Tom Campbell (Canadian politician)
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Thomas J. Campbell, Q.C. (born October 5, 1927) is a retired Canadian politician, who served as mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia from 1967 through 1972.
Campbell was born in Vancouver, where he became a lawyer. In 1962, he joined Vancouver City Council as an alderman, representing the Non-Partisan Association (NPA), a conservative civic party. Running as an independent, Campbell beat out Bill Rathie in the 1966 election, ending the NPA's long, unbroken domination of city hall. In 1970, he won the NPA nod to replace Mayor William Rathie as the party's mayoral nominee and again won the mayor's office.[1]
As mayor, "Tom Terrific" (as he was both affectionately and derisively called) proved to be brash, confrontational, and controversial. As Greater Vancouver's population topped one million, Campbell took an assertively pro-development stance, advocating a freeway that would destroy a large part of Chinatown, the demolition of the historic Carnegie Centre, and the construction of a luxury hotel at the entrance of Stanley Park. He was also a vocal supporter of the conservative Social Credit government of Premier W.A.C. Bennett.
It is, however, Campbell's confrontations with the city's burgeoning youth counterculture for which he is best remembered. This included attempts to suppress and shut-down the alternative newspaper, The Georgia Straight. His penchant for hysteria on the subject of youth and drugs was nurtured by Jack Webster, an effective and influential local broadcaster. This rhetoric was most notoriously converted to action in August, 1971, when Vancouver police charged on horseback into a group of about a thousand relatively benign hippies having a "smoke-in" on the streets of Gastown and left us the historical footnote known as the Gastown Riots. The so-called Battle of Maple Tree Square led to the arrest of 79 people, of whom 38 were charged with various offences. A later judicial inquiry criticized the action, characterizing it as a police riot.
Because of his declining reputation, Campbell chose not to run for re-election in November 1972 and returned to private life.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- 1971 Report of Mr. Justice Dohm on the Gastown Riots, from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
- 1968 CBC television clip of Doug Collins interviewing Tom Campbell about Vancouver's hippie problem.
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