In February 1962, a 21-year-old figure skater took to the ice in Prague, the city his family had fled under Communist rule roughly a decade earlier, and won the world pairs championship with his sister at his side. Otto Jelinek, the Czech-born skater who later spent two decades in the Canadian Parliament and served as a federal Cabinet minister, died on September 5, 2026, at Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga, Ontario. He was 86.

Jelinek's family left Czechoslovakia for Canada in the early 1950s, settling in Oakville, Ontario, where his father rebuilt the cork-manufacturing business the Communist government had seized in Prague, according to Canadian Press. Otto joined the Oakville Skating Club and paired with his sister, Maria. The two were Canadian junior pairs champions by 1955 and climbed the world rankings through the late 1950s, taking bronze at the 1957 and 1958 World Championships, then silver in 1960, the same year they placed fourth in pairs at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, according to Team Canada and Skate Canada. They won the Canadian senior pairs title in 1961 and 1962 and the North American pairs title in 1961, before capping their amateur career with gold at the 1962 World Championships, held that year in Prague. They then toured professionally, including with Ice Capades, for about six years.

He entered federal politics not long after, winning election to the House of Commons in 1972 as a Progressive Conservative and going on to win six consecutive federal elections, representing the Oakville, Ontario, area for most of his two decades in Parliament. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney brought him into cabinet in 1984 as minister of state for fitness and amateur sport, later adding responsibility for multiculturalism policy. In that role, Jelinek was blunt about his own view of Canadian identity: "I for one resent being referred to as a hyphenated Canadian. I believe we have to get rid of hyphenated Canadians." In 1989, Mulroney named him minister of national revenue, a post he held as the country's new goods and services tax took effect.

By 1993, with a Progressive Conservative leadership race on the horizon, Jelinek chose a different path. He said the decision came down to his wife and two young sons, then aged 10 and 5, later telling reporters that thinking of his family made the choice to leave politics clear. He did not seek re-election that year.

Jelinek then built a business career of nearly two decades in the Czech Republic, including as chairman of Deloitte's Central European operations, according to HuffPost. Looking back on his years in cabinet, he once said the hardest part of the job was not the opposition, the voters, or the press: "The biggest problem I had was not with the opposition in the Parliament, not with the voting public, not with the media, but with my bureaucracy." He returned to Canada in 2012, and the following year Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed him Canada's ambassador to the Czech Republic, sending him back to represent the country of his birth on behalf of the one that had taken his family in.

His younger brother, Henry, said Otto had been "quite the ambitious guy" who was "sincerely and strongly a Canadian guy, who did everything he could to help this country," according to Canadian Press. Jelinek is survived by his wife, Leata, their sons, Misha and Jamie, and his brother, Henry.

What persists from Jelinek's life is the shape of it: a skating record that put him and Maria in the Skate Canada Hall of Fame in 1994, a decade in Ottawa that ran from the sport and multiculturalism files to the ministry that introduced the GST, and an ambassadorship that put the boy who once fled Prague behind a Canadian desk in that same city decades later. Few Canadian public figures closed a circle quite that complete.