Hugh Segal/The Anglican Journal

 

Thomas S. Axworthy

August 10, 2023

In 1699, at the passing of his mentor, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift wrote, “All that was good and amiable in mankind departed with him.” That is the sentiment in Canada’s political community today on the passing of Hugh Segal.

Hugh lived an engaged life with an astonishing list of accomplishments in a variety of domains, all of which contributed to placing him among the foremost public policy intellectuals in Canada. He came to his love of politics and the Progressive Conservative Party early. The opening scene of his book The Long Road Back is the 1962 visit of Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker to Hugh’s Montreal school, the storied United Talmud Torah Academy. Thunderstruck by the force of Diefenbaker’s speech, Hugh Segal decided then and there, at the tender age of 12: “I was a conservative and a Conservative.”

That conviction never left him: at the age of 21 he ran for a seat in Parliament in Ottawa Centre supporting the leadership of Robert Stanfield. He became Associate Cabinet Secretary to Premier William Davis, then Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party in 1998 and was appointed to the Senate in 2005 by Paul Martin, a Liberal, demonstrating how much his talents were appreciated by members of every party.

Hugh’s political expertise and experience were the bedrock of his effectiveness as a public policy leader — he never forgot that public policy must be adopted as well as formulated, but he added to this core many other gifts. He was deeply read in political philosophy and biography – Oakeshott, Churchill, Disraeli, and even William F. Buckley were often cited — and wrote a score of books on subjects as disparate as the Constitution, electoral politics, foreign policy, defence and social policy.

He was President of the Montreal-based think tank the Institute for Research on Public Policy for several years and was long associated with the School of Policy Studies at Queens University. He retired from the Senate in 2014 to become Principal of Massey College, University of Toronto. Not surprisingly, given the richness of this background, he was invited to contribute to a host of institutions, including the Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth, the Trilateral Commission, the Canadian Defence and Foreign Policy Institute and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, whose board he chaired. Perhaps the association he most treasured was being made an Honorary Captain of the Royal Canadian Navy and, long before the war in Ukraine, he regularly called for a more robust security policy.

What made him stand out was that his personality sparkled: you were never with him without leaving with a smile on your face and hope in your heart.

In his lifetime of work in so many different areas, it is difficult to highlight which of his many contributions made the most impact, but I will mention two. First, for more than a generation, Hugh Segal was the leader, both in thought and in active politics, in promoting progressive conservatism. He believed in the tenets of classical conservatism; the rule of law, order, tradition, a strong defence-but combined this with a commitment to fairness, compromise and sharing. His advice to his party was to “reach out to all those who share a clear focus on collaborative and humane conservatism, which is about not wedge politics and narrow ideology, but inclusion and opportunity.” Not for him the assault of radical populists who, in the name of conservatism, overturn established institutions and due process.

These strands in his approach to politics and policy come together in the policy idea for which he is best known, the need to have a concerted fight to end poverty in Canada. Hugh Segal was a supporter of the policy mechanism of a guaranteed annual income, an idea he’d known about since the party policy discussions initiated by Robert Stanfield in the late 1960s, as he wrote in his last book,  Boot Straps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada.

While principal of Massey College, he accepted an assignment to prepare a detailed discussion paper for the Ontario government on how a basic income might be tested through a planned pilot project (the Doug Ford Government, upon achieving office, promptly killed the project). Segal, who was always guided by political realities, acknowledged that “the road to basic, affordable, and engaged economic opportunity for the poor in Canada is in steep incline.” Just as characteristically, he vowed   that “the battle has not ended”

So, Hugh Segal was a skilled policy analyst with deep political skills devoted to his party, to the public interest and to public education. That is worthy but that alone is not what made him special. What made him stand out was that his personality sparkled: you were never with him without leaving with a smile on your face and hope in your heart. His sense of humour was so much a part of Hugh and so intertwined with his intellect and attitude toward life and politics, that it’s impossible to remember him with anything but a smile — on his face and yours. He loved telling jokes on himself, and fully crediting those of other people, as though paying forward the laugh was a mitzvah.

After his party was decimated in the 1993 election to a lonely pair of MPs, he loved recounting the story of his lunch at Chez Piggy, the landmark Kingston restaurant, where the owner, former Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist Zal Yanovsky, mischievously called out “Segal — party of two!”. He was loyal to his ideas and to his friends: after he fell on an icy winter day outside the Senate seriously injuring his head, he called up several friends (including me) urging us to get footwear with little spikes for better grip. I recall him, attending his first official function at Massey College, having to sit in a chair in the quadrangle because of his injury, yet meeting all with a smile, with every student enjoying a quip and a personal guide to the college.

I write this appreciation in my den under a photo of Hugh Segal at Mamma Teresa’s restaurant in Ottawa, where we spent so much time together negotiating over the Constitution in 1981. In it, Hugh is laughing, and that image of him, brimming with good humour and bringing joy to others, is one I always share with everyone who was lucky enough to know him.

Contributing Writer Thomas S. Axworthy is Public Policy chair at Massey College, University of Toronto.