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n Timothy Porteous’s varied
careerasanartsadministrator,
writer and political aide, he
brought together the worlds of
politics and the arts in unique
ways. While he was still at univer-
sity, he co-wrote a satirical hit
musical that toured across Cana-
da, and later he worked to get
Pierre Trudeau elected prime
minister and then served as his
executive assistant. Perhaps his
most enduring accomplishment,
though,washissuccessfulfightto
preserve the arm’s-length rela-
tionship between the federal gov-
ernment and the Canada Council
for the Arts, where he worked for
a dozen years, including three as
its director. He went on to run a
number of prominent arts-relat-
ed organizations.
“He was a very gentle person,
but he had a fire in his belly.
When something was really im-
portanttohim,hestoodfirm,”his
wife, Beatrice Donald, says. Mr.
Porteous,whodiedonFeb.11,was
known for his intelligence, wit
and generosity.
He was also highly creative,
bothinhispersonallifeandinhis
writing. “The way his mind
worked, it was play,” his son, Ni-
cholas, recalls.
In February, 1957, Mr. Porteous
and a group of classmates study-
ing law at McGill University took
on the annual student review.
They got funding from business
tycoon E.P. Taylor, brought in a
professional director and came
up withMy Fur Lady. Mr. Porteous
wrote the lyrics, co-wrote the
script and acted as associate pro-
ducer. It played for weeks at the
university, followed by shows at
the Avon Theatre in Stratford,
Ont., where the Stratford Festival
was in its early years, and a tour
across the country. He called
working on the musical “one of
the two great adventures of my
life.”
Ironically, the story, about an
Inuit princess scouring the coun-
try in search of a husband – play-
ing off the Broadway musicalMy
Fair Ladyand the real-life story of
GraceKellymarryingPrinceRain-
ier of Monaco – included the Cul-
turality Squad, which was a spoof
of the Canada Council, where Mr.
Porteous would later work. The
show took down Canadian-
American political follies, includ-
ing the funding of the Distant
Early Warning Line. The title song
includes the lines: “The dollar
spentinlargeamountsenrichour
bulgingbankaccounts,andthat’s
why we parade the aisles in the
sleekest, chicest Arctic styles.”
Mr. Porteous’s daughter, Va-
nessa, a theatre director, thinks
My Fur Ladyhit when there was
little art being made that refer-
enced Canada. “The Canadian
identity didn’t even have a sen-
tence to describe it.” But her fa-
ther and his colleagues ran with
it, even reporting on the defeat of
prime minister Louis St. Laurent
during the 1957 election live from
the stage during one perform-
ance.
“The thing about my dad is,
there’s so much colour,” she says.
Later, Mr. Porteous was occa-
sionally asked to exercise his the-
atrical writing skills. In the late
1960s, the Canadian Opera Com-
pany commissioned him to pen
satirical lyrics about Mr. Trudeau
for a song inDie Fledermaus.
When McGill andMy Fur Lady
mate Donald MacSween turned
50, he wrote a song for the birth-
day party with lyrics that includ-
ed: “Birdy flies out and crow fly
in. The Liberals lose and the To-
ries win.”
Mr. Porteous became friends
with Mr. Trudeau after they met
at a World University Service
seminar in Africa in 1958. They
werevacationingtogetherinTah-
iti in 1967 when Mr. Porteous in-
troduced his older friend to 18-
year-old Margaret Sinclair, whom
Mr. Trudeau would soon marry.
In 1965, Mr. Porteous took a
leave of absence from his law-
firm job to work as an assistant to
Liberal industry minister Bud
Drury, and went on to do media
relations and write speeches for
Mr.Trudeau,whowasrunningfor
prime minister. When Mr. Tru-
deau won, Mr. Porteous became
his executive assistant; this was
the other great adventure of his
life. (He never practised law
again.)
Mr. Porteous was meant to of-
fer a young, hip air to the new
prime minister’s leadership. He
obliged, accompanying Mr. Tru-
deau to a meeting with John Len-
non and Yoko Ono.
The political aide caught the
attention of Richard Nixon in
1972, when the U.S. president vis-
ited Ottawa. According to audio
tapes released years later, upon
his return to Washington, the
presidentreferredtoMr.Porteous
as “that bushy-haired fellow.” Mr.
Nixon then called him an “ugly
bastard. Probably very left wing.
Why don’t we do something
about it?” Apparently, Mr. Nixon
tried to plant an unflattering
media story about Mr. Porteous,
but it never materialized.
During his time with Mr. Tru-
deau, Mr. Porteous often drew on
his talent with words, writing,
among other things, the message
on behalf of Canada that was left
on the moon by Apollo 11 in 1969:
“Man has reached out and
touched the tranquil moon. May
that high accomplishment allow
man to rediscover the Earth and
find peace.”In 1972, Mr. Porteous began
working for the Canada Council,
where he advocated for inde-
pendence fromgovernment in-
terference. In 1984, Mr. Trudeau’s
government proposed the coun-
cil and other arm’s-length corpo-
rations should fall under the Fi-
nancial Administration Act, and
be subjected togreatergovern-
ment oversight. Mr. Porteous ob-
jected, triggering what’s been
called the organization’s biggest
showdown with the federal gov-
ernment.
“While the Council supports
the principle of full accountabil-
ity tothe government, Parlia-
ment, and the people of Canada,
itopposestheimpositionofaddi-
tional controls bythe govern-
ment on the Council. ... This will
mean a deterioration in the qual-
ityofjudgementsmadeaboutthe
needs and priorities in the arts,”
Mr. Porteous wrote in a back-
ground paper on the issue.
“He was a very rectitudinous
man, very principled. Very
strongly ready to put his money
where his mouth was. But in a
modest way,” says Sarah Jen-
nings, an Ottawa-based author
who was working as a cultural
journalist in that era.
Whilehewasassociatedirector
of the council, he and director
Charles Lussier tussled with the
government when it insisted
$800,000 be chopped from the
council’s budget, and specifically
be pulled from the budget of the
relatively new Art Bank, whichbuys art to displayin government
buildings.
Inbothcases,Mr.Porteousand
his allies prevailed. These battles
cost Mr. Porteous the long-time
friendshipofMr.Trudeau,butleft
a legacy of a council that still to-
day runs with minimal political
interference.
He was born John Timothy Ir-
vine Porteous on Aug. 31, 1933, in
Montreal. His mother, the former
Cora Ann Kennedy, loved litera-
ture and shared that interest with
her son, often ordering books
from England. His father, John
Geoffrey Porteous, was a lawyer
who mentored a young Brian
Mulroney. He had an older sister,
Jennifer, and a younger one,
named Camilla.
Tim attended a boarding
school that valued sport and had
a militaristic culture – after all, it
was wartime – but the young stu-
dent preferred poetry and art.
There, he did his first and only
actingroleasMirandainTheTem-
pest, and he admired that charac-
ter all his life.
At McGill, Mr. Porteous fin-
ished his BA in 1954 and his law
degreein1957,duringthehubbub
ofMy Fur Lady. After the musical
toured, he took a job at the Mon-
treal law firm Bourgeois, Doheny,
Day & Mackenzie.
A few years later, Wendy Farris,
a neighbour in his apartment
building,askedhimtodefendher
againsttheirlandlordinadispute
over a bathtub. The two began
dating.
Vanessa says the family story
was that they were lying in bed in
1968 and her mother said, “What
are we going to do if Pierre wins?”
Mr. Porteous replied, “I thought
we’d get married and go to India
and [then] get jobs in thegovern-
ment.” This is what they did, with
him working for Mr. Trudeau and
her beginning a long career as a
civil servant.
Vanessa was born in October,
1970,duringtheFLQcrisis.Herfa-
therwasatPierreLaporte’sfuner-
al the day her mother brought
her home from the hospital. The
young family spent time with the
Trudeau clan, including holidays.
Mr. Porteous and his wife di-
vorced in 1982.
While Mr. Porteous clashed
with the Liberal government
whenhewasdirectoroftheCana-
da Council, he truly chafed under
Brian Mulroney’s newly elected
ProgressiveConservatives.Heob-
jected to cuts to the council while
the government increased arts
money that it closely controlled.
He was fired from the job in 1985.
Mr. Porteous then became the
associatedirectoroftheCanadian
Centre for Architecture in Mon-treal. By 1988, he had moved to
TorontotobepresidentoftheOn-
tario College of Art (now OCAD
University). “He did fine at these
jobs, but he was really at his peak
attheCanadaCouncil,”saysGeof-
freyJames,whoheadedthecoun-
cil’s visual-arts division.
Mr. Porteous met Beatrice Do-
nald in 1981 at a conference in
B.C., where he had written a skit
to open the event. The two mar-
ried in 1987, and their son, Nicho-
las, was born the same year.
Whenheretiredin1995,heand
Ms. Donald moved to West Van-
couver. There, he did community
work, including launching a se-
ries of annual Stephen Leacock
lunches, and continued serving
on boards, such as the Vancouver
Art Gallery and Vancouver Youth
Theatre. His board résumé also
includes the National Theatre
School, National Arts Centre and
Royal Ontario Museum.
He was named a member of
the Order of Canada in 2003 and
received an honorary doctorate
from Trent University in 1986.
In his personal life, Mr. Porte-
ous had what Nicholas calls “an
incredible sense of play.” Vanessa
recalls her father declaring he
wanted to learn either to skate-
board or to ride a unicycle. His
then-wife felt the latter would be
safer, and he got one for Christ-
mas around 1978. He would take
Vanessa to a parking lot and
would put one hand on the mir-
ror of the family’s van and the
other on the top of her head and
taught himself to balance on it,
then ride it. At one point, he even
owned and mastered a giraffe
unicycle, which is extra tall.
Similarly, he took the fun of
special occasions very seriously.
Birthdays were elaborate, playful
events: Vanessa recalls one in-
volving an all-neighbourhood
scavenger hunt with items plant-
ed by her dad. The Porteous fam-
ily’s annual spring party in Otta-
wa eventually expanded to in-
clude the entire neighbourhood.
The night his father died, Ni-
cholas, a professional actor, had a
show. “They asked me if I wanted
tocancelit.Thatwouldhavebeen
against everything he stood for.
SoIdidit,anditfeltreallygoodto
honour his spirit in that way.”
Mr. Porteous, who was 86, died
as a result of complications relat-
edtoParkinson’sdisease.Inaddi-
tiontohiswife,sonanddaughter,
he leaves his daughter’s partner,
BruceWeir;youngersister,Camil-
la Ross; and grandson, Alexander
Weir.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailWithareportfromJudyStoffmanTIMOTHYPORTEOUS
ARTSADMINISTRATOR,POLITICALAIDE,86CANADACOUNCILHEADFOUGHT
FIERCELYFORITSINDEPENDENCE
AfriendandassistanttoPierreTrudeau,heintroducedthefutureprimeministertothewomanhewouldmarry,
oncefamouslydrewtheireofRichardNixonandevenwrotetheCanadiangoodwillmessageleftonthemoonin1969DIANEPETERS
TimothyPorteousisseenathomeinVancouverin2002.Mr.PorteousreceivedanhonorarydoctoratefromTrentUniversityin1986andwas
namedamemberoftheOrderofCanadain2003.JOHNLEHMANN/GLOBEANDMAILMr.PorteouschatswithPierreTrudeau.Mr.Porteousmetthefuture
primeministerataseminarinAfricain1958,andtheywouldgoon
totravelandworktogether,buttheirshowdownsoverthefutureof
theCanadaArtsCouncilinthe1980sultimatelyendedthefriendship.