Political maverick lived on the edge   ALAN HUSTAK The Gazette

September 25, 2005

Richard Holden was a cheeky boulevardier and a lifelong political maverick who chose to live on the dangerous edge of things.

The former Westmount MNA, who thumbed his nose at convention by switching political parties to sit as a separatist, committed suicide last Sunday by throwing himself off his apartment balcony. He was 74.

At his memorial service on Friday, Holden was remembered in an appropriately irreverent eulogy by his son, Arthur, as a lifelong diver.

"As a boy, he won pennants for diving," Arthur Holden recalled.

"He dove into the bars of downtown

Montreal, where his capacity for hard liquor and harder invective made him an entertaining, if dangerous, drinking companion. And he dove into Quebec politics, performing the single most spectacular flip ever seen."

Holden referred to his father's fatal last dive, ending the eulogy with the words, "when he touched bottom, I hope he found peace."

Richard Holden was born in Montreal on July 7, 1931. His father was an engineer and his grandfather made a fortune starting a company that provided the boots for soldiers during the First World War.

Holden studied law at McGill University and at the Universite de Montreal and took political science at the Universite de Grenoble.

He was admitted to the Quebec Bar in 1956. In 1962, he ran for a seat in the Quebec legislature as an independent candidate opposed to the nationalization of Hydro-Quebec.

He tried to get elected to Parliament as a Progressive Conservative in 1979.

He was elected to the National Assembly in 1989 as a member of the English-rights Equality Party, then shocked his constituents by crossing the floor in 1992 to sit as a separatist.

A cynical, self-deprecating wit, Holden was a fixture on the Crescent St. bar scene, and as one of his drinking companions Mordecai Richler used to say:

"Nothing said by Richard Holden after 2 in the afternoon should be taken seriously."

His marriage to >b>Helene Papachristidis ended in divorce in 1981.

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Maverick ex-MNA Holden dies

Richard Holden, the former Equality Party MNA who enraged his Westmount constituents by crossing the floor to the Parti Quebecois, has died.

Holden fell to his death from the eighth-floor balcony of his Atwater Market area home Sunday morning, his son, Arthur Holden, said yesterday.

Richard Holden was 74.

Richard Holden

Foul play is not suspected. Arthur Holden said his father was suffering from debilitating back pain and chose to end his life. A suicide note was found at the scene.

"He was just suffering at the end, and I guess he just wanted to do it his own way," Arthur Holden said, adding no doctor had been able to relieve his father's anguish.

"Life was not fun for him."

Added Richard Holden's former wife, Helene: "He had pizzazz, and he went with pizzazz. Just like Frank Sinatra - my way, voila."

Holden, who had been divorced for 20 years and lived alone, was a crackerjack lawyer in his youth, a maverick politician and a self-proclaimed fun-loving gadfly. He revelled in shocking his friends and supporters, and in the process he burned many bridges.

By far his biggest stunt - the one Montreal remembers best - came in 1992 when, as the independent MNA for Westmount, he turned his back on federalism to join the separatist Parti Quebecois. The party banner under which he had been elected in 1989, the anglophone rights Equality Party, had already kicked him out for refusing to follow the party line.

"Canada was a very wonderful country," Holden said three years before the 1995 sovereignty referendum, delighting in rattling the teacups of the Westmount establishment from which he came. "I was very pleased to be a Canadian, but it is not the country I once knew."

Holden's only brother, Rodney, stopped speaking to him and threatened to change his name.

Holden claimed his friendship with former prime minister Brian Mulroney was not hurt by the move - Holden had run unsuccessfully for the Progressive Conservatives in the 1979 federal election - but history shows that the voters had the last word.

In the 1994 provincial election, Westmount went back to the Liberals, while Holden, who ran for the PQ in Verdun, was defeated. Later, the PQ appointed him to a government job on the Quebec rental board, where he worked until he retired in 1999.

Holden embarrassed Equality in other ways. A 1993 Gazette investigation found he had used his MNA's expense account to pay consulting fees to his limousine driver, tagging him his transportation adviser. And he hired a unilingual coat-check woman as a political aide.

"Obviously, he worked to the beat of his own drummer," Robert Libman, Equality's founding leader and the former MNA for D'Arcy McGee, said yesterday. "He was never a conformist to anything, even in his personal life. He was a colourful guy. We certainly had our high points and some good moments together. Ultimately, he was just never able to fit in."

Two other Equality candidates had been elected with Holden and Libman in the 1989 election - Neil Cameron in Jacques Cartier and Gordon Atkinson in Notre Dame de Grace.

"I'm sad to hear he's gone. I will miss him very much," said Atkinson, 85, a former broadcaster. "We got along very well. I didn't believe his bullshit, and he didn't believe mine."

Added Cameron: "Richard was intelligent and witty and frequently amusing, certainly literate. In some ways I liked him, because rogues are likeable."

Holden was known for his outbursts, one day giving his Equality colleagues a single-finger salute during a session of the National Assembly, a move for which he was later made to apologize.

Even though Holden lived his later years in political exile, he kept up his friendships in the bars on Crescent and Bishop Sts.

Yesterday, some of his pals gathered for a drink after learning of his death - mourning the loss of another of the street's colourful personalities, like author Mordecai Richler and journalist Nick Auf der Maur.

"He was outspoken and we don't always agree with everything he said, but he was an interesting person," said Holden's old pal Irwin Steinberg. "There are some of us who will miss him. I guess there will be others who will not.

"All the characters that used to congregate ... they're all gone. It makes it a less interesting place. It's people who live, maybe at the extreme, who make life interesting. I'm not saying everybody else is boring, but generally speaking everybody else is boring."

"He was fun to be around," Arthur Holden added. "You always got the sense when you were with him that life was worth living.

"He really had a good life. He got up to stuff and was a colourful Montrealer. I think in the last few years, even though a lot of anglo Montrealers were quite annoyed at him for his political changes of heart, he was well-liked.

"People would ask after him and come up and say 'Hi' - even anglos who had not been pleased when he moved to the PQ. I don't think there were any hard feelings, and I don't think he felt terribly guilty about what had happened. He was just in a lot of pain."

Holden is survived by two other children, Christopher, who lives in California and works in the technology industry, and daughter Caroline, an opera singer who lives in Switzerland, and several grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for Friday. Sep 23, 2005

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COLLEAGUES REMEMBER AN ORIGINAL

"I'm sad to hear he's gone. I will miss him very much. We got along very well. I didn't believe his bullshit, and he didn't believe mine."

- Former Equality MNA Gordon Atkinson

"Richard was intelligent and witty and frequently amusing, certainly literate. In some ways I liked him, because rogues are likeable."

- Former Equality MNA Neil Cameron

Obituary of Richard Holden.

Né à Montréal en 1931, cet avocat se lance dans le monde de la politique en 1989. Avec Richard Libman, il crée le Parti Égalité. Il est député dans le comté de Westmount de 1989 à 1992. Toujours à la tête du comté de Wesmount, il siège à l'Assemblée nationale comme indépendant en 1992 et pour le Parti Québécois de 1992 à 1994.

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