The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How the Liberals Ended the Tory Dynasty 40 Years Ago

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

40 years ago, something quite extraordinary happened at Queen's Park. The opposition parties combined forces to defeat the Progressive Conservative government of the day, thus, bringing to an end, 42 straight years of Tory rule. The previous time a government had changed hands on a lost confidence vote? 1871! So this was rare. And even a few months earlier, there was little indication any of that drama would unfold. David Peterson, Ontario's 20th premier; Hershell Ezrin, former chief of staff to the premier; and Helen Burstyn, former deputy secretary of the Premier's Council.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

40 years ago today, something quite extraordinary happened at Queens Park. The opposition parties combined forces to defeat the progressive conservative government of the day, thus bringing to an end 42 straight years of Tory rule. The previous time a government had changed hands on a lost confidence vote? 1871. So this was rare. And even a few months earlier, there was little indication any of that drama would unfold. Here to reminisce about the events of 40 years ago, we welcome David Peterson, who would

be sworn in as Ontario's 20th Premier one week later, Herschel Ezrin, who would become the Premier's Chief of Staff, and Helen Burston, who was Deputy Secretary of the new government's economic think tank called the Premier's Council. And we are delighted to have you three here at our little studio for a little bit of reminiscing about the events of 40 years ago. And I actually want to start with, because we got a lot of young people who will not remember they weren't alive for any of this, so we got to do a little background here. I want to take you back to the fall of 1984. Brian Mulrooney has just won the biggest majority

in Canadian history. There are no liberal governments, provincially or federally, anywhere in the country. And four of your most significant caucus colleagues, liberal MPPs at Queens Park, had quit to run federally for John Turner because, I'm sorry to say it, they had no confidence in your ability to win the next election.

Why are you reminding me of all this unhappiness? I want to know what you thought your political prospects looked like in the fall of 84. Well, I was probably a little bit crazy anyway because I was a bit of a dreamer and I didn't sort of spend a lot of time calculating, we just spent a lot of time calculating. We just spent a lot of time doing. And losing those four people was a blow. But I've had my successes, I've had my failures in life, Steven. And I realized that both success and failure are fickle mistresses.

And I did know one fundamental fact. Things were changing in Canada. When Mulroney came in with that big majority in 84, no liberal governments, I knew about the old curve that says the Ontario's got a better chance if there's a, the Liberals do, if there's a conservative government. And I just knew we were doing a lot of good things. It wasn't obvious to anybody, except maybe Herschel, because the smartest thing I did was recruit Herschel. And Herschel, if you think I'm crazy, he was crazy.

You're taking a job with no prospects, which he did. Herschel knows how to read polls, and the polls showed that you were 25 points behind Frank Miller and the Conservatives when the election started. Yes, and the polls also showed that although we had made modest gains, David wasn't still a household word in the province of Ontario. That's a nice way of saying nobody knew who the hell he was.

Yeah, but elections are like that. Elections are the opportunity when people dial in and they actually pay attention for a change. And that happens in all elections, and it happened in this one as well. And what happened when the election got started was all of a sudden we were out of the gate. We seemed to have a plan. We did actually have a plan but it seemed to the public that we had a plan. And Mr. Miller was a bit of looking in the rear view mirror of history with his black jackets and his old more appeal to more rural

conservative Ontario. Helen what were you seeing at this time? Well I was in the public service and we were seeing change possibly and I'd say hopefully. There was a sense of excitement in the air. We had been with, there were no problems with the governments we had served before then. But things were getting a little old and stale and David and the Liberal government, that was to be, looked like it represented something new and exciting and there was a sense of optimism. Give us more on that sense that you were feeling as you were out campaigning.

They called the election for May 2nd, 85. During the campaign, what were you seeing out there? Well, to tell you what, I remember the beginning. The campaign was called, and we had a bus immediately arrive at Queens Park. We got on the bus. It was perfectly and flawlessly executed. And Herschel was instrumental in making all this happen. We went on a, took the bus to Fort Erie.

There was a member of parliament called Ray Hagerty. And he was having a meeting. It was all set up ahead of time that night. And it was our first campaign event. And I remember, it's the small things that matter in politics too. I remember we stopped in some sleazy motel along the road to change before we went to the dinner and I went out on the road just alone with no staff, nobody

knew for a jog alone because I just refresh as we get ready to go and make a speech. And as right now it was twilight. And I remember a crew, a television crew, and it was actually Chantal Lebert and the French crew saw me, they turned their bus around or their car around, and picked me up jogging down the road alone. And that image became a very powerful image, accidentally,

we didn't plan it, of the energy. And I was younger than Frank. And Frank, as Hirsch said, represented the old guard of the Conservative Party, not the new wing of the Conservative Party. And from that minute on, we'd captured sort of a wave of energy and enthusiasm, and I would say pent-up demand in this province

for a lot of change among women and new Canadians and people that wanted to be part of the governing structure. There was a real sense that this province was run by some you know white cigar smoking men in the Albany Club. Because it was. It was. And they didn't grasp, we understood the world and at that moment better than they did. In fact Frank Miller was 58 but seemed older. David Peterson was 42 and seemed younger.

From your perch what did the contrast look like to you? It looked like we were about to have youth descend on and just a sense of possibilities. There were some good ideas that were floated and people think of public service is not a monolith. Everybody works in different ways and looks at things differently. Speaking for myself and where I was, which was in the legislature at that time, it looked like we were about to get an infusion of younger, spirited, more interesting government and that really made us all happy. Lots of new policies and the other side of this and with due respect

to the public services, every time a government changes, and they hadn't really had many government changes, the public service gets to dust off all of their great old ideas that nobody else wanted to see. But we were interested in seeing them. And we signaled in our own ways by our own platform that we were interested in getting more information from the public service.

And they were going to be our partners. And that's a very important message. One of the fascinating things about this election campaign, Premier, was that it was essentially a tie. Frank Miller won four more seats, but you won 30,000 more votes. It was a hung parliament, Bob Ray in the catbird seat as the guy who was

holding the balance of power and going to decide who was going to get to be the next government of Ontario. What did you do at that point? Nothing because I knew it was going to turn out the way it did and I just had to be patient. You had to let the NDP vet. They had went through their own grieving process because they thought they were going to be in a position to do something. They were worried about their own position and they wanted stability. They did not want another election. I would have been extraordinarily comfortable going back and having another election. Right away? If it was necessary. I didn't want to

precipitate it. But don't forget we had all the momentum and all the traction coming out of that campaign which is even that's in addition to the numbers that you talk about. So I just had to let the NDP figure out what they had to do. They came to the conclusion which any logical person would come to. They couldn't support the Tories because they were retrogressive and then they came to say we have to support the Tories because they were retrogressive. And then they came to say, we have to support the liberals because there's a number of things we campaigned on which in common. A number of things were not in common.

And we put together a group, and Hersh was part of it, to negotiate and see if there's things we could accomplish together. And invented a new parliamentary device called the Accord, never been done before to the best of my knowledge in parliamentary history, to things that we had in common. And it was a very constructive period of government. Let me follow up with Herschel on that.

The conservatives sent in their team to negotiate with the NDP. And you were part of the liberal team that went in to negotiate on behalf of him. Were the negotiations difficult? Because it seemed from the beginning that it was obvious you guys were going to get picked. There is another factor that no one has ever really clued on,

and I'm happy to reveal it tonight. There were 42 years of petty slights that had built up against the conservatives from different members who had sat there and had their time cut off, their offices changed, not getting the right phones in their places. You wouldn't imagine the kinds of things that were expressed in some of those meetings.

Because people had had it with a group that they didn't feel respected them and treated them as at least as elected members even if they weren't in the opposition. And so that was the the hidden weapon if you'd like in all of the negotiations. Anytime we reached a really tough impasse on an issue and how it would be expressed we just reminded the NDP, or they reminded themselves often, of all of these petty slights over the years. And it made it very difficult for the conservatives

to come back. And of course, we were happy to remind them that the conservatives will promise you anything. Which they did. But it won't matter because they won't do it. In the end, by having a written accord, we can do it together. Helen, as you were watching all of this unfold from your perch in the public sector,

what were you thinking in terms of whether there were any serious negotiations going on, or was it a foregone conclusion that the NDP was going to support David Peterson and the liberals were going to form the government? It was a foregone conclusion. It was. But I speak for myself.

I don't know what the, I think there were at least 60,000 public servants at that time, probably closer to 80,000. And I think some of them are buried so deep in the weeds doing what they're doing that they weren't as aware of what a monumental change was about to take place. So I think that but what I sensed was it was going to be a liberal government with NDP support and that made sense and I remember someone who later became a cabinet minister in the new government Murray Elston coming into my office and saying I've been working on a project for him in ledge research.

And he said, well, it looks like I'm going to be doing something different. And I said, I think it sounds like you're going to be doing something exciting. And he agreed. And everybody agreed. There was a lot. And we used to see, in the halls of the legislature,

you'd see everybody. It didn't matter as much in those days what party you belonged to. Everybody was pretty collegial so I'd see Herschel padding along and I'd see others and everybody was feeling like there was a sense of inevitability and feeling pretty positive about it. So let me ask you, what do you remember from 40 years ago today when you actually had to get up in the legislature and vote to bring down a 42-year-long dynasty? And I hasten to add, you were only 42 years old. So you had only ever lived in Ontario under Tories.

So you're implying I don't know anything. Is that what you're saying? That's not what I'm saying. You're kind of close to saying that, Stephen. The answer is, maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I was anesthetized. But I was so relaxed about all this, because I knew it was going to happen.

And I knew not to get too excited. I knew that we had to maintain our humility. We had to give room for everybody else. Don't forget, we did not even humiliate them the Tories. We didn't humiliate them. And I didn't want to humiliate even Frank Miller. I appointed Frank Miller to a job after he had lost the conservative leadership. I believed in being kind as human beings.

It was a competitive business politics. But I just, we stood up in the House. We knew we were going to win the vote. We knew we were going to be chosen a week later because the governor, John Eyre, the lieutenant governor, had to pick us. And we accepted. And we were 100% ready.

And I'll say one other thing. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me in politics is the team of people we had and were elected. I believe very strongly, Helen may have a different view, but we had the strongest cabinet ever assembled in the history of Ontario. People doing big things and important things and creative things. Nixon, Ian Scott, and you know Sean Conway and Jim Bradley and just it was it was it was world-leading stuff that we were doing and we were maybe too dumb to understand it was complicated or we should have been gone slower. We went fast.

Herschel I will remember that the opposition conservatives once they once they lost the power and had to move over to the other side, they said, wait a second. There is something unconstitutional about this. This guy came second in the seat count, and he's now in government. How far did that, this all constitutionally stinks, how far did those arguments go?

Not very far. And the reason they didn't go very far was we assembled our own set of experts who could speak with great authority on the fact that what was being proposed was perfectly legitimate. But more importantly, the lieutenant governor had his own experts, leading jurists and others and constitutional experts, who all said, it may be a little different, but it's perfectly acceptable. Because what they're doing is they're actually agreeing on some common principles.

In a minority government situation, you often have discussions and debates between different parties about what they'll support and what they won't support and what they want to see in it. The difference in this deal was we made it all public. We made it public for a period of time. And that's what made the accord somewhat unique and then subsequently used in BC to great effect,

used in Northwest Territories to great effect, not to very good effect in Ottawa later on when they tried to do that. The Supply and Confidence Agreement, is that what you're referring to? Yeah. You are. OK.

I want to take you to the events of 40 years ago next week. Because on June 26th, he took the oath of office, he became the 20th Premier of Ontario. It was an outdoor ceremony, which had never been done before. Lots of people showed up. Were you one of the people who showed up? I was there. You were there. It was so easy.

What do you remember of that day? It was already set up. There had been a previous event that had happened. I think it was Canada Day. July 1st. That's right. It was Canada Day. What do you remember of that day? It was already set up. There had been a previous event that had happened. I think it was Canada Day. July 1st. That's right. We used the same stage. We saved money using the same stage.

Exactly. Not that I realized that there was cost saving involved, but it was convenient. There we were. And there were so many people. I mean, they flooded the whole of Queens Park. You mentioned Bob Nixon a moment ago and of course you became the first liberal premier since his father Harry Nixon had been liberal premier of Ontario back in 1943 and on that day he took the oath of office and became your what we then called treasurer now minister of finance and I went to see Mr. Nixon in Paris not too long ago Paris, Ontario where he lives and I asked him and became your, what we then called, treasurer, now minister of finance.

And I went to see Mr. Nixon in Paris not too long ago, Paris, Ontario, where he lives, and I asked him whether there was any awkwardness between you and him because you were the new leader, he was the former leader. And I was just curious about how all of that worked and here's what he had to say. Sheldon, roll it if you would. I'm curious about that. It could have been awkward, was it? No, not at all.

No, no, we had a very good personal relationship and still do. I write a comment daily to my friends, and every now and then I get a response from him. And sometimes it'll be something like well not in my time or good point or you know it's not an extensive response but it's nice to hear from him. He will be 97 next month incidentally how did that relationship work because it could be awkward between a new and a former leader? He was the most

loved and respected person in the entire legislature from all sides. I mean, the NDP and the Tories loved him. And of course, his liberals loved him even more. Bob was so smart, and he could speak extemporaneously on any subject. He didn't forget anything. He's got an elephant's memory. And he was so loyal. And I loved his company. Because we would sit.

I sat beside him in the legislature. And I made him deputy leader. So when I got in front of him, I couldn't handle it. And lots of times, I couldn't. I'd say, Nixon, you do it. And he would do it better. And then I'd sit and listen to his stories. And his stories are fabulous.

And at 96, they're still fabulous. This is one of Ontario's greatest citizens. Can I just add that in the period of the lead up to the election in 85, Nixon was very important. Because I wouldn't say the caucus was a little restive, but they were. And every once in a while Bob would lay down the law about supporting the leader and this is the way it was going to go. He was, if you put respect and ability, but I would put loyalty right up there, he was a team player par

excellence. There was a rather funny moment after the swearing in because you said from the stage, people, this is your building. We are running a government without walls or barriers. Come on in. Have some ice cream. Have some strawberries. Check out the building. And that led to something rather odd

happening at the very first cabinet meeting which took place immediately after you're swearing in and Bob Nixon strangely enough doesn't remember very much about that but let's hear what he had to say anyway Sheldon if you would I can sort of think of actually entering the cabinet room for the first time, you know, so this is where it happens. And seeing my friends, former fellow political battlers in the field, sitting around as cabinet ministers with the Premier there and thinking,

this is great, but I can't remember a thing about what we did. You were at that meeting? Oh, I was. Do you have a better memory of it than he does? I do, and there were a couple of people we didn't, actually I think it was more than one, I think there were two, people we didn't recognize at all, and then the cabinet secretary sort of saying to us, well, are they yours? And no, they're not ours.

Aren't they yours? No, they're not ours. And they just were folks who dropped by to see government in action. They felt, well, you said without walls or barriers. So they joined the cabinet meeting. It's fine. Do you remember anything about that first meeting?

Yeah, I do. I do remember. We walked in there. Can I tell you, if you wanted a historical analogy, it's like Fidel Castro coming down from the mountains and taking over Havana. All these barbarians who had come in and never prospects of being in government.

And now they had to wash their faces and put on a tie and come to a cabinet meeting and now had responsibility for what Ontario at the time when I was there, it may still be there. to come to a cabinet meeting and now had responsibility for, you know, Ontario at the time when I was there, it may still be there, if it was a separate country, it would have been the 11th largest country in the world. This is big stuff. And this is the only federation in the world that's

as decentralized as we are and has the kind of budgets and the kind of power that we do. It's a very large organization. Now these infidels were running the place. And boy did they step up. None have ever been in government before. And at the risk of being immodest, it was executed almost flawlessly. And it was tough stuff, Stephen, like Sean Conway doing

the separate school funding. There's no more complicated piece of legislation in Ontario history with the politics and the law and the history. And religion. And religion. And everything was there. And you look at that and say, boy.

And I'll tell you, the other thing I want to say, Helen was in the public service. And I got to know her after. She was a very important part of the public service. And she actually owes me because she met her husband, who we brought in, one of the great projects that we did in rebuilding the economy in the province of Ontario.

But we had fabulous cooperation and I remember this, you think all these Tory cabinet civil servants would be partisan, they weren't. Three or four days after I became the leader, I got a meeting of all the senior public servants, don't forget some of these guys I'd gone to law school with, and they knew stuff about me I wish they hadn't known. And I said to them, of all the things I said about you guys, I'm sorry, because I said bad stuff. Because you did say there were all a bunch of Tory hacks

in the public service. I said there are a bunch of blue fuzz and a blue cloud. Yeah, I did. And don't forget it there was a bit of that because every job in the liquor store was a government appointment in those days but I apologize that I expect you to behave as professionals we're not going to clean this place out with a with a broad brush and we had fabulous support from the public service it was considered a model transition between all these new infidels like Herschel.

Well, infidels might not be the right word, but there was no experience there. And I wondered how concerned the public service was to see these folks come in. I think the only one who had any governing experience was Eleanor Kaplan, who was a North York City councillor. Nobody else had ever been in government. When you looked at it, what did you think? We didn't worry about it, to be honest, at least not the people I was talking to.

We saw that they asked for help. They expected us to be there to work with them, and we did. Because they were open to us and we were open to them. But I, you know, what David was referring to before and where I worked with him and Herschel most closely

was with the Premier's Council, which was something that you brought in quite quickly actually. And it was really a multi-partisan, better than a think tank. It did things. Think and do tank. Think and do tank, exactly. But you set up things like that quite quickly, brought the people who knew the most and were the best at what they did. You brought them in, and you took advice.

You took a lot of learning, and you were open to that but you also you chaired every meeting, you were there for all the things that you wanted to do and I think you got back from the public service everything you put into that trust. Premier Walk the talk too. I mean his first hire for cabinet secretary was although it was for a shorter period of time, was somebody, Ed Stewart, who was very close. He was Bill Davis's cabinet secretary. That's right.

And that sent a signal to everybody that we weren't holding anything against people because they had performed other roles before. And then we chose another remarkable man, Bob Carmen, who came up through the system, understood it intimately. And this also reassured people in the senior ranks of the public service. But then we did some other things

that actually sent other kinds of messages. We started appointing women as in senior jobs, assistant deputy ministers, deputy ministers, the first woman deputy treasurer in Ontario. And this sent a very positive message. We also brought in people from the indigenous community as a deputy minister, from the South Asian community as a deputy minister. We were trying to represent a different kind of Ontario. So even though it was the public service,

we were sending the same messages we were sending politically to the people of Ontario. You appointed the first black cabinet minister in Ontario history in Alvin Kerling, who once told me that every day he came to Queen's Park in those early days, he had a throbbing headache because he felt the need to represent his community so forcefully that it was almost debilitating.

Did you know any of that at the time? Yeah. Yes, I did. And it was my job to help him be successful. And he was. But I understand the pressures. There was a pressures on a lot of it. Every individual in that cabinet had their different sources of pressure

that they had to deal with. And I was, as the conductor of the band, I had to sort of try to put it all together and get the most harmonious music. Now that I have you two bookends here, I want to hunt down a rumor that I heard and see whether or not you can confirm or deny. And here we go. This is 40 years ago. Don't deny it yet until you hear it. Your signature promise was to put beer and wine in the corner stores and it got you a lot of attention because as you point out the LCBO was not exactly on the cutting edge of stuff at that point. I am told that there was a disagreement between the two

of you on whether or not to actually go forward with that policy, that you weren't completely sold on it. And you said, you've got to go forward with this. It was one of our biggest promises. True or false? I don't recall a disagreement. I do recall it was controversial. I do.

Herschel will speak with great insights into this issue. But we did bring it into the House, and it was defeated. Then the question is, well, do you let it go away? It's not a great substance. It was of great symbolic value, particularly when there was a beer store strike on at the time. And people thought, oh my god, he'd like to liberals, we're able to buy a beer in the store tomorrow morning. It wasn't quite that way.

So it had high symbolic value, it indicated a new modern way of looking at things. But after we were defeated by the NDP voted against this and the Tories, then we said, look, there's other more important things to do. And we're not going to spend all our life just worrying about that. But we did open up the discussion. I'll confess that the discussions and the debates that we had were about timing.

They weren't about whether to proceed with the policy, but it was what's the right time to do it. Because actually, we have a lot of very important priority legislation that we want to go forward with, and we don't want to get it mired behind something like this. And so like many things in government, compromises are found.

And you two didn't have a big blowout over it? No, we still talked. You still talked, but did you back then? No, we still talked then. OK, just checking. I don't remember it. But if you want to manufacture Fife, you're going to get it. OK, you talked about some of the big issues

that your government had to handle. The full funding for separate schools was certainly a signature promise, which you and the NDP did bring forward. And it happened, and it's still in place today. I want to raise something which back then was called Bill 7, which was the amendments to the Human Rights Code. And it's hard to imagine, because we're 40 years later, that in the province of Ontario

back then, a landlord could say to a gay prospective tenant, I won't rent to you because I don't rent to gays. Or the same thing as it related to jobs. I'm not going to hire you for this job because I don't hire gay people. It was pretty controversial at the time, 40 years ago, to say those kinds of practices have to stop. What do you remember about all of that? Not very much to be honest. I think Herschel would probably remember more. Well we were lucky because there was a... first of all we felt this was really important but there was a context that we could put in all of it and that was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which had passed in 1982.

And we were able to put a context. There are lots of things that were controversial at the time. That was certainly one of them. Franco-Ontarian rights, where numbers weren't, as we said, was also a very controversial issue. You had doctors protesting at Queens Park, too, because you wanted to ban extra billing. And at people's homes too. So it wasn't alone. There were many controversial issues but that was one that we felt was

important because it was the new Ontario. It was, you know what our slogan in 1985 was, welcome to your Ontario. And the whole idea was it was going to be an inclusive place. You want to add to that? I remember that very much. And we had a brilliant attorney general, it's public knowledge, who was gay. He was not deeply in the closet. Deeply in the closet.

It was different times when which and he was brilliant. But he was stick and but he was a stick handling this in a way that didn't he didn't become the issue. That's Ian Scott you're talking about. Ian Scott and he was the most brilliant attorney general in the history of Canada but you have to deal with all these vicissitudes and I had to deal with that but I'll just say one thing I don't pretend to be the world's best speaker because I'm not.

But probably the speech of which I am most proud of and I made in the legislature on the passage of that bill. And it was controversial. Don't forget, we had a lot of people from the rural realms. We had a lot of people that never from the different. Wasn't an urban party that is today and with different times and it was hard it was so hard on people we were being preached against by the Catholic Church you know the the the bishops came to me and said

we're gonna preach against you and these are weird guys we supported their their their schools. And they came to me and said, we're going to. And I said, good god, you guys are supposed to represent love and happiness. And there's been all sorts of issues in the Catholic Church with respect to homosexuality. Why can't you have some love in your heart for it?

I mean, those are the tough conversations we had, I had. And so I was in the house and I said look if I had a gay child would I be happy? Probably not. Would I love that child? Absolutely yes. Would I want that child to be discriminated against by others for the way they were born? No. If I don't want that for my child, how could I ask it for your child?

And we are an extension of morality in that sense, the political system. And I felt very strongly about it personally. As a father of young kids, I've watched all these things grow up. And it was the right thing to do and to this day, everybody feels good about that. Because we all stuck our noses out in muddy ground and did what we thought was right. We also stuck it out on Sunday shopping. I mean, you want an issue that divided people. The NDP were very unhappy about

it. The unions were very unhappy about it. But we accepted the fact there were families that they needed an extra day on the weekend to do shopping because they were working so hard and they were there were or single parents and all the rest of this. And we gave people opportunities and options which they didn't have before. But they were really controversial at the time. We take it for granted right now, you know, to go out on a Sunday, but it wasn't then.

We have some pictures we want to show here. Okay, can we bring these up in no particular order? Here we go. There's Murray Elston, David Peterson, and I don't know who that guy is in the background there. That's a 140 pound reporter from CBC who was covering Queen's Park at the time. Murray took the biggest, he was the Minister of Health, took the biggest doctor strike in the history of Canada. That guy showed more resolve and strength than anybody I've ever seen.

You want to talk about pressure? Man, that was pressure. He's a hero. And the guy in the back spent five years chasing you guys through the hallways of Queens Park. I think that's me. Next picture, please, Sheldon. That's you in Washington, D.C. And that's me sticking a microphone in your face. Okay, next picture.

You used to be handsome. That was me. And there we are again. You on the left, me on the right, Mike Tanzi in the middle, and we were all 40 years younger then. Hard to imagine. You haven't changed. It's OK.

That's very funny. I'll tell a story about Paken. Paken was given an honorary degree at University of Toronto where I was the chancellor. And I said I'd known him 40 years ago when he was chasing me around with a microphone. He was a little snot-nosed reporter, bothering me, and I didn't know he was gonna turn into Walter Cronkite.

And here's he stepping down. It's a bit of an exaggeration. As from the agenda, this is the Walter Cronkite of Canada. Okay, stop it, stop it, stop it. You've done a great job, Stephen. I want to thank all of you for coming in today and reminiscing about the events of 40 years ago this week. Helen Burston and Herschel Esrin and Ontario's 20th Premier, David Robert Peterson.

Thanks everybody. Thank you.