By Andrew Macdonald
I just finished re-reading a 1990s Nova Scotian classic about the four-term Progressive Conservative government of John Buchanan, and the book Bagman – A Life in Nova Scotia Politics, has stood the test of time over the last 35 years.
It was written by the late mover and shaker Don Ripley, a political insider in the 1970s Liberal government of Gerry Regan, and also an insider in the Buchanan regime from 1978 to 1992.
Ripley’s book Bagman remains a classic expose of the inner workings of the Buchanan government. One story in particular told the power Buchanan wielded. During a frequent Boston shopping trip with his wife Mavis, a snowstorm was raging back in Nova Scotia and Buchanan took a call from one of his isolated rural supporters, who said his residential dirt road had gone unplowed.
Ripley writes that Buchanan somehow got the phone number of the highway plow driver and phoned orders to the operator to plow said road, and the plow operator did as he was instructed by Buchanan.
Bagman is the only book that peers into the four-term regime of Buchanan, who was first elected premier in 1978 when he defeated Liberal Gerry Regan.
Nova Scotia’s second last back-to-back majority government was won by Buchanan in 1988, an election Liberal Vince MacLean was poised to win. That was until the last week of the vote, and an opinion poll said the trailing Buchanan would actually win.
The late Joe Stewart, a Brian Mulroney lobbyist, got written up in Bagman, as well. Ripley wrote that he met Stewart at the Ottawa airport, and Stewart was huffing and puffing. That’s when Ripley said he sat Stewart down and held his briefcase.
During my frequent political chats with Stewart, he denied the incident with Ripley, using a rarely used curse word to describe the event in the book as a tall tale. Stewart considered Ripley the most dangerous man in Nova Scotia politics.
Ripley died several years ago, training late in life as a Vermont lawyer, and he reportedly wrote Bagman to settle political vendettas after he was banned for life from selling stock as a stockbroker.
In 1993, Donald Ripley wrote a scathing book on the inner workings of the Gerald Regan and John Buchanan governments. The book is still available at used book stores and on Amazon.
The ban came after regulators concluded Ripley had leaked contents of the blind trust set up for the late Stu McInnes, a Mulroney minister and Tory MP for Halifax.
Stewart often regaled me on the inner workings of the Buchanan government. Buchanan was a nemesis of Stewart, who in 1976 joined forces with prominent Cape Breton Tory John Abbass in an unsuccessful attempt to remove Buchanan as party leader.
Some aspects of the Buchanan regime could make for great Hollywood movie material.
During the Buchanan regime, Tory bagman, John Grant, was found dead in a Burnside hotel, dead from multiple knife wounds. The coroner of the day concluded Grant committed suicide, but author Stevie Cameron, in her political book On the Take wrote it sounded more like a gay frenzy killing, and questioned how someone could stab themselves multiple times.
Back in the 1980s, investigative journalist Paul Walsh was found dead in Halifax harbour. Weeks before he died, he told Joe Stewart that people were after him, and Stewart believed Ripley had been threatening Walsh before his death. Walsh had written a book on the premiers of Nova Scotia.
Another top Tory bagman Ross Montgomery died in the 1990s. He left an estate of $600,000 and the official word from the coroner was that he hung himself in the basement of his home. But his close friends noted he had just gone to Sears to buy a golf shirt the day he died, and had a game scheduled on the links.
At a former news job, I asked Ripley, who was no fan of Montgomery, if he had visited with Montgomery the day he died. Montgomery was among the people he blamed for his lifetime ban as a stockbroker.
Ripley went ballistic for an answer.
Soon, an unsigned letter came to me, recommending ‘bag & window treatment’. “Put briefcase by window floor, open window and push Macdonald out”. That would seemingly suggest I jumped out the window on a suicide mission.
I talked to Joe about the letter, and he believed it had the hallmark of one Don Ripley, who Stewart said was noted for sending unsigned threatening letters to his enemies.
Many believe Ripley was behind the sexual assault charges laid in the 1990s against former Premier Gerald Regan, who was once a friend of Ripley’s, but Ripley in his book wrote the former premier crossed him, thus becoming an enemy.
Regan was subsequently acquitted of the sex charges.
