Dick Proctor

Who is Dick Proctor?

Dick Proctor is a Canadian political activist, former New Democratic Party Member of Parliament, and a former journalist.

Proctor has been active with the NDP in a number of capacities since the 1970s. In the early part of that decade, he was communications director for Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis. He was cabinet press secretary to then-Premier of Saskatchewan Allan Blakeney during the 1978 and 1982 provincial election campaigns. He was executive assistant to federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent in the intervening period.

In the mid-1980s, Proctor worked as the research director for the National Union of Provincial Government Employees and then as the project coordinator of the Canadian Labour Congress in Latin America. He returned to the NDP in 1989 to serve as the party's federal secretary. He then served as provincial secretary for the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party from 1993 to 1996.

He also worked as a journalist for the Edmonton Journal and Toronto Telegram in the 1960s and 1970s, and as sportswriter for the Globe and Mail in the 1970s. Moonlighting for The Hockey News under the pseudonym "Mike Gamble", he wrote a profile of 16-year-old junior hockey player Wayne Gretzky, and may have been the first person to use the phrase "The Great Gretzky".