Our last good premier? How Bill Davis nearly quadrupled Ontario’s GDP and created the province we know today

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/08/2021 (1869 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In scanning the business world for CEO role models, we too seldom look to the public sector.

To the legacy of Bill Davis, for instance.

When he left office, in 1985, Davis was running a $170-billion enterprise called Ontario.

The late premier, who died Aug. 8 at age 92, nearly quadrupled Ontario’s GDP while in office, from 1971 to 1985.

Davis secured Ontario’s sustainably increasing prosperity by thinking things through rather than acting impulsively.

He surrounded himself with people smarter than himself, each gifted with special knowledge of Ontario’s stunning diversity of industries, its incredible one-million-sq.-km. land mass, its increasingly diverse cultures, and its place in a globalizing world.

How do you manage growth? How do you satisfy the needs of roughly 10 million people, as Ontario’s population then was?

And in a rapidly growing enterprise, where the new challenges of globalization, feminism, and environmentalism come into full force soon after you first take office, how do you make potentially disruptive forces work for your enterprise?

Those are the challenges for every business CEO, and Bill Davis mastered them better than most corporate CEOs in history.

Davis made it look deceptively easy, drawing little attention to himself as he greatly strengthened the foundation for private-enterprise prosperity first laid by his superb predecessors, Leslie Frost and John Robarts.

In business terms, Ontario is a conglomerate, one of the world’s biggest.

Ontario is a leading producer of agricultural goods, autos, electric power, minerals, forest products, financial services, computer software, toys, biotech innovations, beer, every kind of media content, commercial aircraft, and satellite components.

That’s the short list, but you get the idea.

An economy so multi-faceted and growing so quickly required a workforce with remarkably diverse skills during Davis’ time as a top cabinet officer and then premier.

Ontario businesses needed machine-tool operators, foresters, welders, software writers, bank-branch managers, telecom engineers, filmmakers, international trade lawyers, entrepreneurs and experts in global finance.

So, as Ontario education minister for almost a decade in the 1960s, Bill Davis built a sprawling network of community colleges to provide business with the multi-skilled workforce it needed ahead of its period of torrid growth.

Davis helped usher into the world York, Brock, Trent and Laurentian universities, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and TVOntario as an educational broadcaster.

York University is now one of the Canadian private sector’s biggest sources of experts in business administration, and of young entrepreneurs.

Brock University and its associated Niagara College turn out experts in every aspect of winemaking.

And Davis’ Sheridan College is a world leader in film animation, one of the reasons Walt Disney Co. just announced a new office in Toronto.

Davis was unapologetic about the cost of building that education infrastructure, which is still paying dividends decades after the first groundbreaking.

In his eulogy of Davis in another newspaper, Patrick Brown, the Brampton mayor and former Ontario PC leader, recalls what Davis said of education’s importance:

“Show me a good doctor, a good lawyer, a good whatever and I will show you a good kindergarten teacher, a good high school teacher and a good university professor. There is no more important commitment that a government can make than to education.”

The wise CEO is not a victim of trends, or “disruptive technologies” that drive long-established businesses to the wall. She makes them work for her.

A low-key feminist, Davis appointed Margaret Birch as the first woman to the Ontario cabinet in 1971. She was joined four years later by Margaret Scrivener.

A year after the first Earth Day, in 1970, Davis’ Ontario had North America’s first non-federal ministry of the environment. It enforced the most rigorous environmental assessments in Ontario history.

Impressed by the grassroots Toronto movement to protect neighbourhoods fundamental to the character of the city, Davis killed the planned neighbourhood-destroying Spadina Expressway.

He also put a stop to then-Metro chairman Paul Godfrey’s campaign to evict the 700 or so people living on the Toronto Islands.

Davis put the powerful Godfrey in his place again by overruling Godfrey’s determined efforts to have a domed stadium built in his native North York.

Davis said it would be built downtown, instead. And so it was done.

For the next three decades, other North America cities have been relocating their principal sports and concert venues downtown, rescuing inner cities from the 1960s and 1970s flight to suburbs like North York.

And a fledgling grassroots movement to protect neighbourhoods and architectural heritage became, and remains, a tenet of urban planning in the GTA and widely elsewhere.

Davis also intervened to protect the Niagara Escarpment from commercial development. Blessed with some of the Earth’s most fertile soil, the region is now a leader in New World wine production. It is an early case of environmental protection giving rise to a lucrative new industry, now a prominent phenomenon as new businesses and industries are created in the fight against climate crisis.

Globalization, a trend on the far horizon, would require a hyperefficient road and superhighway network.

During Davis’ premiership of almost 14 years, Ontario was constantly under construction. New or enlarged traffic arteries were underway in the regions of highest economic activity, existing and forecast.

That cut trucking times in half or more, enabling “just in time” delivery of goods to factories the moment they needed them – about a decade before that business imperative became a reality.

The National Film Board’s compelling documentary on Bill Davis, “The Art of the Possible,” is a must-watch film in understanding a Davis management style suited to enterprises of every type.

Davis was given to bromides. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” for instance.

But unlike many conservative political leaders in North America, Davis walked the talk on fiscal responsibility. He was adept at the wise CEO’s task of allocating capital without wrecking the balance sheet.

When running a deficit was made necessary by a weak economy, Davis managed to keep the shortfall at a modest ratio to GDP. And the significant GDP growth in good times yielded bountiful new tax revenues.

“Bland works,” Davis famously said in response to those who thought him oddly ordinary.

What the detractors didn’t grasp until later was that this shy man from Brampton was riding an economic tiger with acumen and apparent ease.

He succeeded by embracing compromise, by working amicably with ostensible adversaries, and in knowing that unthinking adherence to an ideology is a trap.

Not one for the dramatics of the celebrity CEO, Davis quietly and with good cheer got the job done.

It has often been said in the 36 years since Davis left office that he was our last good premier. Let’s hope not.

Correction — Aug. 13, 2021: Margaret Birch was the first woman to be appointed to an Ontario cabinet. The article incorrectly stated she was Canada’s first woman cabinet officer.

David Olive is a Toronto-based business columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @TheGrtRecession