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Duff Roblin, the former premier who was declared the Greatest Manitoban, died Sunday just a few weeks short of his ninety-third birthday.
Although long-retired, Roblin never fell into obscurity. Instead, his stature grew each time the floodway he built around Winnipeg in the 1960s spared the city from inundation. Nicknamed Duff’s Ditch, the Red River Floodway was an unpopular project at the time Roblin was trying to raise the $63 million it took to build it. Detractors of the time called it “Duff’s Folly” and said it was a colossal waste of money.
“I can remember walking into his office and he was holding the telephone away from his ear and one of Winnipeg’s most prominent businessmen was berating him for the stupidity of building the floodway,” recalls Joseph Martin, who served as Roblin’s executive assistant when Roblin was premier.
Roblin’s floodway ended up paying for itself several times over, preventing flooding in Winnipeg on at least ten occasions since 1969.
But Roblin, who was Progressive Conservative premier from 1958 to 1967, did not consider the floodway his greatest achievement. He was most proud of the advances he had made to Manitoba’s educational system. He modernized the way schools were administered, promoted French-language education, and oversaw the formation of community colleges, as well as the creation of Brandon Univeristy and the University of Winnipeg, which were originally colleges.
Martin, who is President Emeritus of Canada’s History Society, said Roblin had the rare talent of being able to communicate lofty visions to a grassroots audience. He often got people to see beyond their own narrow self-interest.
“For instance, one time we were in Minnedosa [a rural community in southwestern Manitoba] and he had set aside money for a program to help people in Malaysia. He talked to that group of farmers and townsfolk about the importance of the Commonwealth and of a world a long, long way away from Minnedosa — and they were inspired. That’s what made him so different; he was always putting things in a much bigger picture.”
In fact, Roblin’s ability to inspire people was what moved Martin to work for him in the first place.
Martin was a young business student and active in the Progressive Conservative party when he met Duff Roblin for the first time at a political meeting.
“I mean, those meetings can be pretty boring things, pretty awful,” said Martin. “But he was just back from Halifax, where they’d been celebrating the centennial of representative government in Canada, and he just changed the whole dynamics of the room and rather than being some boring political meeting, he put it in a context of what democracy was all about.”
After the meeting, Martin said he had the “temerity” to point out a small error in Roblin’s speech. Instead of being offended, Roblin wrote the freshman business history major a letter the next day thanking him for the correction.
“It was one of a series of occasions where he inspired me,” said Martin.
Roblin eventually approached Martin to work for him. He became Roblin’s executive assistant from 1961 to 1966.
Roblin’s government was industrious. New highways were built, crop insurance was set up, new provincial parks established, and social assistance programs expanded. He was re-elected in landslide victories in 1962 and 1966. But a new sales tax reluctantly introduced in 1967 proved his undoing. It didn’t matter that Manitoba was the last of nine provinces to introduce a sales tax — Alberta doesn’t have one to this day —the new levy proved hugely unpopular, and Roblin paid the price.
After resigning as premier to make an unsuccessful bid for leadership of the federal Progressive Conservatives (he lost to Robert Stanfield), in 1968 Roblin ran for election to Parliament in the riding of Winnipeg South Centre, where he suffered a humiliating loss.
“Duff Roblin was punished by the people of Manitoba, at least the ones in Winnipeg South Centre,” said Martin. “They were angry about the sales tax, they forgot about the floodway and everything else and they punished him deeply.”
Roblin made one more try at federal politics in 1974, this time in Ontario, but again went down in defeat. In 1978, he was appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, retiring at age seventy-five in 1992.
In 2008 he was named Greatest Manitoban in a poll conducted by the Winnipeg Free Press Martin, who is director of Canadian business history at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, said Roblin had a huge impact on his life.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking today and I’m reminded of the saying which goes: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, why. Others see things that never were and say, why not?’”
Roblin took the latter view, said Martin.
— Nelle Oosterom
Read more from the Winnipeg Free Press, the Globe and Mail, and visit CBC's Digital Archives for a radio broadcast of the 1950 flood, and video shot in April 1997.