The Worst and Best of the Premiers and Some We Never Had by Bill Rowe

Author:Bill Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2017-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Tom Rideout

Thomas Gerald Rideout was born in Fleur de Lys in 1948. He was interested in politics from an early age. When I first met him as a young teenager in the early 1960s on the Baie Verte Peninsula, he told me he was going to be premier. But first he became a teacher in Baie Verte before entering elective politics.

In the early 1970s, Tom was my campaign manager in a couple of successful elections in White Bay South. Then he got elected to the House of Assembly as a Liberal himself from the district of Baie Verte–White Bay in the provincial election of 1975 and served as a bright star in the Opposition.

He was about to cross the floor and join new premier Brian Peckford’s PC caucus before the election of 1979 but stopped in his tracks when Don Jamieson came back from Ottawa to lead the Liberal Party. Like nearly everyone else in the party, he thought Jamieson was going to lead the Liberals to victory.

After Peckford beat Jamieson, though, Rideout did move over with the Tories the next year. He claimed he was motivated by Peckford’s strong stand against the new Trudeau Liberal government on ownership and control of the offshore resources.

Tom became Peckford’s parliamentary assistant before being appointed minister of Culture, Recreation and Youth, and then minister of Fisheries in 1985. When Peckford retired as premier in 1989, Rideout ran for the Tory party leadership against four other candidates, cabinet ministers Len Simms, Neil Windsor, Loyola Hearn, and Hal Barrett. Some of them were leading lights in the government.

On the third ballot, he beat Len Simms 403 votes to 377, and very shortly after being sworn in as premier, he called a provincial election. The results on voting day proved to be peculiar.

In spite of the PC Party languishing under a dark cloud from the Sprung greenhouse boondoggle, and in spite of Clyde Wells having been touted for years as the saviour of the provincial Liberal Party, not to mention of the province itself, Rideout led the PCs to a slightly higher percentage of votes than Wells’s Liberals received.

The PCs got 47.6% of the popular vote and the Liberals 47.2%. But the way the votes were distributed determined that the Liberal candidates won 31 seats in the House to only 21 for the PCs. Wells formed the government and Rideout became Leader of the Opposition.

He had been premier for forty-four days.

In 1991, Tom left as Leader of the Opposition for an appointment to a federal board. When his term of office ran out there, he tried to get elected as a PC in Gander–Grand Falls riding in the federal election of 1993. But he was routed by the popular Liberal incumbent, now senator, George Baker.

After receiving a law degree from the University of Ottawa, he got elected to the provincial House again in 1999 as a PC in Lewisporte district, and later in the district of Baie Verte–Springdale. When Danny Williams won his election in 2003

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