Alan William Pope (August 2, 1945 – July 8, 2022) was a Canadian politician. He was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1977 to 1990, and served as a cabinet minister in the governments of Bill Davis and Frank Miller. Early years Pope was raised in Northern Ontario, and was educated at Waterloo Lutheran University and Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He worked as a lawyer before entering politics. Pope served as an alderman for Timmins City Council from 1973 to 1974. Provincial politics In the 1975 provincial election, he ran as the Progressive Conservative candidate in the riding of Cochrane South but lost to Bill Ferrier of the NDP by 1,292 votes. He ran again in the 1977 provincial election, this time defeating Ferrier by 2,276 votes. He was appointed a parliamentary assistant in Davis's government in 1978, and was promoted to Minister without portfolio on August 30, 1979. He faced a minor controversy in 1979, when Ed Deibel, the leader of the small Northern Ontario Heritage Party, publicly claimed that Pope had promised to cross the floor to join the party, which Pope denied. He was re-elected in the 1981 provincial election. Pope was promoted to Minister of Natural Resources on April 10, 1981. He served in that position for the remainder of the Davis administration's time in office. Responding to a report on the state of the province's provincial park system, Pope promised a significant increase in the number of parks. However, he refused to prohibit mining, hunting, and fishing within park grounds. In 1982, after a dispute over wild rice harvesting on Mud Lake, Pope ruled that traditional native harvesting rights would be upheld and that the ministry would not allow commercial harvesting to proceed. Political views Pope's position in the Progressive Conservative Party was unusual. He supported the interventionist policies of the Davis government and was sometimes considered to be on the progressive wing of the party. However, he was not a Red Tory and did not support the party's Toronto-based establishment (commonly known as the "Big Blue Machine"). Pope was rather a populist, who sought greater power for the party's neglected local branches in northern, eastern, and southwestern Ontario. In that sense, his position in the provincial Progressive Conservatives was similar to John Diefenbaker's role in the federal party a generation earlier. Support for Frank Miller In 1985,