Joe Borowski

Joseph P. (Joe) Borowski (December 12, 1933-September 23, 1996) was a Canadian politician and activist. From 1969 to 1971, he was a cabinet minister in Manitoba Premier Edward Schreyer's New Democratic Party government. Subsequently, he gained national notoriety as an anti-abortion protester.

Borowski was born in Wishart, Saskatchewan, and was educated at Birchcreek School in that province. He subsequently moved to Sudbury, Ontario, and Thompson, Manitoba, working as a miner and steelworker. He was Vice-President of the United Steelworkers of America Local 6166 in 1964-65. Borowski retired from manual labour in his 30s, and became the owner of a small gift shop.

Borowski burst onto the public consciousness of Manitoba in the late 1960s by camping outside the Manitoba legislature for several months in extremely cold weather. His protest was meant to draw attention to the rights of northern Manitobans, and to protest the province's low minimum wage in relation to the high salaries given to cabinet ministers (he also opposed Dufferin Roblin's provincial sales tax). Eventually, cabinet minister Stewart McLean had Borowski ejected from the legislative grounds.

Borowski was not actively involved in politics before this experience. He had supported of John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives at the federal level, but was not directly involved in partisan activities and does not appear to have considered running for public office. He had become a local celebrity through his protest at the legislature, however, and was drafted by the Manitoba NDP to run in a February 1969 by-election, in the northern riding of Churchill. He defeated the independent candidate Blaine Johnstone by seven votes (as confirmed by a recount), and joined the NDP ranks in the legislature.

Borowski endorsed Sidney Green for the party's leadership in May 1969, and made some enemies by his intemperate attacks on Edward Schreyer (who defeated Green to become the party's leader). Borowski was easily re-elected in the province's general election of 1969 (held in June), defeating Progressive Conservative Thomas Farrell by almost a thousand votes in Thompson.

The NDP formed government after the 1969 election, and Schreyer surprised many by appointing Borowski as his Minister of Transportation. Borowski represented northern interests in the cabinet, and was also seen as an important "populist" link between the NDP and the working class voters. Russell Doern, who joined cabinet in 1970, later claimed that Borowski's popularity rivalled that of the Premier during this period. On September 3, 1970, Borowski was given the additional ministerial portfolio of Public Works.

There are conflicting views on Borowski's performance as a cabinet minister. Some claim that he was a committed Public Works Minister, who often conducted personal inspections of road renewal projects and demanded efficient results from overseers. Others allege that he treated provincial bureaucrats with contempt, and ran his ministries in a highly centralized manner. Debate over his job performance, however, was soon overshadowed by controversies unrelated to his ministerial duties.

On February 17, 1971, Borowski damaged his credibility by making derogatory comments about aborginal Canadians, veterans and the disabled during an address to NDP supporters in Winnipeg. Former party leader Russell Paulley openly criticized his remarks, and Borowski was nearly dropped from cabinet before agreeing to a public apology.

Borowski was known for his rigid social conservatism on subjects such as pornography and abortion, and was dropped from cabinet on September 8, 1971 after several intemperate remarks on the latter subject (which included making fun of protesters on the legislative grounds who supported abortion services). As a backbencher, he tried to prevent public monies from being spent on hospitals providing out-of-province abortion referrals.

Borowski finally left the NDP caucus on June 25, 1972, claiming that the Schreyer government's new film censorship board would not adequately prevent pornography from reaching the province. He would later leave the NDP entirely. After briefly supporting Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government in the mid-1970s, Borowski abandoned partisan politics entirely. In later years, he criticized all major parties as ineffective on issues such as abortion.

In the provincial election of 1973, Borowski ran as an independent candidate in the north-end Winnipeg riding of Point Douglas, but lost to NDP incumbent Donald Malinowski by more than 2,500 votes. Borowski's campaign was based almost entirely on an anti-abortion platform; after his loss, he never again ran for public office.

Shortly before the provincial election of 1977, Borowski purchased a large advertisement in the Winnipeg Free Press, purporting to show the opinions of several MLAs on abortion. Not all of his information was accurate. MLAs whom Borowski considered to support abortion were listed as "pro-death". Edward Schreyer, interestingly, was described as ambivalent.

In addition to his activities as an anti-abortion spokesman, Borowski also became an insurance salesman and a proponent of health foods in the late 1970s. In 1977, he published a work entitled The Borowski Cookbook. He withheld his income tax for five years in the 1970s, to show his opposition to Canada's federal abortion policies of government.

In 1981, Borowski went on an eighty-day hunger strike to protest the absence of a provision for the unborn in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Three years earlier, his lawyers had put forward a case arguing that abortion was illegal under Canada's 1960 Bill of Rights, in that it robbed the unborn of their right to life. The case was not brought to trial until 1983, and was not completed for several years after that. In 1989, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear Borowski's case, on the grounds that his original motion became irrelevant when Canada's abortion laws were struck down in 1988.

Borowski also published a series of extremely homophobic works in the late 1980s. In 1988, he released a document which called for "all known gays" to be quarantined from the rest of society until the AIDS epidemic had subsided. He also published a work entitled "Child Molestation and Homosexuality", the front page of which showed a middle-aged man attempting to lure a child for sexual purposes. Winnipeg AIDS activist and future mayor Glen Murray was a vocal opponent of Borowski during this period.

Borowski died of cancer in 1996. Notwithstanding their previous differences, Edward Schreyer spoke at his funeral and was among his pallbearers. In August 2004, author Lianne Laurence published a biography of Borowski, Borowski: A Canadian Paradox, funded largely by donations from the anti-abortion community in Canada.