In the 1990s, I wrote a weekly series for the Halifax Daily News, profiling interesting individuals in the community. In May 1995, I wrote this profile of Donald Oliver. Senator Oliver died last week—September 17, 2025—at the age of 86.

            Later this morning, Senator Donald H. Oliver, Q.C., will deliver the annual Barton Lecture on the importance of community service to the privileged students and faculty at Toronto’s prestigious Upper Canada College.

            At one level, it all seems perfectly fitting.

            After all, Donald Oliver, a Black janitor’s son from tiny Wolfville, N.S., raised himself up by the sheer power of his own ambition and intelligence and, later, by the power of powerful connections, to become a successful lawyer, businessman, gourmet chef, wine connoisseur and finally senator. Though he never forgot where he came from — he has helped raise money for all manner of good causes from the establishment of a provincial Black Cultural Centre to a new Dalhousie University Chair of Black Studies — it seems perfectly reasonable that he would be at home at Upper Canada College among the sons and daughters of the country’s elite, young people he will describe in his speech this morning as “the leaders of business, industry and government when we enter the 21st century.”

            At home — but never at ease.

            Perhaps it is not quite a perfect fit after all.

            Don Oliver may have taken on the trappings of the white elite — on this afternoon, a week before the UCC speech, he is sitting in his comfortable, book-lined Chester law office, a distinguished-looking man with graying hair, conservatively dressed in a neatly tailored dark blue suit with blue pinstriped shirt and an expensive gold chain bracelet — but he will always be a Black man in a white world.

            And that still makes all the difference in the world.

            He can tell you about the times in the sixties when he was thrown out of restaurants on Quinpool Road for no better reason than the color of his skin; he can recall, with a pain that still sounds fresh, the time when a lawyer in another firm sent him some legal papers with a written notation attached for the messenger: “Take this to the nigger,” it read.

            “You can’t be a Black lawyer in Nova Scotia and not have experienced racism,” he says simply.

            And yet, for all of that, Donald Oliver is not much more comfortable within what should be his other, natural home — the leadership of the Black community.

            For starters, of course, there is the suspicion that he is too much at home among whites. He is married to a white woman, and most of his associates in law, business and politics are white. Then, too, there is his politics: he is a “free enterprise” Conservative who believes sincerely that “the state has no business trying to run business.” Nova Scotia’s Black leadership, as he is the first to admit, doesn’t generally share that view: “I stick out like a sore thumb sometimes.”

            He has tried, from time to time, to bring his divergent worlds together. Once, he recalls, shortly after former Nova Scotia Premier Robert Stanfield stepped down as leader of the federal Conservatives, Stanfield confided to Oliver that he felt he hadn’t done nearly enough to advance the cause of Blacks in the province. He was anxious to use his prestige as well as his new freedom as a former leader to right that wrong. So Oliver organized a series of informal evening meetings between Stanfield and members of the province’s Black leadership. In the end, however, he concedes not much was accomplished. “There was a mistrust among the leadership in the Black community,” Oliver explains. “That was — and is — a problem in the Black community.”

•••

            One reason why Donald Oliver may seem as ill at ease in the Black community as he is ultimately out of his element in the world of the white establishment is that he grew up Black in an environment that was almost totally white.

            The Olivers, he recalls, were the only Black family in Wolfville. “There was a Black lady two streets over and a Black maid for a rich white family in town, but we were the only Black family in town.”

            Born in 1938, Donald was the middle child in Clifford and Helena Oliver’s family of five. (He also had a famous half-brother from his father’s first marriage; the late Rev. W. P. Oliver, 30 years his senior, was one of the province’s best known and most respected Black leaders of the fifties and sixties.)

            Clifford Oliver had been forced to quit school after grade three to help support his family, but he believed passionately in the importance of education for his children. “By the time he died in 1966 at the age of 84,” Donald Oliver says proudly today, “there were 17 university degrees in his extended family, and most of them were with high honours and distinctions.”

            Donald included.

            He was class valedictorian when he graduated with honours in history from Acadia in 1960. Although his father wanted him to follow his half-brother and his maternal grandfather, Dr. W. A White, the first Black to graduate from Acadia, into the ministry, Oliver says he decided he wanted “to find justice in an unjust world” through the law.

            Although he describes Wolfville as a “comfortable place” to grow up and says he didn’t notice its “latent racism” when he was younger, he smacked hard up against the ugly, in-your-face variety more than once after he came to Halifax to study law in 1961.

            There were restaurants where he would wait an hour-and-a-half to be served, only to be finally told, “We don’t serve your kind here,” and barber shops that wouldn’t cut his hair. Once, when he and a white law student decided to play a game of pool at the Cue and Cushion, his partner was taken aside by the person running the pool hall and told he could stay, but his coloured friend would have to go.

            “There was just one incident after another,” recalls Oliver, who, as a result, became involved in some of the lobbying that eventually led to the establishment of provincial human rights legislation.

            By the late sixties, when Oliver — only the third indigenous Black to ever graduate from Dalhousie Law School — was quietly making his name as an up-and-coming young civil litigation lawyer at the province’s largest and most prestigious corporate law firm, generations of suppressed Black rage was finally exploding into the streets in the U.S. and spilling over, even into Canada.

            In late 1968, Stokely Carmichael and other members of the militant Black Panthers visited Halifax. Although their mere presence frightened the white establishment, it galvanized and excited many young Blacks, including Don Oliver.

            But, unlike many other young Blacks, Oliver, the careful lawyer, directed his efforts behind the scenes, helping establish a new, government-funded organization called the Black United Front to serve as an umbrella organization for the entire Black community. Today, he describes that as one of “the defining moments in Black history in Nova Scotia.”

            Though he has continued to work in Black community organizations — mostly by serving on the boards of organizations from the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the Indigenous Black and Micmac Program at Dalhousie Law School — much of his personal and professional life has seemed curiously divorced from traditional Black interests.

            His legal specialty, for example, is insurance law; one of his main clients was the giant Allstate corporation. “I love insurance law,” he says. “It’s intellectually stimulating and very challenging.” (Oliver, who resigned his partnership after he was appointed to the Senate in 1990, was suspended from practicing law for 30 days in 1986 for misrepresenting facts during a bar society hearing into his handling of a divorce case. Today, he simply says, “I think I have a pretty good record as a lawyer.”)

            His business interests run the gamut from a south shore Christmas tree farm he bought in 1975 to a still-stalled German health spa at Aspotogan (Oliver had to withdraw from that project after he was appointed to the senate in 1990 because the developers were seeking federal funds).

            His personal interests too tend toward the cosmopolitan — he studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu in London and is the author of his own gourmet cookbook. More recently, he helped found a provincial chapter of the Grand Senechal Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, an international wine-tasting society.

            He admits trying to live in both white and Black worlds “has been isolating.” He describes himself as shy. “I don’t have a lot of friends. I’m a private person . . .  we don’t go out to all the big social events.” His idea of a good time, he says, “is inviting a few friends over and cooking dinner.”

            And yet, he is, by virtue of his position and how he has chosen to define it — his curriculum vitae specifically designates him as a “Black Senator” — a public figure whose role very much includes promoting Black interests.

            “When you’re a Senator,” he notes, “people return your phone calls.”

            But again, few of his official duties — he is the Chair of the Senate Transport and Communications Committee and also served on the Banking, Trade and Commerce committee — relate specifically to the Black community.

            He makes his presence felt on Black issues more by his mere presence and by his example — a successful Black man in a white society where there are still far too few like him.

            This morning, he will urge those young men and women at Upper Canada College — students he predicts will someday become lawyers and bank directors and cabinet ministers and judges “to stand up and say no to discrimination, no to racism, and yes to a society which promotes equality of opportunity. Each one of you acting by yourself,” he will say, “can make a difference.”

            And then he will add quietly but proudly: “I have proven that.”

            Sitting back in his office in Chester, he smiles: “I like the idea that a little guy from Wolfville can influence the policies of the country.”

May 15, 1995