John Cummins left a safe federal seat to try and revive the provincial Conservatives in 2011.
In 2011, federal Conservative MP John Cummins took a big chance: to leave federal politics to try to revive the moribund provincial B.C. Conservatives.
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For awhile it appeared to be working. At one point, Cummins’s Tories were tied with then-B.C. Premier’s Christy Clark’s Liberals in the opinion polls.
But his support dropped during the 2013 provincial election, when the Conservatives received only 4.5 per cent of the vote. Cummins lost his own bid for a seat and resigned as leader.
Cummins died March 2 at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, 10 days shy of his 83rd birthday. He had been in poor health for several years.
“John had a spinal stroke Aug. 18, 2020, and it paralyzed him from the waist down,” said his wife Sue. “He’s never walked since, he’s lived with pain for 4 1/2 years.”
John Martin Cummins grew up working-class in Georgetown, a small town near Toronto. He got a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Western Ontario in the mid-1960s, then headed west, working in Alberta’s oilfields and on construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in northern B.C.
“When I came to B.C. in 1967, this was the place to be in Canada,” Cummins told Doug Ward of The Vancouver Sun in 2011. “There were these big projects. The Bennett Dam. (Social Credit Premier) W.A.C. Bennett was building highways, forestry was booming, fishing guys were making money, everyone was making money. And people were flocking here.”
Cummins moved to the Lower Mainland and became a fisherman, a vocation that he loved — he held a commercial fishing licence for two decades. But his main gig was as a teacher in Langley, Delta, the Northwest Territories and in the Peace River district of northern Alberta.
He entered federal politics in 1993 with the Reform party, and won six straight elections in Delta-South Richmond and Delta-Richmond East with Reform, the Canadian Alliance and finally the Conservatives.
His biggest notoriety was when he got arrested in 1996 after illegally participating in a salmon fishery open only to Aboriginals. He spent two nights in jail.
Phil Eidsvik of the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition told The Sun’s Peter O’Neil that “John is seen as a hero. He’s welcome on any dock in the province, and on a lot of them they’d throw other politicians in the water.”
But Cummins’s opposition to Native-only commercial fishing was controversial — he was bounced from his post as senior fisheries critic by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper in 2004.
At his peak as B.C. Conservative leader, his party polled 23 per cent, the same as the B.C. Liberals. But infighting and questionable candidates — three were fired for inappropriate comments — led to calls for Cummins’s resignation, and the party’s fortunes fell.
Cummins moved to Ladysmith and Kamloops in retirement. He was predeceased by his first wife Phyllis and is survived by his wife Sue, son Martin, daughter Carolyn, stepdaughters Christina and Erin, 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
A celebration of life will be held March 29 at 2 p.m. at the South Delta Baptist Church in Tsawwassen.
