Phil Gaglardi was one of many politicians who made use of govt aircraft during the 1960s

EDITOR’S NOTE — Canadian politicians have been much in the news lately for the spending of taxpayers’ money on travel for family members. Alison Redford, Jenny Kwan, Linda Reid and others have felt the political consequences. Getting in trouble over family travel isn’t new in B.C. politics. In 1968, ‘Flying’ Phil Gaglardi was at the top of his game as MLA for Kamloops and minister of highways in the W.A.C. Bennett government. But an incident involving a flight by a family member was to cost him his job as highways minister. This is the second in a series of excerpts from a chapter called The Plane, The Plane in Friend O’ Mine, my biography of Phil Gaglardi published in 1988. In the first installment, opposition MLAs discovered that the government’s Lear jet had flown to Dallas with Gaglardi’s daughter-in-law and grandson on board. Karen Gaglardi, then married to Phil’s son Bob, and who is Tom Gaglardi’s mother, is a native of Longview, Texas, near Dallas. In March, 1968, Bob Gaglardi learned the Lear was flying to Wichita, Kansas for maintenance, so he asked pilot Bert Toye if Karen could catch a ride to show her parents their new grandson.

By MEL ROTHENBURGER

What the press didn’t know was that Gaglardi genuinely hadn’t expected (pilot Bert) Toye to take the side trip to Dallas to deliver the passengers. Hadn’t expected it, because he’d given specific orders against it.

“Bert said, ‘What difference does it make? I have to go there anyway.’ I said, ‘The difference it will make is what some people might make of it.’ He said, ‘It has nothing to do with you.’”

Gaglardi was worried about the publicity he’d been getting over The Boys’ land deals, and couldn’t afford any more controversy. He says he was left with the impression that Toye and co-pilot Ron Page understood they were to take no extra passengers with them.

Lou Iverson’s recollection backs up Gaglardi on the caution to Toye, although he says he knew Toye intended to take Karen on the trip. Toye was to let his passengers off in Seattle, where they would catch a Continental Airlines flight to Dallas.

McNeill confirms Gaglardi’s concerns. “I was standing right there,” he said. “Phil did not want those ladies carried to Dallas. Now if the pilot got down there, and if the pilot decided something different, I don’t think Phil should carry the can for it.”

The Lear headed out of Kamloops, dropped Gaglardi in Vancouver and continued to Victoria and then south. Karen Gaglardi and her son were on the plane. By the time she got through customs, it was too late to catch the Continental flight. They went on with Toye, and from that point, all the flight decisions were up to him.

The weather, said McNeill, was not a problem for Toye. The collaborated version of events now provided by Gaglardi, Iverson and McNeill indicates very strongly that Gaglardi took a bump rap, a rap that caused him grievous political harm, in order to protect Bert Toye.

“I can tell you categorically that I did not make that decision,” he says of the extra leg.

Gaglardi didn’t try to cast doubt on Toye’s story; he never, in fact, even talked to Toye about it after the scandal broke.

Any hope Gaglardi had that this controversy would die a natural death the way so many others had was doomed. It was an instant scandal.

To Dave Barrett, flying your daughter-in-law on a government plane, even if it was purposely diverted somewhere especially for her, was a minor indiscretion. But in politics, you used what you had for ammunition. In politics, you were guilty unless proven innocent.

Ray Perrault was demanding a judicial inquiry. “The public must be reassured that every effort will be made to ascertain the complete facts and, if necessary, that appropriate action will be taken in the interests of the citizens of B.C.”

In retrospect, even Ray Perrault would find that position a trifle pompous. The Lear’s price tag was a quarter that of Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s Lockheed Jetstar, which had been used only recently to take Pearson and his wife for a vacation in Jamaica.

The federal jet was fully equipped with special electronics, a bar, a galley — all the comforts of home. All federal cabinet ministers used the Jetstar, and all MPs flew free on Air Canada or Canadian Pacific Airlines, as well as on Department of Transport aircraft.

And, other provinces had large fleets of aircraft. Perrault was also aware of the growing use of aircraft by private companies. It was becoming a necessity.

“Gaglardi’s contention that he needed an airplane was justified,” Perrault said in an interview with the author. “In retrospect I would revise some of my judgments.”

But in 1968, without benefit of hindsight, all the Liberal leader saw was the minister of highways giving himself and his relatives rides on an expensive jet paid for by the taxpayers.

Perrault’s view was shared by more than a few members of the Socreds’ own caucus. Several who had been uncomfortable with Gaglardi’s way of doing things for a long time, who had become increasingly alarmed at the trouble caused by his sons’ land deals and everything else that had blown up to the delight of the opposition recently, were horrified at this latest faux pas.

Within cabinet itself, whatever reluctant support Gaglardi had enjoyed in the past evaporated. His competence had never been questioned — though he often cut red tape when he should have unraveled it — and no cabinet minister ever said Gaglardi wasn’t doing the job.

But it was Gaglardi’s spending that had resulted in the premier’s clamp-down on budgeting in the early 1960s and that had often resulted in money taken from the coffers of another ministry to go into Gaglardi’s projects. It was Gaglardi who missed many a cabinet meeting, yet managed to get most of the press and somehow remained second in popularity with the public only to Bennett.

And it was Gaglardi who got the perks, who drove government cars with radio telephones, who maintained a room at the Hotel Vancouver, who flew around in a jet.

Some cabinet ministers still hadn’t figured out where the money came from for that jet, or even how he’d been able to swing all the past spending on other planes. Other cabinet ministers used the jet on occasion, and some used other government planes as well, but never to the extent or in the manner that Gaglardi did it.

Most of all, Gaglardi’s refusal to hold back on the bombast and the flaunting of the amenities of his office had become an acute embarrassment to the government.

NEXT: Flying Phil prepares to deliver a rip-roaring speech in the Legislature defending himself, but it’s a speech he’ll never be allowed to give.