Richard Mahoney

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Richard Mahoney (right), speaking to a friend
Richard Mahoney (right), speaking to a friend
This article is about the Canadian lawyer and politician. For the Arizona politician, see Richard Mahoney (Arizona politician).

Richard J. Mahoney (pronounced MAhenny) is a Canadian lawyer, specializing in public policy and regulatory law. A longtime organizer for the Liberal Party of Canada and media commentator, he returned to full-time legal practice in the early 1990s after serving in numerous capacities within Liberal governments as a strategist, executive member, advisor, and minister's aide. Mahoney is strongly associated with the fiscally moderate and socially progressive neoliberal movement that characterized Canada's political state for the better part of two decades under the direction of then Finance Minister Paul Martin. He ran as the Liberal candidate in the riding of Ottawa Centre during the 2004 and 2006 Canadian federal elections. Fluently bilingual[1], Mahoney has been a resident of Ottawa and Denholm, Québec for over twenty years. He is married and the father of three children.

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[edit] Early life

Raised in Toronto, he attended the Jesuit-run Brebeuf College School and then received his B.A. in political sciences in 1982 from the University of Western Ontario. After graduating, he opted to put himself within arm's reach of Canada's political hearth and enrolled at the University of Ottawa's law school. While studying to earn his LL.B., he served as the President of the Young Liberals of Canada and worked in the offices of Prime Minister John Turner and Finance Minister Marc Lalonde. He graduated with a law degree in 1985.

[edit] Politics and government

Mahoney was executive assistant to Paul Martin, during the latter's unsuccessful 1990 leadership campaign. He was elected president of the Liberal Party of Ontario from 1992 to 1995. After the 1995 provincial election resulted in a Progressive Conservative victory, Mahoney traveled the province on what he "wryly called the Hugh Grant apology tour'". [2] His position as party president led Mahoney to wide media exposure in the Ontario press, and saw him acting as a political commentator for many years on TVO's Studio Two, CTV, CBC, 580 CFRA News Talk Radio, and other television and radio networks. After his term expired, he remained a close confidant of many federal and provincial politicians and was often called upon to advise Paul Martin, Canada's finance minister from 1993-2002. In 2003, the two worked closely on a successful Liberal leadership campaign, ultimately leading to Martin's election as Liberal leader and appointment as Canada's 21st Prime Minister.

After incumbent Liberal MP Mac Harb was appointed to the Senate in 2003, Mahoney garnered the party's nomination in Ottawa-Centre. Expecting to run in a by-election, he and his opponents were thrust into a national election when one was called for the early summer of the following year. The riding was captured by New Democratic Party candidate Ed Broadbent, one of the most formidable and respected politicians in Canada's recent political history. After a short-lived minority parliament, Mahoney ran as the Liberal candidate again in the election of 2006, but the riding was carried by Broadbent's NDP successor, Paul Dewar.

In April 2007, Mahoney announced that he would seek the Liberal nomination in the riding of Pontiac, currently held by Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon. This came as rumours circulated, supposing that Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion had encouraged Mahoney to run and given the candidacy his blessing.[3] On April 15, however, Farrelton farmer Cindy Duncan-McMillan won the nomination and will be the Liberal candidate for Pontiac in the next federal election.[4][5]

[edit] Professional and community interests

Early in his legal career, Mahoney directed much of his energy towards practicing refugee law, in front of the Immigration Refugee Board and the Federal Court of Canada. After his law practice evolved into other areas, he remained involved as a volunteer, assisting a number of refugees including as volunteer counsel to the SOS Viet Phi, who remained stateless in the Philippines until 2005, Vietnamese refugees after fleeing their country in the wake of the Vietnam War. He also worked, for seven years, as a director of the Royal Ottawa Hospital's fundraising foundation, using legal contacts to bring much-needed funding to community healthcare.

Mahoney has pursued a number of personal interests at the professional level as both a lawyer, sometime lobbyist and business executive. He was a senior vice president and of Borealis Capital, an investment firm owned by the OMERS pension fund. He practises business, public, regulatory and immigration law at Fraser Milner Casgrain, one of Canada's "leading business law firms" [6] and recently sat on the board of the Canadian-American Business Council. Mahoney has used his expertise in law, government and policymaking as a representative for numerous clients, including Rogers Cable [7]. He represents corporations from sectors such as "telecommunications, broadcasting, transportation, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, high technology and financial services." [8]

Mahoney's role as a lawyer and lobbyist while simultaneously hoping to become an MP was, at times, controversial. [9] An article in the [10] Ottawa Citizen reported Mahoney successfully lobbied the Liberal government to lower Canadian content requirements for Canadian Satellite Radio prior to obtaining his lobbyist license. However, Mahoney attended the event in question as a Liberal Party donor and the nonpartisan Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists ruled there was no wrongdoing and that he had not, in fact, lobbied the government. Mahoney, also, resigned his position at Borealis in 2004 to prevent a conflict of interest during his turns as a candidate in general election campaigns.

Mahoney plays in an Ottawa-area band called The 20th Century Boys. The seven-member group includes Warren Everson, who had a decade-long career in the Mulroney government, bass player Darrel Reid, deputy director of policy and research for the Prime Minister's Office and Scott Bradley, director of business development at Bell Canada.

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