By Lloyd Mackey

BROADCASTER and community activist David C. Onley was driving along a Toronto-area freeway when he received a call on his cell phone from Prime Minister Stephen Harper with the news: he had been chosen as Ontario’s new lieutenant-governor.

Onley has been preparing to take over the role from James Bartleman, whose tenure wraps up this summer.

While the 58 year old Onley is known as a writer, environmental broadcaster  and advocate for handicap accessibility, he is also a Christian whose faith will shape what he brings to his new position.

“We are thrilled with the appointment,” says Brian Stiller, president of Tyndale College and Seminary, adding: “Not only is he wise but he is smart. He understands the importance of serving in the public domain without trying to ‘slip in the gospel.’ Instead he lives the gospel.”

Onley, his wife Ruth Ann and adult sons Jonathan, Robert and Michael attend Safe Haven Worship Centre in the eastern Toronto suburb of Ajax.

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Onley contracted polio at age three. He credits his parents’ integrity and verbal witness with helping him to find encouragement in the goodness of God, no matter the circumstances.

“Their personal faith stood by me, as I was paralyzed for months on end,” says Onley. “It helped me to know there was a greater force. Then, later, recognizing the tenets of the Christian faith became an incremental process.” At the ages of 9 and 13, he underwent extensive surgeries to correct some of the disease’s ravages.

Since earning a political science degree from the University of Toronto, Onley has served in several on-air TV capacities. He gained a foothold by writing a best-selling sci-fi novel Shuttle: A Shattering Novel of Disaster in Space, in 1981. His literary success led to a position as science and technology person at CityTV, and later as CityNews anchor.

His colleagues have always played up his disability, rather than hiding it. That gave him the opportunity to become an advocate for the disabled and highlight the need for more public accessibility.

“David will bring to his new calling an authenticity rooted in faith, in his skills as a communicator never playing off of his disability,” says Stiller.

“You knew he never expected you to listen to him because of that. A word befitting him is ‘genuine.’”

October 2007