Sen. Francis Fox, left, and MP Denis Coderre speak at a press conference in Montreal on Aug. 15, 2008, where they addressed the governmentês approach to cultural funding.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
There was a time in the late 1970s when Francis Fox was considered a possible future leader of the federal Liberal Party and potential prime minister. Articulate, handsome, effortlessly bilingual, Mr. Fox was part of a generation of young politicians who had swept into Ottawa on the coattails of Pierre Trudeau.
“Francis was a star,” said Jean-Jacques Blais, who was first elected as a Liberal MP from Northern Ontario in 1972 alongside Mr. Fox. Both were 32. Four years later, both men were appointed to cabinet and Mr. Fox was handed the politically sensitive portfolio of solicitor-general. Mr. Fox was soon thrust into a nasty controversy involving the RCMP, whose security service had been caught in a series of dirty tricks in its fight against Quebec separatism.
“In the House, he shone,” Mr. Blais recalled in an interview. “I didn’t envy him. He was up on his feet during every Question Period for 15 minutes defending the RCMP and doing a super job of it. He was very articulate in both languages and had the respect of the whole House.”
But for Mr. Fox, who died of cancer on Sept. 24 at age 84, that rapid political ascent hit a major obstacle in early 1978, when he told a stunned House of Commons that he was resigning from cabinet after he admitted to signing another man’s name on the consent form for an abortion.
Mr. Fox explained that some time earlier, he had had “a brief liaison” with a married woman who became pregnant. Abortion was still part of Canada’s Criminal Code at the time and the hospital performing the procedure had insisted on first getting the okay of the woman’s husband. Mr. Fox provided the signature.
After an anonymous letter disclosing the incident was sent to the prime minister, Mr. Fox submitted his resignation to Mr. Trudeau, who accepted it with regret. “I just hope that people will understand that this is a human failing and that he will not be lost to public life forever,” Mr. Trudeau said.
In the less-partisan political atmosphere of the time, there was broad sympathy for Mr. Fox’s plight not just from Liberals but from opposition MPs as well. “I really feel a certain sadness for Mr. Fox,” said Elmer MacKay, the Progressive Conservative critic for solicitor-general. “I think he brought great dedication to the ministry.”
Supporters of a liberalized abortion policy saw Mr. Fox’s actions as proof that the law desperately needed reform. A Globe and Mail columnist said Mr. Fox should be praised rather than criticized. “We should be applauding the man for standing by the woman when so many others run the other way,” he wrote.
Ontario attorney-general Roy McMurtry later announced that the Crown would not press criminal charges against Mr. Fox for his actions, saying the public interest would not be served.
Mr. Fox was easily re-elected to the Commons in the 1980 election and he was soon back in cabinet as communications minister, shepherding through Canada’s first Access to Information legislation and bolstering the role of Telefilm Canada. Years later, he served as a top aide to Prime Minister Paul Martin and was appointed as senator. But leadership always eluded him.
Asked in 1984 if he harboured ambitions to become prime minister, Mr. Fox responded, “I did once, but I grew up. … I’m a Canadian nationalist but I’m also a pragmatist and a realist. I realize it’s not very likely.”
Robert Rabinovitch, who served as Mr. Fox’s deputy minister in the early 1980s recalled that Mr. Fox was “really bright” and “could have been minister of anything.” But the 1978 incident “blew up his career,” Mr. Rabinovitch said.
FPhilippe de Gaspe Beaubien, right, shows Federal Communications Minister Francis Fox a new portable cellular phone in Montreal in 1983.Ian Barrett/The Canadian Press
After Mr. Fox was defeated in the 1984 electoral wave that brought Brian Mulroney to power, Mr. Fox stayed active as a behind-the-scenes adviser for the Liberals but never ran for political office again. “He knew he was damaged goods, which was quite sad,” Mr. Rabinovitch said.
Francis Fox was born in Montreal on Dec. 2, 1939, the third of four children of Pauline Taschereau, a member of an illustrious French-Canadian family of politicians, cardinals and judges, and Francis Moore Fox, an Irish-Canadian building-products salesman.
Young Francis grew up in the comfortable Montreal suburb of Town of Mount Royal, where he excelled at school and hockey. It was a bilingual household but Francis studied primarily in French, attending Collège Jean de Brébeuf and earning a law degree at the University of Montreal. He did a Master’s of Law at Harvard and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics.
Returning to Canada, he began practising law at the Montreal firm of Tansey, de Grandpré, but in the late 1960s he moved to Ottawa, working initially for a Liberal minister before being recruited as a special assistant in the Prime Minister’s Office, where his mentor was Marc Lalonde, the principal secretary and a fellow Brébeuf graduate.
According to Mr. Fox’s eldest son, John, the Trudeau Liberals were anxious to rejuvenate the party in Quebec, so one of his father’s tasks was to draw up a list of potential political candidates in the province. Mr. Fox placed his own name atop the list and submitted it to Mr. Lalonde. His political career was launched.
Mr. Fox decided to seek the Liberal nomination in Argenteuil–Deux-Montagnes, a largely rural riding north of Montreal, and began visiting the constituency regularly to convince locals he could represent them. His son says he worked hard to win over voters, with his “capacity to combine that kind of Cartesian French-Canadian logic with an element of charm that allowed him to be closer to people than they would have expected from a guy from Montreal.”
Back in cabinet after the 1980 election as both communications minister and secretary of state, Mr. Fox was in charge of cultural policy, including the CBC, and telecommunications. Lloyd Axworthy, who served in cabinet with Mr. Fox, said that Mr. Fox was always “a very helpful interpreter and explainer” of Quebec politics. Mr. Fox later served as trade minister in the brief Turner Liberal government.
After his defeat in 1984, Mr. Fox returned to Montreal and began a legal career at Martineau Walker, now part of Fasken. He specialized in communications law and was closely involved with Rogers Communications, where he held several positions and in 2002 was appointed its president of strategic relations.
For a time, he was also a lobbyist working with Government Consultants International, an Ottawa firm that included prominent Tories including the late Frank Moores, onetime premier of Newfoundland.
All the while, he remained active in Liberal politics, usually behind the scenes. He served as president of the Quebec wing of the federal party. He also kept good relations with onetime rivals, including Brian Mulroney, who at one point asked Mr. Fox to serve as chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. He declined.
Then in 2003, already in his 60s, Mr. Fox got directly back into the political fray. He was appointed as principal secretary to Mr. Martin when he became prime minister. Mr. Fox had special responsibility for Quebec.
“He was thoughtful, well-connected in Quebec and politically astute,” said Tim Murphy, Mr. Martin’s chief of staff at the time. He called Mr. Fox “a steadying influence” who didn’t bring a lot of ego to the role.
For Mr. Fox’s daughter, Julianna, who was studying law at the University of Ottawa, her father’s move to Ottawa had extra meaning. “He was my roommate. We shared an apartment in the student ghetto.”
In the end, Mr. Fox stayed less than a year in Ottawa, returning to Montreal in late 2004. A year later, Mr. Martin appointed Mr. Fox to the Senate where he served for six years, retiring in 2011.
For Julianna, he was always much more than her Dad. When she began practising law, they were both at Fasken, where he was a colleague and adviser. “He was the first person I travelled with internationally,” for work, said Ms. Fox, who is now chief ethics and compliance officer for WSP Inc, the Montreal engineering firm.
Politics always was a constant in the family. In the 2011 election, Mr. Fox’s younger son, Daniel, made his own entry into federal politics as the Liberal candidate in part of his father’s old riding. He was swept away by the NDP’s Quebec orange wave.
Mr. Fox was active in various community roles, serving for seven years as chair of Montreal International, which promotes the city’s international vocation, and as a board member of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and of Tennis Canada. He also worked closely with Cystic Fibrosis Canada in efforts to get sufferers from the disease access to new medications.
Mr. Fox’s first marriage, to Joan Pennefather, ended in divorce in 1976. They had one son. In 1978, Mr. Fox married Viviane Case, a model and flight attendant, who later became a successful visual artist. They had two children.
Mr. Fox leaves his wife, Viviane Case-Fox; children, John, Julianna and Daniel; siblings, Robert, Marie-Hélène and Elizabeth; and seven grandchildren.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.