Dickson also ran for mayor of St. Catharines in the 1977 and 1980 municipal elections.[1]
He ran for provincial secretary of the NDP in 1982, but lost to Michael Lewis (the brother of former party leader Stephen Lewis) by a margin of 1,524 votes to 315. At the time, he was listed as a resident of Niagara Falls.[2]
Dickson was a Niagara Regional Councillor in the mid-1980s. In 1985, he criticized local police authorities for using hidden video surveillance to arrest men who had engaged in public sex acts in a restaurant washroom.[3]