Laurence Decore, influential Canadian Ukrainian politician, dies (11/21/99)

Laurence Decore, influential Canadian Ukrainian politician, dies

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - Laurence Decore, an influential politician on the western Canadian scene for three decades, a man who helped enshrine multiculturalism in Canada's Constitution, died at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton on November 6 after a long battle with cancer. He was 59.

Among those paying tribute following his death was Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who issued a statement of condolence to the family and a press release. "The people of Alberta have lost an extraordinarily gifted leader," Mr. Chrétien wrote, "a man of vision and perseverance."

Quoted by the Edmonton Journal, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, a long-standing political rival, said: "Laurence was a man who brought great passion and a keen intellect to all he did in public life, qualities especially apparent during debates in the legislature. Whether we were working as allies or as political foes, I always felt that he served his constituents and his community."

Mr. Decore, also known as Lavrentiy Dikur, was born on June 28, 1940, in Vegreville, Alberta, the son of John Decore, himself a politician and a member of the federal Parliament in 1949-1957, before being appointed superior court judge.

Mr. Decore graduated with a B.A. from the University of Alberta in 1961, returning to earn a bachelor of law degree in 1964. He was called to the Alberta Bar that same year. He became involved in various business ventures, including a hotel in Jasper, Edmonton's QCTV cable television station, and various commercial and industrial development projects, that soon made him a millionaire.

In 1973 he became the founding chairman of the Alberta Cultural Heritage Council (also the year he was elected Edmonton's Ukrainian Professional and Business Club) and served in that capacity for two years.

After two unsuccessful forays into municipal politics, in 1974 he was elected to Edmonton's City Council as an alderman, and was returned to his post in another ballot in 1976. In the three years after 1977, he served as chairman of the municipality's economic and public affairs committees, as a member of the board of Royal Alexandra Hospital and as the director of the Edmonton Board of Health.

From 1977 to 1981 Mr. Decore was a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies, and in 1979-1981 he was president of the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Federation.

In 1980 Mr. Decore was appointed chairman of the Ottawa-based Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism for a three-year term, joining the vanguard of a nationwide lobbying effort to include language enshrining Canada's multicultural character in Section 27 of the new Constitution, adopted in 1982.

In 1977 he had run for mayor of Edmonton and lost, but in 1983 he ran again and was elected in a landslide - winning the largest plurality ever accorded to a candidate for the post in that city. Later that year Mr. Decore was awarded the Order of Canada for his work on behalf of multiculturalism since the 1970s.

In 1986 Mr. Decore was re-elected as mayor of Edmonton in another, even larger, landslide and embarked on a reorganization of the municipal administrative system. He abolished Edmonton's Board of Commissioners, which effectively handed more power to the city's elected representatives, and adopted a fiscal program that eliminated the city's debt. For three years running his administration earned excellence awards from the international Government Finance Officers Association.

In the fall of 1988 Mr. Decore used his municipal power base to engineer a caucus review within Alberta's Liberal Party and at the ensuing convention won the leadership on the first ballot. Then-Premier Don Getty called a snap election the following March, and Mr. Decore's Liberals lost, but he won his Glengarry-Edmonton seat from the New Democratic Party (NDP) incumbent, and led his party "back from the wilderness," as Mr. Chrétien put it.

As a member of the legislative assembly (MLA) Mr. Decore's relentless attacks on the Conservative government's financial mismanagement lifted the Liberal Party into a lead in the polls in the early 1990s, even as he began the first of his bouts with cancer. In 1990 he overcame an affliction of the colon, and in 1992, returned to the legislature a month after an operation to remove a tumor in his liver.

However, also in 1992, the Alberta Tories chose a new leader, Mr. Klein, who began co-opting Mr. Decore's proposals for fiscal austerity, and in the election of May 1993 the Conservatives were returned to power. Nevertheless, the Mr. Decore led his party to status as Official Opposition, and wiped out the NDP in its Edmonton strongholds. The 32 seats the Liberals won in that election was the highest number won by any opposition party since 1917.

That year Mr. Decore denounced then-federal Tory minister Jean Charest's assertion that the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during and after World War I did not merit commemoration by the Canadian government.

Faced with mounting pressure from his caucus (which had expected to win the 1993 election), Mr. Decore stepped down as Leader of the Opposition in Alberta but stayed on as an MLA. In 1994, according to Edmonton Sun columnist Neil Waugh, Mr. Decore convinced Mr. Klein to adopt reforms that provided for free votes on private members' bills, an elected speaker and the longest question period in Canada, thus greatly democratizing the legislature.

Mr. Decore retired from politics in 1997, when he declined to stand for re-election. He returned to business, securing an appointment as vice-president of Brokerlink Inc., the second largest insurance brokerage company of its kind in Canada.

He served as chairman of the Canada-Ukraine Business Initiative (CUBI) in 1996-1997, and later as its honorary chairman. In 1996 he was keynote speaker at the congress of the Ukrainian Canadian Students' Association in Montreal, and received the Michael Luchkowich award from the Edmonton Branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

In June of this year, more than 1,600 people gathered at a "Thank you, Laurence Decore" fund-raising gala in support of the University of Alberta's new Noujaim Institute for Pharmaceutical Oncology Research, to which he also dedicated considerable effort in recent years. In October the university conferred an honorary doctorate upon Mr. Decore.

Funeral services were held on November 9 at the St. John Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Edmonton, with internment following at St. Michael's Cemetery.

Mr. Decore is survived by his wife, Anne Marie, academic vice-president of the University of Alberta; daughter, Andrea, a Calgary-based lawyer; and son, Michael, a teacher in British Columbia. Mr. Decore's family requests that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Noujaim Institute at the University of Alberta or the Cross Cancer Institute.

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