not lessen his tireless quest to augment what he considered the public good, most notably when he turned his attention in the 1980s to the Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, now known as Vancity. By then, it had become relatively moribund and conservative.
Mr. Williams formed an Action Slate of activists to run for Vancity’s board of directors, which ousted the old guard. The new board, with Mr. Williams as chair, galvanized the credit union. It became more entrepreneurial, while broadening its lending policies to small and medium-sized businesses. As profits increased, Vancity further expanded its reach to socially progressive undertakings. Today, not only is Vancity Canada’s largest community credit union, it’s also recognized as the country’s most socially and environmentally responsible financial institution.
In no way a doctrinaire member of the NDP, Mr. Williams made a lot of money himself with canny real estate investments, and he endeared himself to Vancouver’s independent music scene by buying a railway union’s former private bar known as the Railway Club. Among the numerous up-and-coming Canadian acts the bar hosted over the years were k.d. lang, Blue Rodeo, the Tragically Hip, Cowboy Junkies and Barenaked Ladies. It was also the de rigueur watering hole for city lefties.
Robert Arthur Williams was born Jan. 20, 1933, in Vancouver. His mother, Peggy Chasteauneuf, was just 16. His father was another teenager, Arthur Pritchard. The times being what they were, the young Mr. Pritchard was jailed on a charge of having “carnal knowledge” of a woman not his wife.
Rather than give her son up for adoption, Ms. Chasteauneuf fled the Salvation Army home for unwed mothers, her baby in her arms. A few years later, she married David Williams, a carpenter.
Bob Williams did not learn the identity of his real father until he was 12. Eventually, he discovered that his grandfather was none other than Bill Pritchard, the fiery Vancouver socialist convicted of “seditious conspiracy” and sentenced to a year in prison for his speeches during the historic Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. During the Depression, Bill Pritchard was elected reeve of nearby Burnaby, presiding over council meetings at the same time as his son was in jail in the basement of City Hall. On his release, Arthur Pritchard was advised to leave town. He spent the rest of his life in California.
Mr. Williams grew up in East Vancouver, the poor side of the city peopled by workers, immigrants and those dealt a tough blow in life. His hardscrabble origins and a belief that society looked down on the less fortunate coloured much of his career. A sense of injustice that people got pigeon-holed or passed over because they didn’t have the right connections “just drove him,” said former NDP premier Glen Clark, also from East Vancouver. “It pushed him to make changes that someone born in comfort and affluence wouldn’t.”
After a stint working in Vancouver’s sewer department, Mr. Williams developed a thirst for urban planning that he never lost. Graduating from the University of British Columbia’s new school of planning, he was hired at the age of 26 as the first planner for the growing suburb of Delta, just as developers were beginning to gobble up the municipality’s large land base. When Mr. Williams resisted their desires once too often, he was fired.
Not long afterward, he ran for city council in Vancouver. Against all odds, he secured the 10th and last position on council, the first councillor from East Vancouver since the city’s power brokers abolished the ward system in the 1930s. That whetted his appetite for elected office. Two years later, he ran successfully for the provincial legislature as the NDP’s candidate in East Vancouver. Mr. Williams spent the next six years in opposition, earning a reputation as one of the fiercest adversaries of the entrenched Social Credit government led by W.A.C. Bennett.
Finally, in 1972, the NDP triumphed and Mr. Bennett was out, after 20 years in office. By then, Mr. Williams was married to party activist Lea Forsyth, helping to raise three children, a son and a daughter from her previous marriage, and a one-year-old of their own.
Mr. Williams was the incoming premier’s closest confidant. Both had graduated from Britannia High School in East Vancouver, and Mr. Barrett appreciated his ideas and smarts. The day after the NDP’s historic victory, the two strolled down to the Only Seafood Café in the Downtown Eastside for lunch to celebrate and map out the new government’s priorities and cabinet. At the bare-bones eatery, Mr. Williams wrote out a bunch of names and some key areas for action on the back of a manila envelope. Mr. Barrett agreed, and that was that.
It was a style of hands-on decision-making, uncluttered by political strategists or bureaucrats, that prevailed for much of the NDP’s time in office. Mr. Williams relished it. “The job of a politician is to use power well,” he wrote in his memoir. “And I believe I used power well.”
His elected political career came to an end in 1991. As recounted in his memoir, a Social Credit appointee let him know that they knew he was gay. Unsure how this might be used against him, Mr. Williams resigned before the next election. “I’d seen what happened to others,” he explained.
He was soon harnessed for his acumen by NDP premiers Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark, who governed B.C. for most of the 1990s. His freewheeling initiatives didn’t stop. He pushed forward lasting enterprises such as the West Coast commuter rail service into downtown Vancouver from the Fraser Valley; the Columbia Basin Trust that returns fiscal assets from the Columbia River Treaty for the social and economic benefit of those affected by the damming of the Columbia; and the transformation of an aging shopping mall into Surrey Central City, with a university campus, expanded mall and office tower designed by award-winning architect Bing Thom. Less successful was his promotion of a fleet of B.C.-built fast ferries, which turned into the biggest fiasco of the NDP’s decade in government.
An ideas man all his life, Mr. Williams had an agile mind that was engaged to the end. Mr. Clark recalled the last time the two talked. “He had this idea to connect the harbour with False Creek [an inlet on the west side of Vancouver] to create more waterfront” Mr. Clark said. “And you think, ‘Wow, that’s a wild idea.’ Then you start looking at it.”
Mr. Williams leaves his siblings, Fred, Don, David and Marilyn; stepchildren, Steve and Janet; daughter, Suzanne; and wife, Lea, from whom he was separated.
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