Death by pneumonia came recently to 69-year-old Frank Drea, “the people’s minister” – the legendary Toronto journalist, labour activist and Ontario politician, and one of my major mentors in labour, politics and life.

As a Toronto Telegram journalist and columnist, Frank Drea was truly legendary; no one could lock up a story quite like him.

It was Drea who almost single-handedly brought crusading consumer TV and print journalism to the Canadian media. From 1970 to 1972, Drea was the president of the Canadian Society of Professional Journalists.

My first sighting of the shortish, raspy-voiced, bag-eyed Irishman was in 1961. Fresh out of the graduate history department of the University of Toronto, I was hired by the Toronto Labour Council. I was given the prestigious title Executive Secretary to the Toronto Labour Health Centre Organizing Committee. I was also its sole employee.

At the time, the biggest strike in Toronto was a revolt by immigrant Italian workers in the building trades. That bitter strike was led by the fiery Bruno Zanini and tied up Toronto construction sites for weeks.

Part of my duties in the labour movement was to do a survey of the health needs of these Italian strikers. I went to strike headquarters at Brandon Hall in Toronto’s West End. A cluster of TV cameras and pen-and-pencil reporters led by The Globe and Mail labour reporter Wilfred List were waiting patiently for a press statement from labour leader Zanini.

Suddenly, the secret meeting of the Zanini union was over. From behind the closed curtains stepped Frank Drea; it seems he had been allowed special access to Zanini’s secret strike meetings. Drea then proceeded to chair the press conference of Wilf List and company.

Drea had already filed his front page Zanini strike story to the Telegram. Drea’s lockup coverage of one of Canada’s biggest strikes ever later won him the Heywood Broun Crusading Journalism Award in the United States and a National Newspaper Award in Canada.

Shortly after his Zanini lockup, Drea joined the Steelworkers as assistant public relations director. He was happy in his new job because his Catholicism and the Steelworkers’ hatred of communists went hand in hand.

Drea also became my mentor. He taught me the wonders of alcohol – a morning wakeup of two double scotch-and-waters in the office, two double scotches and one boilermaker for lunch, and umpteen more boilermakers for post-work winding down. Drea was also a superb public relations man and strike strategist who won the Steelworkers many victories.

When I later joined This Hour Has Seven Days in the mid-1960s, Drea and I kept in touch as drinking companions of Norman DePoe, Peter Reilly, Michael Maclear and Knowlton Nash. Our soirees at the Four Seasons bar across the street from CBC’s Jarvis Street headquarters are already a part of Canadian journalism legend.

But anti-communism, not alcohol, was really foremost on Frank Drea’s mind. Frank dreamed of eliminating the major Steelworker rival union, the communist-led Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, based in Sudbury.

Bill Mahoney, the leather-lunged anti-communist leader of the Steelworkers decided to give Drea the job of moving the Mine, Mill Workers in Sudbury into the Steelworkers tent. Mahoney provided a hefty war chest.

In the middle of the night I was awakened by Frank Drea. He was in Sudbury. “The commies are all drinking themselves silly at the Confederation Hotel. Larry, I want you to get me a film crew to record all their laughing, brazen, commie faces.”

For Frank Drea, anything. I found him the best cinematographer in Canada plus an excellent crew. Off they went to Sudbury.

Things didn’t work out. Drea’s Steel seduction of the Mine, Mill Workers petered out at a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Steelworkers and Mahoney. An angry Mahoney fired Drea for alleged incompetence.

Drea wasn’t fazed a bit; he already had other prospects. The famed Ontario Tory fixer “Fast Eddie” Goodman approached Drea and offered him a cabinet post in the Bill Davis Tory government. Drea became Ontario’s minister of community and social services, and of consumer and commercial relations. In 1986, the Peterson Liberal government made Drea chairman of the Ontario racing commission.

Drea single-handedly gave the Ontario Tories a labour face and a populist voice they used most effectively to keep the NDP at bay. As minister in the Bill Davis government, Drea passed legislation protecting workers, modernized the insurance industry, and gave a big break to disabled Ontarians.

In all these Left-Right battles for Frank Drea’s soul, he always got the last and best laugh. In the mid-1960s, Drea was my main defender against the charge that I had maligned a peaceful, innocent union on strike against computers and automation in Toronto’s newspapers. That union was the International Typographical Union. The union said I had maligned them in my Anik Award-winning documentary Strike: Men Against Computers.

When the union launched a smear public relations campaign against me with CBC president J. Alphonse Ouimet, Frank Drea came to my rescue.

Drea also wrote letters to the CBC president enclosing press clippings that read: “Avoid violence, printers told,” “nine strikers appear in court,” “a Telegram advertising employee had her life threatened by telephone. She was told she would have her ‘throat cut’” and “Telegram composing room foreman had his home broken into, basement, living room and kitchen flooded and fire started.”

Frank, I’ll miss you badly. I still owe you big. Rest in peace.