The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Filibuster Showdown: The Legend of Alvin Curling vs.the Bull

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

He was at the helm when Ontario actually built housing. He was Ontario's first Black cabinet minister and first Black Speaker of the House. He was Canada's envoy to the Dominican Republic. And famously when Mike Harris vowed to "Make Ontario Great Again" and introduced a massive omnibus bill he stood up in the legislature and spoke for 18 straight hours to protest what many saw as a threat to democracy. This is the story of Alvin Curling.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you would find that 27 of them are people of colour. If you did that four decades ago, it would be a very different scenario. You would see precisely one person of colour. His name was Alvin Curling, and we're going to tell his story today. going to tell his story today. Alvin Kerling was appointed by Premier David Peterson as the Minister of Housing. He became the first black cabinet minister in Ontario history. One of the things that the Liberals, with the support of the NDP, had pledged to do was to really ramp up the construction of social housing. And that was the ball that Alvin Kerling was going to have to try to take down the field. Well, it was tough.

He had introduced a new housing policy for the province of Ontario, and there was an opposition MPP for the New Democrats by the name of David Revel. He gets up, and he starts really laying into Alvin Kerling. You think you guys have any clue about what it takes to get housing built? This is not going to get the job done. This is terrible.

Oh boy, David Revel just went after him over and over and over. It was a brutal question period. I go and talk to David Revel after question period's over. I'm a reporter. I got my microphone, my camera. And I say, really, David? This policy is as terrible as you say it is? And he goes through his speech again. Chapter and verse of why this Alvin Kerling housing policy is going to be so terrible. Then I turn the camera off and I look at him and I say, wow it's really that bad eh? And he says to me, nah I

think it's probably gonna be okay. It was a good lesson for me in learning if you're the government you propose and if you're the opposition you oppose even if you think it's good policy. All of this contributed to a really tough first year for Alvin Kerling. And I remember him telling me many years after the fact that he used to show up at Queens Park every day with a throbbing headache. And he had that throbbing headache because he just felt so much pressure, not only to do a good job, but he felt the pressure of being the only guy in that legislature

who was representing an entire community. So he felt that pressure every day when he went to Queens Park. It's tough. Okay, let's fast forward for a little bit here. 1990, the liberals lose the election, the NDP comes in, they're in power for five years, then they lose the 1995 election. And we usher in a common sense revolution in the province of Ontario. It's Mike Harris and the progressive Conservatives who are now in power. Help make Ontario great again. Join the common sense revolution.

And Mike Harris decides fairly early on in his tenure that he's going to introduce something called an omnibus bill. Basically it's a bill into which governments throw everything, including the kitchen sink. Now, the opposition liberals were not happy with this approach, and they wanted to stall this omnibus bill from passing. And so that's what they had Alvin Kerling do. He got up and he stood in his place and he started to speak against the bill. This filibuster continued for 18 straight hours.

He couldn't stop. Once he stops talking, once he sits down, his filibuster is over and the government can call a vote and bring in the bill. So you may ask yourself, how exactly did Alvin Kerling, am I allowed to say, like, how did he do his business? He could perhaps make it a little more dignified. More dignified? How did he relieve himself into a dignified vessel in the middle of this filibuster? Well, necessity being the mother of invention, they figured it out. Somebody in the Liberal caucus brought a huge blanket,

and a whole host of the MPPs from the Liberal caucus held this blanket up. He did his business in a dignified way and on he goes. Now there came a point where the sergeant at arms wanted to throw Alvin Kerling out of the legislature for this filibuster. You can imagine how this would have looked. The sergeant atarms putting his hands on a black man, one of the very few people of color in the legislature at that time, and forcibly ejecting him from the legislature. Not a good look, and everybody knew it. And so, when the sergeant-at-arms came towards Curling for the purposes of taking him out, many of the members of the Liberal caucus literally formed a human shield in front of him,

and the sergeant-at-arms, I think appropriately, decided not to push matters and backed off. Now, eventually the filibuster came to an end. The Conservatives did get their bill through. They got their policies through. They served two terms. Yada, yada, yada. On we go. But on that day, Alvin Kerling was a hero to the opposition because he stopped in its tracks and forced further debate on a bill that a lot of Ontarians had a problem with and thought was against the spirit of democracy. Alvin Kerling went on to have a successful career in diplomacy. He became Canada's ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

He's always been a kind of an elder statesman in both the federal and provincial liberal parties. And no doubt in this province, there are communities that have been built. There are homes that have been built thanks to the policies that the liberal government with Alvin Kerling as the minister of housing brought forward nearly four decades ago. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.