Allan Williams has two images of his dad, former St. Albert MP John G. Williams — a man in a suit and tie working in his office, and a man driving a 1954 Massey Ferguson tractor on his Sturgeon County hobby farm.
John Williams, who served nearly 15 years as St. Albert’s MP, died on Monday, July 15. The local politician was first elected in 1993 as a member of the Reform Party of Canada, a more socially conservative right-wing party that split from the Progressive Conservatives in the 1980s.
“While being a member of parliament and giving as much public service as he could was always a huge piece of him, he longed to be a farm boy and never got away from it,” Williams said.
The farm, equipped with machinery from the 1950s that Williams kept in working condition, became more of a focus after he stepped down as an MP in 2008.
But politics, Williams’s Presbyterian faith, and community remained central aspects of his life, family and friends told the Gazette.
Williams migrated to Canada from Scotland when he was in his early 20s.
Despite his deep affection for Scotland, Williams “tried to become as Canadian as he could,” Williams said. “He wanted to come here and build something for himself.”
In Canada, he became an accountant, a profession that family and friends said was well-suited to a man who was both thoughtful with money and believed strongly in personal accountability.
Williams an 'ethically single-minded' parliamentarian, friends say
Williams launched his first bid as an MP in the early 1990s. Friends said his political drive was in part a response to Canada’s weak dollar and large deficits, as well as his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, which he believed would weaken Canadian society.
During his first campaign, he met longtime friend Alan Murdock. The pair competed for a spot as the Reform candidate for St. Albert, and 30 years after Williams’s victory, they still met weekly to discuss current events.
Williams wanted to talk politics deep into the last months of his life, Murdock said.
“He was highly ethical to the point that he struggled being a politician,” Murdock said. “I think he enjoyed his time in opposition more so than when he was in government and had to toe the line.”
Murdock called Williams “ethically single-minded,” a man who was allied with principles over party.
That attitude carried over to Williams’s work as chair of the public accounts committee, where he regularly published Waste Reports, documents that criticized what he saw as careless government spending.
Williams's tenure as chair of the public accounts committee, which is always chaired by an opposition member, ended when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won the 2006 election. Afterwards, he was discouraged from publishing the Waste Reports, a change that made him unhappy, friends said. He believed that politicians should be held accountable, even when those politicians were on his side of the spectrum.
He also believed that Canada’s prime minister and cabinet had too much power and parliament should be granted more authority, said Charlie Schroder, a longtime friend who ran two of Williams’s campaigns.
“John really, truly believed that he represented all of the people in our constituency, whether they voted for him or not,” Schroder said. “I can attest to his success, because in the second and third campaigns, we always had volunteers that he had helped, and they wanted to pay back the help that he had given them.”
Under Williams’s guidance as public accounts committee chair, the committee helped unravel what became known as the sponsorship scandal. The discovery that federal officials, as part of a program to build Canada’s reputation in Quebec, had funnelled $100 million to Liberal party supporters, led to firings, resignations and arrests, and may have contributed to the Liberals’ 2006 election loss.
“John understood what it meant to be a member of Parliament,” said former St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, who succeeded Williams. “He understood better than most, maybe better than all, that the role of Parliament was to hold government to account, to ask the tough questions, to hold the prime minister's and the cabinet ministers’ feet to the fire.”
Following his tenure as an MP, Williams turned his attention to the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption, or GOPAC, a group he founded in 2002. GOPAC, an international network of parliamentarians focused on combating government corruption, is still active today, with 64 national chapters.
Williams a mentor to young politicians
Dane Lloyd, MP for Sturgeon River-Parkland, said Williams helped launch his political career.
Williams provided mentorship to Lloyd when Lloyd was still just a teenager interested in politics. When Lloyd ran as an MP and won his seat in 2017, Williams gave Lloyd his endorsement.
He remembers Williams told him to rewrite a campaign speech to be delivered to Conservative members in Lloyd’s riding.
“He said, ‘All the points, you said are fine, but you’ve got to give the people an opportunity to respond,’” Lloyd said. “You’ve got to say a point where people can say, ‘Heck, yes, I'm behind that,’ and then you’ve got to pause … I gave my speech, and with John's advice, I got about a third of the way through, and then I paused, but I paused it on a great point, you know, ‘We've got to get rid of this wasteful, ineffective carbon tax.’ And then I just pause, just like John told me do, and the whole place goes nuts.”
Williams’s politics were inspired by his experiences as a young shepherd in Scotland, his religious faith, his Western Canadian identity and his work as an accountant, Lloyd said.
“Combine all those things together, and it's just something that is so unique and almost out of time,” he said.
St. Albert-Edmonton MP Michael Cooper was also a teenager when he met Williams. Cooper was involved in Williams’s campaigns in the 2000s and served as his riding president in 2007 and 2008.
“He was unpretentious,” Cooper said. “He was straightforward and sincere. And I think that after serving the years that he did, the majority of constituents who were engaged, whether they knew him personally or not, would have viewed him that way.”
