Frank Duff Moores served as the second Premier of Newfoundland. He served as leader of the Progressive Conservatives from 1972 until his retirement in 1979. Moores was also a successful businessman in both the fishing industry and federal lobbying.
Early life and education
Born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, he was educated at St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ontario. Moores then briefly attended Boston University in the fall of 1951, but left after two months, following an argument with one of his professors. He then worked briefly in the Boston fish industry, then returned to Newfoundland, where he worked in his father's fish plant. His father, Silas Moores, was a wealthy businessman in that industry.;
Expands family business
Moores worked with his father to expand the family business, North East Fisheries, to the stage where it became the largest fish processor in Newfoundland by the early 1960s, employing 2,000 people. With his father's death of a heart attack in July 1962, he followed through on a plan to take the company to a year-round operation from the traditional summer-autumn format, and then sold a majority interest to British owners.
Politics
With no previous experience in politics, Moores was first elected in 1968 to the House of Commons as a Progressive Conservative. Tories captured six of seven seats in the province, which had been virtually completely Liberal since 1949, going against the national trend which elected Pierre Elliott Trudeau to a strong majority. Moores was elected to a one-year term as president of the federal PC Party in 1969. In 1970, he resigned his federal seat, and became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Newfoundland. He was asked to form a government in January 1972, several months following the October 1971 election that resulted in a near tie between Joey Smallwood's Liberals and the Tories. Moores then called a new March 1972 election shortly afterwards, and won a strong majority. In the 1975 election, he won a reduced majority. As Premier, Moores advocated rural development and provincial control of natural resources as well as economic development.
After politics
He left politics in March 1979 to re-enter business, and became a lobbyist. In 1983, he was an organizer of the successful Progressive Conservative Party leadership campaign for Brian Mulroney. He served as an adviser to Mulroney while he was Prime Minister of Canada, and was appointed to the Board of Air Canada, then a Crown Corporation. At the time, he was also working for Government Consultants International, a powerful Ottawa-based international lobbying firm, which had as clients at the time the airline firms Wardair and Nordair, which were competitors of Air Canada. Over accusations of conflict of interest, GCI then gave up Wardair and Nordair as clients. He resigned his Air Canada directorship shortly after GCI took on the Airbus file. In 1987, he became the chairman of GCI, and retired from this position in 1990. In the 1990s, he regained prominence through his alleged role in the Airbus affair. On July 10, 2005, Moores died of liver cancer in Perth, Ontario. In November 2007, in the wake of new revelations about the Airbus affair by Karlheinz Schreiber, The Globe and Mail published evidence indicating that Moores had written a letter about the Airbus deal to Franz Josef Strauss, chairman of Airbus Industrie. Until his death Moores denied having any involvement in the affair.
