Memorial Service for Les Benjamin

 

 

June 27, 2003 Regina

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Bill Blaikie, MP

I want to begin by saying that I considered it a great honour to be asked to speak here today. Les Benjamin was a colleague of mine in the Federal NDP Caucus for 14 years, but he was a friend for 24 years. I had a visit with him here in Regina last year and had been in touch since then. I am sorry that the unexpected nature of his death prevented me from having the other visits with Les that I would surely have arranged as time and circumstance brought me to Regina once again. After 1992, whenever Les came to Ottawa, he would drop in on me and use my office as a place to operate out of, and to steal a smoke in. Les was known for his sense of humour, and for his constitution. He was a survivor, and no amount of medical trouble could keep him down. The words that come to many people’s minds when they think of Les are not hard to come by. He is invariably described as “a real trooper”, “a loyal soldier” someone who “stuck to his guns” and as Les often exhorted us in caucus “one who was prepared to follow his leader down the barrel of a gun”. Les knew that politics wasn’t for fairweather campers. Though he wasn’t one to stifle his opinion or keep only his own counsel, he knew when and where and how to be critical of his own, and he knew when not to.

 

 

For me, Les, and now his memory, epitomizes the best of what is meant by collegiality, collegiality within a party, but also collegiality between people of different Parties, and especially M.P.’s of different parties. Les’s work on the transport committee and the relationships he built there, represent a kind of collegiality in Parliament that has been hard to replicate in recent years. As he said in his book “Rolling in The Grass Roots”, we rarely hate each other, although we may hate what the other guy may say, or stand for”.

 

 

As for his NDP colleagues, Les was especially close to the class of 68. They are the main focus of his memoirs, and he missed those who were defeated in 1974 like a lost arm. He was also rightly proud of all that the caucus of 1972-74 achieved when they held the balance of power. However, when I first read Les’s book I was a little put out at how much play the class of 68 got, and how little the class of 79 or other years got. But as I am now less than a year away from 25 years service in the House myself, I catch myself telling more stories about the 80’s than I do the 90’s, and look at Les’s book with a more forgiving eye. I only made it into the book in a quote from Hansard in which while I was raising a point of order, Les was heard and recorded as alleging a certain other M.P. was like unto a body part that never sees the sunshine, although Les used more direct language, the one word that sufficed to say it all.

 

 

The freshness, the energy and the conviction that Les brought to Ottawa in 1968, along with others like Alf Gleave, John Skoberg and John Burton, the fire in the belly that they had, was something that Les never lost. It was a fire in the belly that was complimented by a great sense of comradeship and of fun – he was a happy warrior, and I don’t just mean when he was sitting around killing a crock with Mark Rose, Doug Rowland, or Derek Blackburn or others at the meetings of the “Whisky Sipping, Clam Chowder, and Marching Society”.

 

 

In the House and on the hustings he had what he would later call a “made to order” political foe in Otto Lang, or at least until Father Bob Ogle came along and put an end to that. But Lang’s policies didn’t end with Lang, as we know, and it was after Lang’s defeat that the Crow was lost and so many other battles were lost, battles in which time after time Les would forcefully and eloquently analyse and accurately predict the eventual outcome of the policies being put forward by the government. Les was a living example of the farmer-labour coalition that was the foundation of the CCF.

 

 

Reading Les’s old speeches about airline deregulation and privatization, and where it would all end up should be compulsory reading for all who wish to say anything intelligent about such issues. I missed Les in 1995 when the NDP, all 9 of us, stood alone against the privatization of the CNR, a move which has led to a once publicly owned railway being owned and operated by Americans. It makes the CPR look good sometimes, something I’m sure Les would find difficult to hear. I have no doubt that had he been in the House that act of treason by the Liberals would have been harder to get away with.

 

 

I had that in common with Les, right from the start, we both had railroading in our blood. We both knew what a “sunkink” was. Indeed, my first committee experience came about as I replaced Les on the transport committee at the time of the Mississauga derailment. Les was away on a CPA trip, and I got the call as someone who also knew something about the railroad. I took the train to the lake earlier this week, and as I sat there looking out the window of the VIA dining car, I thought of Les and all that he had done to defend the idea and the reality of passenger rail in this country.

 

 

As we get more serious about meeting our Kyoto commitments, and saving the planet, Les’s vision of a multi-modal rail focused transportation system will someday be realized. He was not a romantic, as his critics sometimes caricatured him, he was a visionary. His vision was not just of a past being destroyed, but a superior future being torn up in the name of short term corporate profit.

 

 

Les was proud of his Welsh heritage. His father’s family came from Rumney Valley in Wales. Indeed, I remember inviting Les one time to give the Toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns at one of my annual Burns Nights. This would be about 1989 or so. Burns never got such short shrift on a Burns Night. I can’t remember just how he made the connection, but it turned out to be more of a toast to the famous Welsh socialist and architect of the Labour Party, Nye Bevan. For Les, I guess one Celt was as good as another, especially if he was Welsh.

 

 

Les Benjamin attended his first provincial NDP Convention 50 years ago this year. In 1953 he went to the convention at the Bessborough as a delegate from Maple Creek. He was a democratic socialist who believed that labour was prior to, independent of, and superior to capital, and he liked to quote Abraham Lincoln saying just that, especially when he knew that his right-wing opponents would of thought he was quoting Marx.

 

 

He was a stubble-jumping, goose hunting, baseball playing, whisky sipping, politically incorrect railroader and political organizer with an imagination nurtured by listening to the radio as a kid. He was a defender of small communities, and the economic policies that make them possible. He fought his battles in Ottawa, or on the hustings in Regina, but his heart was in those metaphorical towns he liked to refer to as Gopher Gulch or Grasshopper Flats, and his sights were set on defeating policies that were, as he often said, “enough to give a coyote heartburn”. If W.O. Mitchell had invented an M.P. with the appropriate sensibilities, he could well have invented someone like Les Benjamin. He never got too big for his boots.

 

 

Les remarks in his book that when a nation loses it rural economy and becomes a collection of city states, it eventually collapses. This is advice well taken, as Canada arguably heads towards becoming such a collection of city states.

 

 

Les said that the Regina Manifesto was “sheer poetry”. There was poetry to Les’s politics, the poetry of the common man committed to his fellow human beings. Les wasn’t much for organized religion, but his political life reflected a view of humanity that finds deep resonance in the Christian faith of his forefathers and foremothers, and in all the great faiths of humankind, especially in what is sometimes called the prophetic tradition within these great faiths.

 

 

A prophet in the sense of one who stands up to the powers that be for the sake of the powerless, or the less powerful, who speaks for community and environmental well being in defiance of corporate profit strategies that lead us elsewhere.

 

 

Les says in his book, referring to something the railways were up to. \"If they try to pull that off again, there’d better be some guys around like me and Gleave and Skoberg to raise hell”.

 

 

Let this be our promise to Les, that there will never be silence where Les would have been raising hell.