The man in the arena : from railway brat to diplomat
Roger Simmons (Author)
"The Man in the Arena: From Railway Brat to Diplomat is the candid political memoir of Roger Simmons, from Newfoundland and Labrador, who made waves in both provincial and federal political scenes. Roger Cyril Simmons, PC, is a public policy consultant and former politician and diplomat in Canada. He is originally from Newfoundland and Labrador, where he was an active politician for twenty-four years. The son of Willis Simmons and Ida Williams, he was born in the outport community of Lewisporte. After studying at the Salvation Army College for Officers, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Boston University, he became a teacher in Newfoundland's Salvation Army school system. (Churches ran their own publicly funded schools until 1998.) He subsequently moved to Springdale to become principal of Grant Collegiate and superintendent of the Green Bay Integrated School Board. He became president of the Newfoundland Teachers' Association in 1968 and was elected to a second term in 1969 but resigned to manage the campaign of Justice Minister Alec Hickman for the leadership of the Newfoundland Liberal Party. In 1973, Simmons was elected to the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly as the Liberal member for Hermitage. He was re-elected in 1975 and 1979 as MHA for Burgeo-Bay D'Espoir. Later in 1979, he resigned his provincial seat and was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in a 1979 by-election as the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for Burin-St. George's. Following the 1980 election, he became parliamentary secretary to the Minister of the Environment and parliamentary secretary to the Minister of State for Science and Technology. On August 12, 1983, he was named to the cabinet of Pierre Trudeau as Minister of State for Mines. He resigned eleven days later after learning he was being investigated by Revenue Canada for income tax issues. Simmons thereby set the record for the shortest federal cabinet career in Canadian history. Following that, he narrowly lost his seat in the 1984 election. In 1985, he returned to the Newfoundland House of Assembly as the provincial Liberal MHA for Fortune-Hermitage and served as Leader of the Opposition. Simmons returned to the federal House of Commons in the 1988 federal election. He was re-elected in the 1993 election, then defeated in the 1997 election. Roger Simmons represented Canada at the Rio Summit in 1992 and the WTO in 1999. In 1998, he was appointed Consul General for Canada in Seattle, and he served in the position for five years before moving to Vancouver and joining Gowlings, Canada's largest law firm, as senior policy advisor. Beginning in 2010, he spent a year in Baghdad as advisor to the Iraqi parliament. In 2012, Simmons went to Kiev and eastern Ukraine as an election observer with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2018
Flanker Press, St. John's, 2018