William McDonough Kelly

Who was William McDonough Kelly?

William McDonough Kelly, CLJ was a Canadian political strategist and Senator.

Kelly was a civil engineer by training and a consultant in the energy industry by profession. Politically he was a member of the Big Blue Machine, a group of advisers, organizers and strategists around Ontario Premier Bill Davis and the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in the 1970s and 1980s.

He was appointed to the Senate in 1982 by Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. At the time, the Liberals had been in power for almost all of the previous twenty years resulting in a steady decline in the number of Tory senators. Trudeau adopted a policy of replacing retiring Progressive Conservative Senators with other Progressive Conservatives in order to ensure the opposition caucus was large enough to be functional.

The Leader of the Official Opposition would submit a short list of names from which the Prime Minister would choose an appointee for a vacant Tory Senate seat.