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| - Alan William Pope (born August 2, 1945 in Ayr, Scotland) is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1977 to 1990, and served as a cabinet minister in the governments of Bill Davis and Frank Miller.
Pope was raised in northern Ontario, and was educated at Waterloo Lutheran University and Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He worked as a barrister and solicitor before entering politics. Pope served as an alderman in the northern city of Timmins from 1973 to 1974.
He first ran for the Ontario legislature in the 1975 provincial election, but lost to Bill Ferrier of the NDP by 1,292 votes. He ran again in the 1977 provincial election, and defeated Ferrier by 2,276 votes. He was appointed as a parliamentary assistant in Davis's government in 1978, and was promoted to Minister without portfolio on August 30, 1979.
Easily re-elected in the 1981 provincial election, Pope was promoted again to Minister of Natural Resources on April 10, 1981. He served in this position for the remainder of the Davis administration's time in office. Pope was known for hating departmental bureaucracy, and took the initiative in opening several new provincial parks. He also made the controversial decision that mining, hunting and motorboats would be allowed on park grounds. In 1982, he decided that the MNR would not attempt to enforce jurisdiction over disputed rice cropland claimed by the Ardoch aboriginal group; to date, no subsequent Ontario government has attempted to claim the land.
Pope's position in the Progressive Conservative Party was unusual. He supported the interventionist policies of the Davis government, and was sometimes considered to be on the progressive wing of the party. Despite this, he was not a Red Tory, and was not a supporter of the party's Toronto-based establishment (commonly known as the "Big Blue Machine"). Pope was rather a populist, and sought greater power for the party's neglected local branches in northern, eastern, and southwestern Ontario. In this sense, his position in the provincial Progressive Conservatives was similar to John Diefenbaker's role in the federal party, a generation earlier.
In 1985, Pope was a prominent figure behind Frank Miller's campaign to succeed Davis as party leader. Some regarded his presence in Miller's camp as unusual, given that Miller's supporters tended to be older figures from the party's right-wing. Pope nonetheless proved an effective campaigner for Miller, compiling much-needed polling data and devising strategies for Miller's supporters at the party convention. One strategy was to have some of Miller's delegates vote for the progressive Larry Grossman on the second ballot, which resulted in the narrow elimination of the centrist Dennis Timbrell (this was considered strategic voting as Timbrell was considered a greater threat than Grossman). (en)
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