Politics
Agostino was elected as a Catholic separate school board trustee in the Hamilton-Wentworth board at the age of 21, serving from 1980 to 1987. He campaigned in the 1985 provincial election in Hamilton Mountain, and finished third against New Democrat Brian Charlton. He then served as an alderman on the Hamilton City Council from 1987 until the provincial election of 1995, when he was elected as the Member of Provincial Parliament for Hamilton East.
Agostino was the first Liberal candidate to win the riding since 1937, and the first member of Hamilton's Italian community to win a provincial election anywhere in the city. He defeated Andrew MacKenzie, the son of outgoing New Democratic Party Labour Minister Robert W. MacKenzie, by about 4,000 votes.
The 1995 election was won by the Progressive Conservative Party, and Agostino quickly emerged as a prominent figure in the parliamentary opposition. He became a leading spokesperson for the Liberal Party's left wing, and gained particular praise for his performance as the party's Environment Critic from 1996 to 1999.
In 1996, Agostino supported Gerard Kennedy's unsuccessful bid for the party leadership. He was re-elected without difficulty in the provincial election of 1999, and served as Chief Opposition Whip from 1999 to 2002. Unlike some others in his party, he supported the City of Hamilton's amalgamation in 2000.
The Liberals won a majority government in the provincial election of 2003, although Agostino was re-elected with a somewhat reduced margin of victory. To the surprise of many in the province, he was not appointed to the first cabinet of Dalton McGuinty in October 2003. This was widely interpreted as a snub, but subsequent events cast the decision in a much different light: Agostino died on March 24, 2004, of liver cancer. He had been battling the disease for some time and had undergone surgery during the 2003 campaign, although this information was not made public until his death.
In a by-election to fill his legislative seat held on May 13, 2004, his brother Ralph, a Catholic separate school board trustee, failed to retain the Hamilton East seat for the Liberal Party, falling far behind city councillor and NDP candidate Andrea Horwath.
Read more about this topic: Dominic Agostino
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)