By RON FANFAIR
Rarely is an incumbent prime minister ousted by a rookie politician.
Just over three decades ago, Hedy Fry pulled off the remarkable feat, defeating Conservative Kim Campbell – Canada’s first and only woman PM – in Vancouver Centre.
Campbell held the leadership position for 132 days after replacing the late Brian Mulroney whose popularity had waned.
This month marks 31 years since Fry has held her federal seat, making her the longest-serving female Member of Parliament.
As president of the Vancouver and British Columbia Medical Associations and the Federation of Medical Women, and host of the popular ‘Doctor, Doctor’ medical information show on CBC television, the practicing physician was well-known in the medical community when Jean Chretien asked her to run in 1992.
Fry initially declined.
“I knew Kim when she was a member of the provincial legislature,” she said. “She was my MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) and we went out for dinner and chatted about policy issues. When Chretien asked me to run in Vancouver Centre, I told him I didn’t want to do that against a woman because there was just 12 per cent of us there in the House at the time.”
Convincing Fry to run in Vancouver Centre, which has the largest Japanese community in Canada, was not easy.
The then-family physician joined the Liberal Party when Chretien was running for the leadership. One of his co-chairs in BC was her patient.
“She asked me if I would support him because she knew I am a Liberal,” Fry recalled. “At the time, I was president of the BC Medical Association and I went to the Board and told them I was asked to do this. I liked Chretien and his feistiness. The Board said they didn’t care what I did federally as long as I didn’t support anyone provincially.
“I put my name down and after he became leader, he asked me if I would join a committee looking at how to get more women in politics. He then asked me to co-chair the Aylmer Conference the Liberals were putting on that was the basis for the Red Book (the federal Liberals’ plan for the party’s platform for the 1993 federal election).
“I went back to practicing medicine and was due to be the president of the Canadian Medical Association in 1993. It rotates through the provinces and it was BC’s turn.”
Becoming interested in the basic ethical issues related to assisted reproductive technologies, she was considering pursuing Law when Chretien invited her to breakfast while he was passing through BC.
“I thought it would have been a group of people, but when I got there, it was just me and him and he said, ‘I want you to run,’” said Fry. “I told him he was joking and that was not going to happen because politics is a messy and grubby little business and I didn’t want to be part of that. He told me that politics is public service which I was already doing as a medical practitioner and host of a TV show. I also let him know politics is not my thing and that was that.”
A few months later, Chretien invited Fry to lunch and again asked her to run for political office.
“He said you came to this country as an immigrant and asked if Canada has been good to me,” she said. “I said yes and he asked if I was going to put something back. I told him I paid one of the highest taxes and I am putting it back. He didn’t say anything and left me alone.”
Very persistent, Chretien asked prominent Liberal Party member Sheila Copps to have coffee with Fry.
“I told her what I told him and he asked me to come to dinner with him and his wife,” she said. “What I learned was that he was ‘sussing’ me out and had concluded that I would only run if something appealed to me. At the dinner, he told me I am an activist always pushing for change. He asked how I would like to come inside and make a difference instead of standing outside and knocking on the door.
“I said ‘what?’ and he said ‘you can do that’. My response was ‘really’ and he said I could make a difference from inside the tent.”
Catching her attention, Fry promised to run on the condition that he would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to add sexual orientation as a prohibited ground for discrimination.
“Without blinking, he said, ‘I could do that’,” she said. “His only request was that I give it to him in writing which I did the next day. The reason I wanted that was because many of my patients who were gay died in the 1980s. It occurred to me that they were treated unequally under the law in terms of access to drugs. Their partners, with whom many of them had been living for years, had no say in what happened to them in hospitals or their funeral arrangements. They had no ability to access medications if they needed them because they were gay. I thought this is not the Canada I came to.”
The Bill was first passed in 1996.
In the 1993 election, Fry ended 12 years of Progressive Conservative rule and Kim Campbell’s brief tenure as PM.
Three days later, she received a congratulatory call from Campbell who the Chretien government appointed Canada’s Consul General to Los Angeles.
“Kim went there right away and we have not seen each other or spoken since,” said Fry who, as head of the BC Medical Association, successfully negotiated a groundbreaking agreement with then Premier Bill Vander Zalm that included Canada’s first retirement plan for doctors.
Along the way, Fry has stung other Canadian heavyweight politicians.
Attempting a political comeback in 2006 after admitting two years earlier to stealing an expensive ring, the incumbent foiled New Democratic Party MP Svend Robinson’s bid, winning by over 8,000 votes.
It was Robinson’s first loss in 25 years.
In the 2008 federal election, the tireless politician defeated prominent gay Conservative Party candidate Lorne Mayencourt and NDP member Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
Soon after migrating to Canada in 1970, Fry read the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s ‘Towards a Just Society’ and was inspired. She was also motivated by her grandmother who insisted she should not complain about anything she is not willing to change.
“Just go in there, fix it and make a difference she would always say,” recalled Fry, who was Canada’s Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women for six years before being dropped from Cabinet in 2002. “My parents had a Grade 8 education and they struggled to get me to where I am. Me and my ex-husband (Peter Fry was doing a residency in Vascular Surgery) were planning to go to the United States before deciding to settle in British Columbia. Education is the single most important thing and I wanted to get involved in health care for which you didn’t have to pay.”
Medicine and politics were not among the professional pursuits on her list growing up in San Fernando in the 1940s and early 1950s.
An avid reader and writer, Fry aspired to be a ‘Time’ magazine correspondent and a novelist.
At St. Joseph’s Convent, she studied French, Spanish and French Literature for her Advanced Level exams and was awarded a scholarship to attend Oxford University after emerging as the top English Literature student in Trinidad & Tobago.
“My parents were saving money to either build a house or send me to university,” Fry said. “All of a sudden, everything had fallen into place. They could get their house, I could read and I wanted to see if I could join the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.”
While preparing to take up the scholarship, ‘she read ‘The Wheel of Fire’, written by English literary critic and academic G. Wilson Knight that psycho-analyzed Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.
“I had to do Shakespeare, a lot of the romantic poets and prose among other things to win that scholarship,” said Fry who chairs the Canadian Association of Parliamentarians for Population Development to raise parliamentarian’s awareness of sexual and reproductive health, human rights and to promote cooperation among other networks. “So, I decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist and my father said he would ask our family doctor if I could do that. The doctor said I could not because I didn’t do any science subjects that would allow me to apply to medical school.”
While researching, Fry’s obstetrician discovered there was a College of Physicians & Surgeons in Dublin that was accepting 10 persons with top of the bell curve marks in Literature and the Arts into their pre-med class.
He sent her marks and she secured one of the spots at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
“My father said if I wanted to do that, he had money saved that would pay for my tuition,” said Fry who completed a Bachelor of Science in a year before starting medical studies “So I gave up my Oxford scholarship to study medicine.”
With all of her father’s savings, she vowed not to let him down.
Re-elected nine times, the 83-year-old plans to run in the next federal election in 2025.
Fry is in rare company among a handful of long-serving Canadian Members of Parliament. They include Mackenzie Bovell who served for 50 years and two months after being elected to the first Parliament of Canada in 1867 and Wilfrid Laurier who served for 41 years and two months until 1919.
“I love the challenges and I love to make a difference and change lives,” said Fry who briefly campaigned for the Liberal Party leadership in 2006 before withdrawing and announcing her support for Bob Rae. “When I came in just over three decades ago, transgender and LGBTQ people were living in fear. Instead of saying I have done this, I have been there and I am tired, I am infuriated and ready to roll up my sleeves.
“Housing is also a big issue here and health care will always be one of the things I fight and strive for. There are so many things to do and so little time to do them. Also, I like elections more than anything else.”
How much has changed since the octogenarian entered the House of Commons in 1993?
“In the last few years, things have been much different,” the former Liberal Critic for Sport Canada said. “There used to be a theatre that went on for question period and then everybody went off to have coffee or something else to drink. People were polite and they went to bat on policies and other issues. The place has become very ugly. People are trying to savage your character and this has got nothing to do, as far as I am concerned, with politics. It is an ugliness that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.”
Fry attributes the offensiveness to the emergence of social media.
“A lot of people say things on social media without anyone checking the facts to see whether they are true or not,” she said. “While social media has its benefits, it does have its drawbacks. People go on to social media and see someone saying something that they agree with. They believe it and, sometimes, share it without anyone checking to see if it is true or not.
“In the old days, if you read something, heard about it on the radio and saw it on television, you were certain you could accuse that person of libel if it were not true. With social media, it is a free-for-all. We have a collective of tribes of people going purely on belief, rumour and innuendo.”
Fry is not the only Trinbagonian who has excelled in British Columbia. As a classmate of British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Valmond Romilly at San Fernando Government School, she knew his older brother Selwyn Romilly who passed away in September 2023.
In the House of Commons shortly after his death, Fry rose to mourn the death of the University of British Columbia’s first Black graduate and the province’s first Black Judge and Supreme Court Justice.
“I was terrified of Selwyn because he was older and very stern,” said Fry. “He was not a guy who was fun to be with. When I came to BC, Selwyn reached out to me and we became good friends. He also supported me. When I first won, Allan Rock (he was Canada’s Justice Minister then) was naming Supreme Court Justices and was looking at the diversity of the people around. I said here is a guy that every time I walk out there and see my friends, they ask if they can get Selwyn Romilly to be a Judge of the Supreme Court. I told Allan to make the appointment because Selwyn was brilliant. He turned out to be an extraordinary jurist. I had a lot of time for Selwyn.”
The apple did not fall from the tree, especially when it came to the eldest of her three sons.
Pete Fry was first elected to municipal office in Vancouver City in 2018 with the second-highest vote count after standing twice in local elections and once in a provincial by-election. The Green Party of Vancouver member was re-elected two years ago.
“I brought my three boys up to have a sense of community and social conscience,” said Fry who heads Canada’s delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly. “We talked about a lot of things, including gay rights and education. Not everyone is as lucky as they are to have two parents who are doctors and living a good life. We also talked about where I grew up in a housing scheme in Trinidad. I let them know you don’t have to be where you come from and that you can aspire to do great things and also help people to aspire.
“We spent a lot of time debating and arguing around the table. I told my children they did not have to agree with everything I said. My only request was whether they provide a good argument to prove their point. They grew up learning to do those things and I think Pete was naturally drawn to politics. The other two are interested in politics but have gone their different ways and have that sense of social responsibility.”
Jeremy Fry is a medical doctor in Australia and Western University graduate Douglas Fry is the President of Subway, North America.
Outside of politics, Fry enjoys cooking and going to the theatre.
