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In memoriam: Wayne Roberts, 1944-2021

A lot of smart and compassionate journalists have worked for NOW Magazine over its 40-year history. Few were as sharp as Wayne Roberts – and that’s not just because he was the only one in the room with a PhD. Wayne was an iconoclast. He was the gravitas guy. People didn’t call him Dr. Roberts for nothing. But despite his impressive mind, Wayne always had a way of making you feel smart when you talked to him.

Food policy may have been his main area of expertise – he managed the Toronto Food Policy Council for a decade – but Wayne was also a student of history and economics. His stories, whether on food or politics, always carried with them the lessons of the past. Wayne died on January 20 of leukemia at the age of 76. He had been diagnosed only a few months earlier. He leaves behind many friends and family and a lasting legacy in the food movement. A celebration of his life will be live-streamed on Sunday, February 21 at 2 pm.

His accomplishments in the areas of food policy and the environment are many. He was the author of 12 books, including Get A Life! his manual for green economics. For those who knew him, the title (part exhortation, part taunt) served as a cheeky homage to the fierce passion behind the soft smile. Wayne won numerous awards, including the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 in recognition of his community service. Among his accomplishments on that front was his work with young people.

Wayne was a visionary, which could make editing his writing a little intimidating. His jousts with editors were not necessarily the stuff of legend around the NOW offices. But they were known to happen because, well, genius. But on those occasions when it fell to me to give his copy the once over – that’s usually all it required – Wayne always treated suggestions with kind gloves. Besides, for him, there was always something else on the go, another revolution to seed somewhere.

And while he will always be known as a guru of food policy, for me it’s his political instincts that stand out. Like shortly after he began covering Queen’s Park for NOW back in the early 90s. Wayne stuck out like a sore thumb for his radical smarts among the more straight-laced types in the mainstream media that made up the press gallery. He saw the Common Sense Revolution of Mike Harris coming before it had a name. Wayne noted the “social outsiders” Harris was drawing to his cause at the PC party convention that would ultimately choose him leader. In his article, written from the floor of the PC leadership convention at the CNE Coliseum, Wayne mused about the pockets in the province that seemed ripe for the picking for Harris’s brand of conservatism, which would eventually lead to his election in 1995. Wayne knew a thing or two about farmers and the political forces at work in rural Ontario. The rest, as they say, is history.

The last time I communicated with Wayne was over email in 2018. It was shortly after the shutdown of the GM plant in Oshawa. To Wayne, the closure of the plant was not just a failure of industrial policy (another one of his areas of expertise). It was an embarrassment, the last nail in the coffin of our national identity, or as he wrote, the end of “les trente glorieuses.

We communicated a few times after that about politics. He had not yet started reading The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis’s examination of the Trump presidency, which we were all still trying to figure out. But he had some thoughts to offer on Trump’s brand of populism. To Wayne, it was something more hostile “akin to fascism (not a word I use lightly).” It’s true. There was no knee-jerk about Wayne. Like many university students of the 1970s, Wayne’s political views were informed by Trotsky. But they gravitated to the Greens through adulthood. He offered how the left had to counter this “new right” of Trump with a “comprehensive and positive view of democracy.” The words would prove prophetic.

We lost touch after that, save for a few emails about story ideas he was kicking around. But by all accounts, the last few months of his life were spent connected to friends and family, and he remained philosophical. A favourite saying of his was from Picasso: “The meaning of life is to find your gift; the purpose of life is to give it away.”

@enzodimatteo

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