Early Life and Career
Clement was born Tony Peter Panayi in Manchester, England, the son of Carol (née Drapkin) and Peter Panayi. His father was a Greek Cypriot and his mother was Jewish (part of her family had immigrated from Aleppo, Syria). He emigrated to Canada in childhood with his parents when he was four years old. His parents later divorced and his mother remarried Ontario politician John Clement, who adopted Tony.
As a student at the University of Toronto, he was elected twice, both as an undergraduate and as a law student, to the university's Governing Council. He was also president of the campus Progressive Conservatives. He first attracted the attention of the media in 1985 when he created a new society to invite the Ambassador of South Africa, Glen Babb, to speak at the University of Toronto and debate Professor Bill Graham in order to defend free speech. This was after the International Law Society had withdrawn an invitation, deeming it too controversial because of the issue of apartheid.
A graduate of the University of Toronto, Clement completed degrees in political science in 1983 and law in 1986. He was called to the Ontario Bar in 1988.
Clement became president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in 1990 and was a close ally of then-party leader Mike Harris. He ran, unsuccessfully, for Metro Toronto Council in 1994, losing to future mayor David Miller in the ward of Parkdale-High Park. He served as Harris' Assistant Principal Secretary from 1992 to 1995 and played a leading role in drafting policy directives for the Common Sense Revolution.
Read more about this topic: Tony Clement
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“That man is to be pitied who cannot enjoy social intercourse without eating and drinking. The lowest orders, it is true, cannot imagine a cheerful assembly without the attractions of the table, and this reflection alone should induce all who aim at intellectual culture to endeavor to avoid placing the choicest phases of social life on such a basis.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)