Anniversary of Bob Rae’s Arrest

“You have to do what you have to do,” then—Ontario ndp leader Bob Rae told reporters in 1989, a year before being elected premier. He uttered these sage words when briefly detained by police at a blockade of a northern Ontario logging road construction project. Rae’s arrest came in a busy month for future federal Liberal leadership hopefuls. Michael Ignatieff was busy promoting Human Edge, his new TV documentary series, promising that the program would “constantly be upsetting viewer expectations.” And a third contender, Gerard Kennedy, then the executive director of Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank, was in the news for condemning a proposal to include food items in the proposed gst, declaring, “The whole concept of this tax is regressive.”