Anthony (Tony) Clarke
Tony was born in British Guiana, where he attended St. Stanislaus College from 1948-1956 on Saints scholarships. He was the captain of the 1st X1 cricket team for a number of years and was a promising off-spinner. He won the 1st ever awarded Demerara Bauxite Company (DEMBA) scholarship to the University College of the West Indies in 1956, graduated with a B.SC (London) in 1959 and stayed on to get his Diploma in Chemical Technology in 1960. In that year, he emigrated to Canada to pursue graduate studies at the University of Toronto, achieving a Masters degree in Chemical Engineering in 1963. Tony stayed on in Toronto after graduation.
During a career of over 4 decades, Tony worked for the (then) Ontario Water Resources Commission, both the Ontario and Federal governments in several capacities, the Canada-USA International Joint Commission, and ran his own private consulting business before retiring finally in 2007. His many achievements, always as a member of a team, include pioneering Ontario’s ground-breaking industrial pollution control programs in the 1960s, providing advice on integrating energy and environment issues to Cabinet sub-committees at Queen’s Park and facilitating innovative Management-By-Results approaches to resources allocation at the provincial ministerial level in the 1970s. Tony helped craft the initial Great Lakes Charter in the 1980s, the first attempt by the Great Lakes States, Ontario and Quebec to managing the Great Lakes watershed as an integrated ecosystem. In 1986, Tony moved to the federal government in Ottawa and joined Environment Canada where he helped steer the Canadian Wildlife Service through difficult budgetary times. In the 1990s, as the Assistant Deputy Minister in charge of the Environmental Protection Service, Tony was responsible for a number of initiatives to reduce and eliminate toxic substances to the environment, was a prime contributor to enhanced environmental cooperation between Canada, USA and Mexico under the side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and represented Canada on moving the ‘yardsticks’ on several global environmental conventions. He was a senior negotiator for Canada in the development of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In 1998, Tony was loaned, as a senior advisor to the Canadian Section of the International Joint Commission where he made significant contributions to the Commission’s 2000 watershed report to the U.S. and Canadian Governments on the implications of potentially exporting water from the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem.
Tony was a ‘jock’ all his life, playing many sports, but his great love was cricket where he played for and captained Ontario and Canada for many years. Tony currently lives in Brighton, Ontario, a couple of hours east of Toronto, with his wife Rosemieke. He has a daughter Marieke, son Robin, and sons Patrick and Dean from an earlier marriage. Tony has a brother David who lives in Barbados, Michael who lives in Brechin, Ontario and a sister Maureen who lives in Kent, England.
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