If Dalton Camp heard me say that an important voice on the left has been lost,he would probably chuckle with that warm, irrepressible laugh of his. What an irony. The man who remained a Tory till the day he died emerged as one of the few voices on the left in the Canadian media.

Some used to joke that it was his heart transplant that moved him left. “He must have gotten the heart of a socialist,” a friend who had a transplant at about the same time told me. But I think it was that everyone else in his circles had moved so far to the right. He was the last honest Red Tory.

Born an American, I could never understand the concept of a Red Tory. To me, a Tory is a Tory, and that’s a right-winger. Former Toronto mayor David Crombie once gave this explanation for why he was in the Conservative Party: “The Tory’s were always more progressive on human-rights issues than the Liberals,” said Crombie. Camp — along with Crombie, Flora MacDonald and others — was often further to left than most Liberals. For this rare type of Tory, the progressive in Progressive Conservative was not an oxymoron.

The famous Morningside political panel, which aired on CBC radio in the 1980s, was made up of Stephen Lewis, Eric Kierans and Dalton Camp. Then, Camp represented a rightwing point of view. But in those days, the political flavour was liberal; today, the rage is in all things neo-con, for a politician or a pundit. How times have changed.

Dalton Camp resisted the massive shift to the right so hard that he moved pretty far to the left. Before he fell ill, he wrote numerous columns opposing the war on Afghanistan. Here’s an excerpt from the last column he wrote before he fell ill with an ultimately fatal stroke:

As Canadians, we face a curious dilemma. Our national priority has become “America’s War.” The approved emotion is American patriotism. To be objective, or critical, or doubting, invites prime ministerial disapproval. In fact, to be perfectly candid — despite the risks in saying so — this is not a war that makes sense for Canada.

He was one of our best polemicists, especially when he went after the corporate elite:

For the past decade, and longer, the corporations have had their way with government. While the boom was on, corporations assumed heroic dimensions. Their demands upon the citizenry enjoyed the virtues of brevity and simplicity and went largely uncontested. All they wanted was more. The public media came to resemble a counting house, scorekeepers for the new investor class, diarists and hagiographers to the new titans of commerce.

He was a relentless critic of the rightwing of his own party:

The core of the party’s presumed representatives talk about arch-conservatism or Toryism as a child’s crayoned copycat vision of American Republicanism. It is a political talent contest in which the winner gets to visit Dick Cheney.

I suspect the time will come — perhaps, soon — when we will clearly see the Harris years as those of squandered opportunities, of abandoned responsibilities and crippling narrowness of vision.

Dalton Camp represented the best of partisan politics. His was a razor-sharp wit and an honest assessment of the issues of the day. He saved his best vitriol for the Alliance and its hapless leader, Mr. Day:

Put another way: The destruction of our once viable political system, and of true national politics, has come at the hand of those who helped in the invention of Stockwell Day and the make-believe component of “anti-Liberalism.” Out of this, of course, the Canadian people got nothing but the circus to distract them from their loss.

For me, his most surprising column was one that recognized the leadership of women in social-justice movements:

Good men are exceedingly hard to find so that the protection of the public virtue and its interests has been left to a few good women; (Elizabeth May) is one of them.

Let me enlarge upon this last point: May, yes and Naomi Klein, Linda McQuaig, Maude Barlow, Alexa McDonough, in no particular order, but enough to say that while the self-anointed arbiters of probity and propriety can’t find a way to deal with this female presence, the country would be in far worse shape without them.

He called it as he saw it, and in that he was a rare voice in media and politics. I will miss him terribly.

Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick is one of Canada’s best-known feminists. She was the founding publisher of rabble.ca , wrote our advice column auntie.com and was co-host of one of our first podcasts called Reel Women....