Born in Newport, Wales, he was the son of an Irish Roman Catholic doctor father and a Welsh Baptist housewife mother.
[1] When he saw an advertisement for doctors in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Savage decided to pack up his family and move across the ocean to continue his medical practice in 1967.
[1] By setting up a detox centre — and a free clinic in the economically disadvantaged and mostly black community of North Preston — he assured his reputation as a left-winger.
Savage attended a session of the meeting to bring greetings from the City of Dartmouth, in his capacity as its mayor, but didn't realize that the party's rank and file were about to oust their long-time leader, Vince McLean.
[2] On May 25, 1993, Savage defeated sitting Premier Donald Cameron and the governing Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 provincial election, winning 40 of the legislature's 52 seats.
[6] His government also led the country in the creation of tougher anti-smoking legislation, consolidation of school boards and local health authorities, creation of the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, the establishment of one of the most modern emergency health services in North America along with province-wide emergency field communications systems, modernizing its vocational schools to form an independent NSCC, and he waged a tough and ultimately successful fight against an entrenched patronage system in the provincial Department of Transportation and Public Works, as well as within his own political party.
[6] Faced with increasing discontent from within his own party over some of his anti-patronage policies, and after surviving a July 1995 leadership review vote,[7] he resigned as premier in 1997.
[8] In its editorial page on March 22, 1997, The Globe and Mail, after citing his list of reforms, called him "the best premier in a generation," and berated both Liberal party members and the public for forcing him to resign.