I had just two extended conversations with Gerald Regan, the former Nova Scotia premier and federal cabinet minister who died Tuesday night at the age of 91.
The most recent was in 2012, in his waterfront Halifax law office, for a story about political leadership in Nova Scotia.
The other was over the telephone in the winter of 1998, in the run-up to his trial on a series of sex-related charges, some of them dating back almost 40 years.
In both cases, I came away with the impression of a man who cared about the notion of personal legacy — and understood the profoundly conflicted one he would leave behind.
“When you are charged with something like this,” he told me 21 years ago, before his trial and subsequent acquittal, “even if you are totally vindicated there will be people who will always believe it.”
Regan wanted his accomplishments to be what people remembered. They were considerable.
Born in Windsor, at the age of five he sold peanuts in the stands at the local baseball park, according to a family obituary.
By the 1950s, he was known as Gabby Regan, a reference to his considerable verbal skills honed as a sports promoter, radio sportscaster — he did play-by-play for stations in Bridgewater and Halifax — and Dalhousie University-educated labour lawyer.
In 1963, Regan won a seat in the House of Commons, where he made enough of an impression to be included in Peter Newman’s poll in Maclean’s magazine that year “of the brightest MPs ever to appear simultaneously in a Canadian Parliament.” Two years later, he became leader of the provincial Liberal party.
As Opposition leader, Regan once led a 14-hour filibuster against the Conservative government’s plans to increase the sales tax. That helped his Liberals win a minority government in 1970, which they increased to a majority four years later.
The MLA for Halifax-Needham became premier at an optimistic time in the region, according to University of Prince Edward Island political scientist Donald Desserud.
“Everyone was excited about the future,” said Desserud. “Maritime premiers were punching way above their weight nationally.”
His premiership was characterized by “forward-looking measures,” according to Dan Reid, Regan’s minister of fisheries, perhaps because he grew up in rural Nova Scotia during the Great Depression, his children say.
In 1972, his government nationalized the Nova Scotia Light and Power Company in a bid to keep rates down.
Anxious to bring industrial development to Nova Scotia, he championed a new super port at the Strait of Canso, tried to harness the immense Bay of Fundy tides, and one day could be seen on the front page of this newspaper holding a vial of the offshore oil that he hoped would one day be the economic lifeblood of the province. At different points in time, Regan tried to convince both Aristotle Onassis and Baron Edmond de Rothschild to invest in Nova Scotia.
“He was a big thinker and dreamer,” said his son, David.
Even political opponents from that period, like former Tory cabinet minister Rollie Thornhill, remember Regan as “a gentleman in the house,” who took the time to show the former mayor of Dartmouth the ropes when he arrived in the legislature as a rookie MLA.
Regan’s days running the province ended in 1978 when his government was defeated by John Buchanan’s Conservatives.
Two years later, Regan returned to the federal stage, winning a seat in the House of Commons. He held a variety of cabinet positions in the Liberal governments of Pierre Trudeau, among them minister of labour, minister of international trade and minister of energy, mines & resources.
When the Liberals fell in 1984, in the way things can work in close-knit Halifax, Regan lost his seat to Halifax lawyer Stewart McInnes, later a Mulroney cabinet minister, whom he would play weekly pickup hockey with for decades.
Back in Halifax, according to his obituary, Regan served as a director of a number of Canadian companies, and in 1990 became legal counsel to Patterson Palmer, which merged with McInnes Cooper in 2005. He held that position until his retirement in 2014.
Out of the public eye, family members say, Regan was the same as he always was: proud and supportive of his six children, a gregarious man who would take forever to walk through a crowded room because, according to daughter Laura, “he would stop and talk to everyone and anyone,” a big spirit who liked to end every party in the Regan house with a game of ring-around-the-Rosie.
But his life didn’t stay private for long.
In October 1993, the RCMP issued a news release announcing that they had been looking into accusations of sexual assault against Regan. Regan eventually went to trial in 1998 on eight charges including rape, attempted rape and forcible confinement for crimes allegedly committed in 1956 and 1969 against victims aged 14 and 18 at the time.
In the end, all eight charges against Regan were dismissed. A year later, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal ruled that a provincial court judge was wrong when he decided to stay seven earlier indecent assault charges against Regan.
Regan appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld the reinstated charges. But, in 2002, Nova Scotia’s Public Prosecution Service decided not to proceed with them.
The ongoing courtroom saga didn’t drive Regan into the shadows.
Into his 80s, he still played hockey several times a week. He also took up skiing late in life.
Until just two years ago, Regan — runner-up in Nova Scotia junior men's tennis at age 19, but also co-winner of the Canadian over-85 men's doubles championship somewhat later — was still playing tennis on the court beside his Bedford home. (Longtime neighbour and tennis partner Slavko Negulic described Regan as a net rusher, with good reflexes for his age, who could get most every opponent’s serve back in play.)
As always, he gauged his energy level by how many innings he felt he could pitch for his beloved Cincinnati Reds.
Friends and family say that the sex-related charges and long court saga took a toll on Regan.
But his children say that his tenacity got him through that, just as it allowed him to hang in for days longer than expected when he went into hospital.
When he died, they chose to remember him for the good he did, the way, according to son David, he “left Nova Scotia a better place” and how, according to his old friend Dan Reid, he “dedicated himself to the service of this province."
