Hugh Segal, Conservative Senator and Basic Income Pioneer, Dies At 72
On wednesday, Hugh Segal, former political strategist, academic & politician Hugh Segal passed away at 72. Segal served as chief of staff to Ontario Premier Bill Davis & Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was appointed as Senator for Kingston-Frontenac Leeds, and was a tireless advocate for a Guaranteed Basic Income to eradicate poverty. Segal described himself as a Red Tory and a “traditional Conservative” in the tradition of John Diefenbaker & Sir John A. MacDonald, and has been a harsh critic of Neo-Conservatism, particularly the form seen in the United States.
Born into a poor immigrant family in Montreal, he first joined the political arena as a staffer for federal PC opposition leader Robert Stanfield in the early 1970's while still studying as a student at the University of Ottawa. After graduating he ran for the PC’s in two federal elections in Ottawa Centre, losing in both 1972 & 1974. After those failures he decided to return to the world of staffing, serving as a senior aide and eventually Chief of Staff to longtime Ontario Premier Bill Davis throughout the 1970's & 1980's, where, according to Kingston, Ontario historian Arthur Milnes, Segal played a key role in the patriation of the Canadian Constitution “He was at the crucial meetings between Premier Davis and Prime Minister Trudeau, where Trudeau, a Liberal, and Davis, a Conservative, tried to put things aside and give us a reformed Constitution, and one that was binding and truly Canadian.” Milnes told The Kingstonist.
In 1992 Segal was appointed as Chief of Staff to Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the waning years of his administration. Around the same time he also served as a pundit on political television & radio shows, as well as writing a number of newspaper columns and political books. He also taught as a faculty member in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 1998, he returned to electoral politics by running for the leadership of the much diminished Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, but came in a distant 2nd place to the eventual victor Joe Clarke, who he endorsed before the 2nd ballot.
In 2005 Segal was appointed as the Senator for Kingston-Frontenac-Leeds, not by the party he’d supported since his adolescence, but by Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin. Since even his earliest days as a Senator, he proved to be a significant critic of the very nature of the institution itself. Speaking at the 2014 Progress Gala in Toronto, he told former US Labour Secretary Robert Reich “My first motion in the Senate was for a resolution that would produce a national referendum on the abolition of the senate. needless to say, it wasn’t universally popular on both sides of the aisle.” during the same event Segal outlined his view that the Canadian Senate only exists in it’s current, undemocratic state because the Fathers of Confederation were unwilling to support genuine democracy. “at the beginning of the country, the Fathers of Confederation…weren’t prepared to actually trust the people with all the democratic decision-making they deserved, so this was a way of achieving democracy without revolution. it’s a Canadian thing.”.
Whie serving in the Senate he held several prominent positions including chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, and later Chair of the Special Committee on Anti-Terrorism. in 2007, after the Foreign Affairs Committee published a report critical of the Harper Conservative government’s Foreign Aid policy, he “reluctantly” resigned as chair at the request of the Government, who reportedly wanted a more ideologically Conservative in the position instead. While in the Senate he championed a number of issues, including defence spending & the idea of a guaranteed basic income for all. Segal retired from the senate in 2013 after accepting a position as a senior fellow at Toronto’s Massey College.
In the years since leaving the Senate, Segal had become a more outspoken advocate for traditionally progressive positions on welfare and the eradication of poverty. Perhaps his enduring political legacy will be his tireless and passionate advocacy for a Guaranteed Basic Income, which was considered much more radical when he first began fighting for it, but has since become increasingly mainstream in recent years, with even Liberal Party of Canada members endorsing a version of it in their 2021 policy convention (though there has been no sign of the Trudeau Liberal government planning to implement such a policy) which would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago. A basic income was even brought into practice with a pilot program in Ontario in 2018 (which Segal even served as an advisor for) before it was terminated by the newly elected Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford. In 2019 he published the book “Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight To End Poverty In Canada” about his life story, and his moral & economic case for a basic income.
In 2013, Segal seemed to critique modern Conservatives who had grown increasingly antagonistic of Labour & collective bargaining while speaking to Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, where he made a rousing defence of Labour unions and their place in Canada:”my Canada is the kind of country where trade unions and free collective bargaining makes our economy stronger, and Canada a better place. It is as important a part of a strong and growing economy as capitol investment, reasonable profits, and fair wages, and without collective bargaining, there’s never any guarantee on the fair wages, and without fair wages, we’re not building a society of which we can be proud to transfer to our kids and our grandchildren, knowing we’ve transferred to them something that reflects OUR values as Canadians…the right of working men an women to unionize was at the root of TORY policy less than five years AFTER Confederation. this is not some new thing that came rolling in with FDR. this has been part of who we are from the very beginning”
