Grace Eiko Thomson: Oct. 15, 1933 - July 11, 2024

Grace Eiko Thomson was eight years old when the federal government came for her Vancouver family, ordering them to leave their home of 12 years and move to an abandoned mine site 100 kilometres west of Lillooet, B.C.

Decades of simmering racism against Asian-Canadians had finally found an excuse for action in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ms. Thomson and her family — the youngest barely a month old when they had to move in 1942 — were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps three months after the bombing under the guise of protecting Canada from supposed Japanese turncoats.

The internment would forever change the lives of Ms. Thomson and her family. Still a child, she had to become the go-between in all communications between the government and her parents, who weren’t fluent in English. Her father, who used to wear a suit and spats to work as a fish buyer, would be relegated to menial jobs from that point on.

“I really feel that, of everything that happened, I am very sad for my father. After 1942, his life was totally destroyed,” Ms. Thomson told the Victoria Times Colonist in a 2019 series on those terrible years.

But the experience would also light a fire against unjust treatment in Ms. Thomson that burned brightly for virtually all of her adult life. Right up until her death from pancreatic cancer on July 11, the 90-year-old was being sought out by archivists and activists across Canada familiar with her deep knowledge of Japanese-Canadian history and powerful voice on behalf of people unfairly pushed into society’s margins.

“To witness an elder from my cultural community stand up and speak truth to power – that totally changed my relationship to my own cultural identity,” says Emiko Morita, executive director of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival Society. “She has been such a role model to so many people.”

Eiko Nishikihama was the second of five children born to Torasaburo Nishikihama and wife Sawae Yamamoto on Oct. 15, 1933. (She would add the name Grace in her early teens, as a defence against racist comments and routine mispronunciations of her name that she endured in school.)

Her parents were first-generation Japanese immigrants with a home on Vancouver’s Powell Street, a neighbourhood where many other recently arrived Japanese-Canadian families had settled. Her father worked as a buyer for the Codfish Cooperative Society.

Their oldest child, Kikuko, was in Japan visiting her grandparents when the family was ordered to leave the coast. They wouldn’t see her again for 10 years. While the Nishikihamas were mostly able to sell their possessions before being sent to the old Minto Mines site, many Japanese-Canadians lost everything they had, all of it appropriated by government and sold to help pay for the costs of the internment.

Canada’s 40-plus camps began closing at the end of 1944, but families were still prohibited from returning to the coast. Ms. Thomson’s family moved east to Manitoba, where her father had worked for a time after emigrating from Japan in 1921.

His wife’s reaction to the rough barn in rural Manitoba where they first had to move is captured in Ms. Thomson’s 2021 memoir Chiru Sakura, which combined excerpts from her mother’s journaling with reflections from Ms. Thomson’s own life.

“Manure clinging on straw hung stuck to these walls,” wrote her mother. “A bare light bulb hung from the high ceiling. I stood in the middle of this barn, which was to be home to our family of six, and couldn’t hold back the tears.”

The family eventually made their way to Winnipeg, where Ms. Thomson graduated from high school and started work in an insurance office. In 1959, she married school teacher Alistair MacDonald Thomson, with both families supportive of the mixed-race marriage. The couple had two sons, Michael and David, and for a number of years lived a middle-class life in a Winnipeg neighbourhood where Michael recalls being one of the only Asian faces at school.

“As a mom, she had high expectations of us, just as her mother had of her. She expected us to work hard and to make some larger contribution as well,” says Michael Thomson. “My brother is a teacher in Japan and I’m a Superior Court judge here in Manitoba, so I think we took those words in.”

The boys were starting into their teen years when Ms. Thomson went back to school in the 1970s to get a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Manitoba, with further studies at the University of British Columbia. She grew increasingly uncomfortable with being an Asian woman in a “white” life, and the marriage ended in the early 1980s.

“I found myself living a life I had created for myself, that of a white woman in a white household, doing all those things I had heretofore only seen in white magazines,” wrote Ms. Thomson in her memoir. “Except I was not white, and never could be. In intermarrying, I was occupying the margins and the centre simultaneously, but I had not yet realized this.”

Her entry into the Canadian arts community took a decisive turn in 1983. An artist herself, she was invited to be an art advisor to the Inuit printmakers of the Sanavik Co-operative in Baker Lake, Nunavut, flying in a few times a year from Winnipeg. It was the beginning of an enduring connection between Ms. Thomson and Indigenous people, whose stories of colonization echoed the dispossession and injustice of her own experiences.

“Grace was able to see the pattern in what happened to people exposed to racism and discrimination,” says Andrea Geiger, a professor emerita in history at Simon Fraser University. “She was inclusive to her core, without ever losing that recognition that Asian Canadians had specific experiences of racism.”

The federal government’s 1988 apology to Japanese-Canadians who had endured internment brought $21,000 in compensation for each of the 13,000 survivors. Ms. Thomson used hers to acquire a master’s degree from England’s University of Leeds. She landed her first curatorial positions soon after, first at the University of Manitoba, then at The Little Gallery in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

But family matters pulled her back to Vancouver in 1994, where her parents had returned three decades earlier. Her aging mother was now a widow and needed help. Ms. Thomson took a position with the Burnaby Art Gallery, then became the founding curator of the new Japanese Canadian National Museum (later renamed the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre) in 2000.

She would go on to become president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians in 2008.

Ms. Thomson’s friends remember her commitment to righting wrongs, and using her voice boldly wherever it was needed. “She was an activist not just for the Japanese-Canadian community, but for Indigenous people, the Downtown Eastside, Inuit artists,” says Daien Ide, research archivist for the Nikkei National Museum.

“She was one of a kind,” says long-time friend Judy Hanazawa. “She really went her own way.”

NAJC past president Lorene Oikawa says one of Ms. Thomson’s biggest passions was getting recognition for the Vancouver Asahi baseball team, active for 28 years in the 1900s until internment orders forced its end. The Japanese-Canadian team was renowned for the so-called “brain ball” that players employed to be able to compete against the physically stronger Caucasian teams of that era.

The Asahi Baseball Association was born in Vancouver in 2014 to honour the memory of the original team. Association vice-president Tomio Fukumura says “a conversation about Grace” will definitely be on the agenda in September at the team’s annual legacy game.

Ms. Thomson moved to Winnipeg last September to be closer to family, but kept her condo in Vancouver. Michael Thomson says she clearly spent a lot of her later years writing; he came upon a large cache of writing from both her and her mother while cleaning out the condo after her death. All works will be donated to the Nikkei National Museum.

“Grace has left an indelible mark,” says museum curator Sherri Kajiwara. “She was a feisty, outspoken woman, but always for a reason. She was very much my mentor. I hear that out of the mouths of so many people.”

Ms. Thomson is survived by her sister Keiko, her two sons, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Published Aug. 3, 2024 in The Globe and Mail

Helen Lucas: Aug. 25, 1931 - Nov. 27, 2023

Early admirers of Helen Lucas’s art could scarcely have imagined that her sombre charcoal drawings would one day give way to joyful, giant flower paintings awash in colour.

Her son-in-law Frank Simonetti didn’t even know she’d had a charcoal period until two York University PhD students staged a retrospective of Ms. Lucas’s works five years ago. That long-ago dramatic change in her art style marked the end of sorrow and the beginning of joy for her, according to her sister Mary Geatros.

“Helen’s early works give you her sadness. She struggled to find her true self, and there were a lot of heartaches along the way,” Ms. Geatros says. “But her floral paintings of later years give the viewer the experience of being alive. She never, ever painted for the sake of painting. It was always personal for her.”

Helen Billie Geatros was born Aug. 25, 1931, in Weyburn, Sask., the first of three girls born to Greek immigrants Eftihia and William Geatros. The family moved to Saskatoon weeks later, where, according to a 1981 article in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Mr. Geatros won the city’s Ritz Hotel in a poker game. The family owned and operated the hotel for more than five decades.

(Mr. Geatros would go on to further local fame as a skeets sharp-shooter hired by the city to take care of a major pigeon problem, while Ms. Geatros would be remembered after her husband’s death in 1949 as one of the first hoteliers in Saskatchewan to welcome the gay community at the Ritz’s Apollo Room bar.)

Ms. Lucas’s rise as a feminist artist is well-documented in Canadian newspaper articles from the early 1970s as interest grew in her art and her fearlessness in talking about women’s oppression in a patriarchal society. In those years, she was known for charcoal drawings of a bold, naked angel named Angelica, who started out as a doodle on cards sent to friends and went on to be the title star of a book of drawings that found a receptive audience among feminists across the country.

“Angelica does all the things I’d like to do,” Ms. Lucas told reporters in 1973, the year after she left a deeply unhappy marriage.

“I have thought, if only I felt I had more value, if only I could not give a damn about being nice. That’s the whole thing of the book. Who can be nicer than an angel? And she fights it. She’s in heaven, and she’s depressed, and depression is reverse anger.”

Angelica was followed in 1981 by This is My Beloved…Sometimes, a book of nude caricatures depicting the different stages of a romantic relationship. By that point, Ms. Lucas had quit her job as an art teacher at Sheridan College to draw and paint full-time.

In interviews, Ms. Lucas recalled growing up as a shy, unhappy child whose artistic bent was discouraged. Her sister says that while it was obvious to her that Helen “needed to be an artist,” their mother wanted her eldest daughter to have a more traditional life of marriage, children and keeping a nice home.

Ms. Lucas did try that path. After finishing her studies in the 1950s at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), she married a Greek man named Michael Lucas and they had two daughters. She painted, but only Greek icons in the traditional style. “That was safe. Anything that I did other than looking after the house threatened my marriage,” she told interviewers.

Her frank views on the sexism and oppression that so many women experienced in those decades drew feminists to her. She collaborated on a children’s book with Margaret Laurence. She worked alongside the late Shelagh Wilkinson to help found the feminist quarterly Canadian Woman Studies at Toronto’s York University, which would award Ms. Lucas an honorary doctor of letters many years later.

In a review of a 1996 TV documentary about Ms. Lucas, Canadian Woman Studies noted that the artist’s move into colour and big canvases in the 1970s and 80s paralleled her own feminist awakening.

“Petals start to appear out of tears, blossoms from crucifixes. Finally, she is painting nothing but flowers in dazzling acrylics,” the reviewer writes. “She lays claim to all the colours of the spectrum. She lays claim to female sensuality, and she sees it as good. Her painting has become a political act.”

Ms. Lucas had more than 50 solo exhibitions over her lifetime. In 2003, she was selected to exhibit at the Biennale in Florence, Italy. She travelled there with long-time friend and fellow Biennale artist Ernestine Tahedl, who first met Ms. Lucas in 1983 when both were living in King City, Ont.

“We worked so differently. She did flowers and I did landscapes,” Ms. Tahedl says. “It’s funny, I was just thinking about her, remembering the last show we did together in 2018. She got so much pleasure from seeing people coming to look at her paintings.”

While flowers were the focus of Ms. Lucas’s art for many years, doves emerged as a theme later on, Ms. Tahedl says. Ms. Lucas donated 13 paintings of doves to churches in Rwanda after she was moved by stories of the atrocities in that country in the 1990s.

“She was very religious at times in her life,” Ms. Tahedl recalls. “Her leanings weren’t all Greek Orthodox, though. In some ways, she chose different paths to explore. She had a mixed, complicated way of connecting to religion.”

Grandson Simon McKendry says he was always told stories of how important an artist his grandmother was, but the characteristic that impressed him just as much was her ability to connect with people. He grew up calling her Helen; she rejected the term grandmother as sounding too old.

“She would really look at people. She made people feel as cared for as anyone had made them feel in their life,” Mr. McKendry says.

“Even when she’d just met someone, she’d be rubbing their faces, kissing them, holding their hand. I think it came at a cost to her – it isn’t easy be that vulnerable all the time, or feel emotions that deeply. But it also brought a lot of people to her in her own time of need.”

The 1996 death of Ms. Lucas’s second husband, Derek Fuller, was such a time. Devoted to her, he grew lavish gardens outside her studio window at their home in King City, to ensure she always had fresh flowers as inspiration.

But harder still was the 2014 death of Ms. Lucas’s daughter Andrea, who died from a brain tumour after a lengthy illness. Andrea had worked closely with her mother managing the business side of her art, and she and her family lived with Ms. Lucas.

Ms. Lucas’s sister Diane Stratas, a former Progressive Conservative MP, died in May of this year.

“She felt those losses deeply,” her sister Ms. Geatros says. “The pain of loss always stayed with her forever. She was an innocent, and she kept that innocence for her whole life. Now, she’s dancing with her angels.”

Ms. Lucas died Nov. 27 from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease after developing<can I change to: being diagnosed with? the condition four years ago. She was 92. She leaves her sister Ms. Geatros; her daughter Michelle; and five grandchildren.

Published Dec. 20, 2023, in The Globe and Mail

Jiixa Gladys Minnie Vandal: May 19, 1938 - Sept. 2, 2023

Haida Elder Jiixa Gladys Vandal was renowned on Haida Gwai’i and beyond, first for her bark and root weaving and then for her commitment to documenting her dialect while first-language speakers like her were still alive.

But her much bigger gift to the world was her lifelong enthusiasm for sharing her knowledge and skills with anyone who wanted to learn from her, says Haida Elder Diane Brown (GwaaGanad).

Ms. Brown was reminded of that recently while looking at a 1978 photo of Haida people in ceremony, in which only one of them wore a traditional hat of woven cedar bark.

“Now, everyone’s got one,” Ms. Brown says. “That’s because of Jiixa. Anyone who wanted to learn how to weave, all you had to do was bring your own bark and Jiixa would teach you. And she taught the Haida language to so many people.”

She was born Gladys Minnie Hans on May 19, 1938 on Haida Gwai’i, to Kathleen and Isaac Hans. The youngest of 10 children, she grew up in Skidegate feeling pampered and loved, says daughter Brenda Vandal (Dulgiits). She attended day school on Haida Gwai’i, which spared her the life-shattering experience of residential school so common to Indigenous people from her era.

Jiixa’s love for the Haida culture manifested in many ways, say those who knew her. She was her clan’s matriarch, counted on by Haida leadership for guidance and wisdom. She was an expert weaver, working with cedar bark as well as famously difficult spruce root. She cooked traditional Haida foods, and loved teaching others to do the same.

But her particular passion for the last two decades was the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program (SHIP). It launched in 1998 to bring together first-language Elders with new learners and listeners to share and document the Skidegate dialect.

“Jiixa was an integral part of SHIP as a fluent speaker,” says Kevin Borserio (Luu Gaahlandaay), who worked closely with Ms. Vandal and eight other Haida Elders on the project until his retirement two years ago.

“The Elders created hundreds of books and recordings. They brought us 40,000 words that fill a 1,200-page glossary, and created hundreds of lessons. They literally go to school until they die. One of the Elders told me, ‘We’re doing this for the Haida children not yet born.’ "

Even from her hospital bed in Daajing Giids when she was in the late stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Ms. Vandal was video-conferencing into SHIP sessions with a passion that she’d had since childhood.

“From the age of 10, she had this instinct of capturing and preserving,” says Tomas Borsa (Gabuu), who grew close to Ms. Vandal while doing university research on Haida Gwai’i and was later adopted into her clan.

“Over her lifetime, she amassed a huge collection of recordings – things like her at age 10 recording her dad and uncle singing. Her filing cabinet is like a personal museum. When someone like Jiixa dies, she is hard to replace.”

Ms. Vandal met “the love of her life,” logger Al Vandal, in 1967, at a time when both were emerging from previous marriages. It would be a match for the ages, says Brenda Vandal, who was adopted as an infant by the couple from within Gladys Vandal’s extended family.

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The late Mr. Vandal was not only his wife’s most devoted fan, says their daughter, but his expertise in the woods ensured Ms. Vandal always had the best cedar bark to work with as a weaver. In the years when she was teaching people in Skidegate how to weave Christmas decorations, Ms. Brown remembers Mr. Vandal preparing individual bags of cedar bark for participants, each holding exactly enough for one reindeer.

“It was an amazing love story she had with my dad,” says Brenda Vandal. “The young guys used to say to him, ‘You should teach husband.’ "

The Vandals moved from logging town to logging town along B.C.’s central coast in the early years of their marriage, before returning to Skidegate in 1992 when Mr. Vandal retired.

That homecoming deepened his wife’s appreciation of a traditional Haida life. The couple joined the Haida Watchman program, spending summers as hosts and cultural interpreters for visitors at five traditional Haida villages in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve.

Those years helped Ms. Vandal hone her weaving in more ways than one, notes her daughter: “She could interweave people together. The gifts she had, she generously shared with everyone.”

In 2019, Mr. Borserio reached out to a friend at Vancouver Island University with the idea of recognizing the work of Ms. Vandal, Ms. Brown and seven other SHIP Elders through the awarding of honorary doctor of laws degrees. The timing was ideal: 2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages.

VIU’s dean of education was immediately onside, Mr. Borserio recalls.

The university chartered a plane to bring the Elders from Haida Gwai’i that June. A contingent of 60 community members climbed aboard and spent four festive days being celebrated in Nanaimo. The recognition came not a moment too soon: Five of those Elders have died in the years since.

Ms. Vandal leaves her daughter, Brenda; stepdaughters, Darlene Venturato and Michelle Cilli; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Living a life true to her Haida culture extended well beyond weaving and language for Ms. Vandal, Mr. Borserio says. Prayer was vital to her, in keeping with Haida beliefs that the Creator should be kept central to daily life.

“Like Haida Elder Ada Yovanovitch, Jiixa wanted everyone to know how to pray in the Skidegate language. She loved to pray and was a very spiritual person,” Mr. Borserio says. “We had prayer at SHIP to open every day, and we’d list off members of the community who were sick and sad. What a gift, to be in ceremony to start every day! Jiixa lived that.”

Ms. Vandal’s friends from SHIP made sure to sustain that connection in the last two years of her life, when her ALS had advanced to the point of requiring a permanent move into the Xaayda Gwaay Ngaaysdll Naay health centre in Daajing Giids, where she died on Sept. 2 at the age of 85.

Adopted clan member Julia Weder (Skaak’aadang Jaad) collaborated with Ms. Vandal in that period on several rap videos in Haida, now posted to YouTube. Ms. Vandal proposed the idea one night while she and Ms. Weder were watching rappers perform on a televised New Year’s Eve countdown. “She loved being able to spread culture that way,” Ms. Weder says.

Mr. Borserio visited Ms. Vandal regularly at the health centre, helping to maintain her connection to SHIP and bringing her a favourite meal of herring roe on kelp.

“She cooked for me for 20 years, so now I had the chance to do the same for her,” he says, adding that his own wife’s death from ALS seven years ago deepened the bond between him and Ms. Vandal at the end of her life.

Ms. Vandal’s long commitment to strengthening and sharing Haida culture and community will keep her alive for decades to come in the cultural practices of all the people who learned from her, Ms. Weder says.

“I really don’t feel like we’ve lost her, because even when we don’t mention her, she’s in people’s weaving, their drawing, their cooking,” she says. “She has transitioned, but she’s always with us.”

Published in The Globe and Mail on Nov. 8, 2023

Edith McGeer: Nov. 18, 1923 - Aug. 28, 2023

The photo that sums up Edith McGeer best for son Rick is one of her holding a throw cushion in front of her face to foil the shot. She was never one for the spotlight.

“My mother was a great woman, and one that you would never look at twice if you saw her out and about,” Rick McGeer says. “And by the way, she liked it that way.”

But the spotlight found his mother anyway, through seven decades of groundbreaking brain research that brought a new understanding of and treatments for complex conditions including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

“It’s difficult for the rest of us to understand her work in terms of how impactful it was in that world, because medical science is not something that’s commonly known to people,” says Jane Burnes, a long-time family friend whom Dr. McGeer considered an adopted daughter. “What she contributed is absolutely remarkable.”

Dr. McGeer and her late husband and research partner, Dr. Patrick McGeer, were once dubbed “citation superstars” by the former Institute for Scientific Information in Pennsylvania, when the couple were University of British Columbia researchers whose manuscripts one year accounted for a fifth of UBC’s total citations.

That’s gold in the academic world, where multiple citations are affirmation of the importance of a researcher’s findings. Edith McGeer remains one of the world’s 100 most-cited neuroscientists of all time, awarded the Order of Canada, the Order of B.C., and three honorary degrees for work that changed understanding of how Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect the brain.

The McGeers were among the first researchers to study the neurotransmitter levodopa as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, as well as the role of inflammation in Alzheimer’s. A 2022 study that confirmed the leprosy drug Dapsone as protective against Alzheimer’s built on postulations the couple had put forward more than two decades earlier, after a chance conversation with Japanese researchers led them to a study of 3,000 people with leprosy whose rate of Alzheimer’s was nearly 40 per cent lower than the general population while taking the drug.

Edith McGeer died at her Vancouver home on Aug. 28, three months before her 100th birthday and almost one year to the day after the death of her husband on Aug. 29, 2022. She was famously low-profile and unassuming to the end. Her last words to daughter Tori McGeer were the ones she always used when saying goodbye to the people she cared about: “Carry on.”

Edith Ann Graef was born to Charlotte (née Ruhl) and Charles Graef in New York on Nov. 18, 1923. Dr. Graef was a Canadian who had previously been the port doctor in Vancouver. He was married to Charlotte’s sister first before her death in childbirth. Dr. Graef and Charlotte then raised daughter Dorothy from his first marriage and had two of their own children, Elbridge and Edith.

Edith grew up with privilege, chauffeured to private school from the family’s sprawling estate in the Bronx. She chafed at the feeling of being “a bird in a gilded cage,” says daughter Tori, and was delighted to enroll at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College at age 16 after graduating high school ahead of her peer group.

A brilliant student, she had earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Virginia and landed a position at the Dupont Experimental Station in Delaware – one of the world’s first industrial research labs – before she turned 21.

Chemistry was an unlikely career path for women in that era, and Edith endured more than one male professor holding forth on that. But despite the challenges of being a woman of science in a blatantly sexist time, she rejected any attempt to celebrate her as an example of a pioneering woman in a man’s world, her son Tad McGeer notes.

“She never liked that. She viewed it as sexism,” he says. UBC colleague Lynn Raymond recalls Dr. McGeer's strong position on that point as well.

“She was a globally pre-eminent scientist, full stop. The fact that she was a woman was not something she wanted anyone to pay attention to,” says Dr. Raymond, director of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at UBC.

While at Dupont, Edith campaigned against the whites-only policy at the Dupont Country Club, a recreation facility for Dupont workers. The only co-worker who stood with her was a young Canadian, Patrick McGeer.

They were soon a couple, married in the spring of 1954 and then off to Vancouver so that Patrick could study medicine at UBC. The West Coast connection forged by her father was reawakened.

The initial plan was for Patrick to become a doctor and Edith to have babies. But their first child died after a premature birth, and a stricken Edith turned back to science to help her through the pain. She began volunteering as a researcher at UBC’s brand-new Kinsman Lab for Neurological Research. Her enthusiasm for what was then a brand-new field convinced Patrick to seek work at the lab as well rather than launch a medical practice.

Their research partnership continued for the rest of their lives. That included 24 years when Patrick McGeer had a second job as an outspoken and sometimes controversial B.C. politician, first as leader of the B.C. Liberals and then as a Social Credit cabinet minister.

Edith McGeer’s extroverted, spotlight-loving husband counted on his wife to keep the research fires burning and raise the couple’s three children in those years, though she credited him in a 1981 profile in the Vancouver Sun as being “excellent at diapering babies.”

Son Tad McGeer remembers being packed into the car with his siblings to trail his father’s campaign bus around the province ahead of the 1969 election, when Patrick McGeer was leader of the B.C. Liberal Party. His mother didn’t just jump on the bandwagon in support of her husband, she made him a real one, live music and all.

“When my father became a cabinet minister, Mom had to be the ‘minister’s wife,’ ” Tad recalls. “She didn’t mind it as long as the other person she was having to talk to could hold up their end of the conversation. But she was happy when that all ended in 1986 and my father left politics.”

Edith McGeer laboured as a research assistant at UBC for 20 long years, says son Rick, “horribly exploited” and working without pay for much of that time. Because Patrick McGeer had landed a paid position in the lab before she did in their early days at UBC, the university’s anti-nepotism rules shut her out from a full professorship even while she became one of the most-cited researchers on campus.

The 1981 Sun profile notes that it wasn’t until Patrick McGeer became a B.C. cabinet minister that UBC finally promoted her, in part because a faculty study at that time identified Edith McGeer as one of the most egregious examples of discrimination at the university.

“She was promoted from volunteer to full professor in a matter of months when things finally changed,” Rick McGeer says. “But she never cared about any of that. Whether volunteer or professor, she interacted with everyone exactly the same way that she always had.”

When she wasn’t engaged in groundbreaking research or helping her husband campaign, Edith McGeer was a Brown Owl in Tori’s Brownie group and a Scout volunteer in her two boys’ troops.

She was also a renowned Halloween fanatic when her children were young, converting the family home into an over-the-top haunted house every Oct. 31. Trick-or-treaters would tour through themed rooms, each more chilling than the one before, then converge in the kitchen to find Edith in full witch’s garb, her cauldron suitably boiling over, courtesy of dry ice she had brought home from her lab.

Edith was an avid reader who never left home without a paperback – and later, her Kindle. She was a voracious puzzler as well, whether crosswords, Wordles, or more complicated versions on days when she found the usual puzzles too simple. (“How can they say that ‘monoid’ isn’t an English word?” Rick recalls her complaining.)

Mandatory retirement left the McGeers without a formal position at UBC from 1989 on, but the couple continued to secure grants for their research. Dr. Edith McGeer published 525 peer-reviewed manuscripts in her time as an academic. At age 89, she launched a biotech startup with her husband to develop effective and safe oral therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease.

Edith McGeer developed colon cancer in 2015, the same year Patrick McGeer suffered a debilitating stroke. Their lifelong friend and former lab assistant Margaret Druhan moved in with the McGeers so they could remain in their home. That was an incomparable gift to the couple and their worried but far-flung children, says son Rick, all of whom are also highly accomplished and live in the United States.

Dr. McGeer leaves her children, Rick, Tad and Tori, and six grandchildren.

Her lifelong dedication to unravelling the mysteries of complex brain diseases will shape understanding long into the future, Ms. Burnes says.

“Much of the work done by Edie and Pat happened a long time ago, and people may not remember,” she says. “But the research that is going on now is all on the shoulders of the work they did.”

Published in The Globe and Mail on Sept. 21, 2023

Deborra Jane Hope: Oct. 11, 1955 - May 15, 2023

She was already a rising star on B.C.’s most popular TV news channel on that momentous day in 1985, though still using her first husband’s surname and not yet the one that she would make famous.

She and her camera crew were in the car coming back from reporting on a news story. She needed a date for a posh banquet in Vancouver that night being hosted by the Chinese government, and was running out of options.

Having already been turned down by the cameraman in the front seat, Deb van der Gracht turned to the shy young cameraman in the back seat and asked without much interest if he wanted to come with her. Roger Hope said yes.

The rest was history, Mr. Hope says. They were a couple virtually from that night on for more than three decades of Deb Hope’s reign as one of B.C.’s best-known and most beloved TV news anchors.

And then they were a couple through a much harder decade as Ms. Hope developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The first signs began to emerge around the time of her 2014 retirement from Global News, when she was 59. She died May 15 of the organ failure common in late-stage Alzheimer’s. She was 67.

“We’d always really loved travelling together, so I made sure we kept on travelling after she retired from Global, even though we knew something was wrong,” Mr. Hope says.

“I took her to Hawaii 12 times, twice to Africa, London, the Great Wall of China. It was an effort, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Deborra Jane Brown was born Oct. 11, 1955, in Trail, B.C. She grew up with two siblings who were already into their adult lives when she was born, and a younger sister. She left home at 18, acquiring a BA in French language and literature at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, and then a degree in journalism at Carleton University, in Ottawa.

Her first reporting job was with Canadian Press in Ottawa, followed by a move to Vancouver to work for now-defunct United Press Canada. Her longtime colleagues at Global News and its forerunner BCTV say those early reporting years informed Ms. Hope’s news approach for the rest of her career. She was a reporter first and foremost, committed to coverage that would resonate with viewers.

“We called it the ‘Deb Hope sniff test’,” recalls journalist Keith Baldrey, who worked alongside Ms. Hope for almost 20 years. “I’d be trying to sell her on a political story that I thought was really interesting and she’d start snoring. You can lose perspective when you have a beat. Deb was the guard against that.”

It isn’t easy for a TV news anchor to be who they really are when on air, says Ms. Hope’s friend and work colleague Squire Barnes. Ms. Hope was the exception, and renowned for an unrestrained laugh that heralded her arrival at work and burst out of her on air whenever something struck her as funny.

“She was a rare bird and was exactly the same both on air and off,” Mr. Barnes recalls. “Viewers approached her like a friend. There was nothing fake about her.”

She was beloved by everyone who worked with her, Mr. Barnes says, with no sign of the “Anchor Monster syndrome” that can afflict popular on-air personalities.

“She was so kind to staff, calling everyone ‘Darlin’,” says her former boss Ian Haysom. “But when she’d come to my office for one of those talks about something she hadn’t agreed with, it’d be, ‘Hey, Mister… .’”

Ms. Hope was a familiar face in Global’s live coverage of B.C. provincial elections over the years, when she would anchor the panel of experts commenting on the elections’ twists and turns. She understood the potential for linking her devoted viewers and fans to good causes through her news shows and high-profile charity events like the annual Variety Show of Hearts Telethon, which she hosted for more than 20 years.

The popular Adopt-a-Pet segment that Ms. Hope introduced to the noon news in 1995 helped find homes for thousands of animals in its 23-year run, says the woman with the BC Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BCSPCA) who used to join Ms. Hope for those segments.

Eileen Drever recalls with much humour those years of bringing dogs, cats, horses, chickens and more to the studio every Tuesday. The segment where a cat in Ms. Drever’s lap suddenly projectile-vomited onto Ms. Hope’s chair landed a mention from Oprah Winfrey and a spot on a UK blooper roll.

Ms. Hope was named to the Order of Canada in 2022 for her many years of supporting charity events, which included the Courage to Come Back fundraiser for Coast Mental Health Foundation. Her 2006 story on Global featuring the five British Columbians chosen for Courage to Come Back Awards that year won her a Jack Webster Foundation journalism award in the category of Best Breaking News Reporting TV/Video.

She also had a rich personal life, as an involved parent of two daughters with Mr. Hope and a stepdaughter from Mr. Hope’s previous marriage. Her love of singing led her to become a baritone with Westcoast Harmony Chorus and Lion’s Gate Chorus, performing four-part barbershop-style music through the two Sweet Adelines International chapters.

“She danced and sang in the front row of both those choruses for many years,” says one of her quartet partners, Pat Fry. “She was so dynamic to watch, and a terrific singer.”

Ms. Hope never got a good explanation from her Orkney Islands parents for the unusual spelling of her first name, Deborra.

But when an African customs agent glanced at her passport one early morning at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania a few years back, the agent whipped out her own driver’s licence with the same spelling and the two women were soon hugging and laughing like old friends, Mr. Hope recalls. “That was Deb.”

Signs of trouble for Ms. Hope emerged gradually, first with misplaced items or a missed teleprompter line, and then more obviously. Ms. Fry remembers Ms. Hope singing every song perfectly at rehearsals, but falling completely silent as soon as a song ended. “Keeping up a conversation became harder and harder.”

Mr. Hope says his wife’s effervescent personality left even medical professionals guessing wrongly for years as the couple went searching for answers. But Ms. Hope’s father had died of early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 61, and Mr. Hope remembers his wife beginning to suspect “what was on the way.”

“She used to call me Rocco, and there was a point early on in this where she said to me, ‘Rocco, I’m so sorry to be doing this to you. There’s no cure or treatment – this is what killed my dad.’”

Long-time Global colleague Pam Mason-Louie – Ms. Hope’s on-air stylist and fashion consultant – recalls a weekend in 2017 when friends took Ms. Hope out to see the play Kinky Boots. While it was a wonderful evening, her friends had to shield Ms. Hope from people who recognized her from the news. She no longer remembered who she had once been.

The disease had advanced significantly by the time she and Mr. Hope joined friend and former boss Clive Jackson and his wife that same year for one last African safari, Mr. Jackson recalls. “But the look of delight was still there when she’d see the animals,” he adds.

Reluctant for a long time to go public with Ms. Hope’s health issues, Mr. Hope was finally convinced by Mr. Barnes to go ahead with a Global piece in October 2020 on the impact of Ms. Hope’s diagnosis on her family. By then, Ms. Hope was living in a long-term care facility near the couple’s Coquitlam home.

Since her death, Mr. Hope has been inundated with emails from women working in TV saying how much they appreciated Ms. Hope’s support in the early days of their careers. “This is a cutthroat business, but she was a team player,” he says.

Ms. Hope leaves her husband; sister, Bonnie; daughters, Katherine and Roxanne; stepdaughter, Leah; and granddaughters, Veronica and Ryan.


Published in The Globe and Mail on May 31, 2023

Landon Pearson: Nov. 16, 1930 - Jan. 28, 2023

Lucy Landon Carter Mackenzie Pearson. The name alone conjures a woman of pedigree and influence, the kind of woman who would count no less than four former Canadian prime ministers among the friends calling in on Zoom a couple of years ago to wish her a happy 90th birthday.

Landon Pearson was all of that, said her long-time friend and fan Sandra Griffin. But she was equally a humble student of the world, an attentive and generous friend, and truly unstoppable in her efforts to improve the lives of children and youth, Ms. Griffin added.

“She made everybody feel important. If you were committed to working with children, then she was committed to you.”

Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 in Ottawa after a winter cold she’d caught led to pneumonia. She was 92.

The former Canadian senator – daughter-in-law of Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning prime minister – is remembered by friends, family and work colleagues as a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position of privilege to influence change.

“Landon spent a lifetime setting up the architecture for realizing children’s rights in Canada,” said Virginia Caputo, director of the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights at Carleton University, where the centre was established in 2006.

“She kept me and everyone around her engaged and motivated with her steadfast vision firmly set on making the world a better place for children. The cornerstone of all of Landon’s work has been to create and hold spaces for children and young people’s participation, to enable their right to know and to have a say in the decisions that adults make that affect their lives.”

Ms. Pearson was born in Toronto on Nov. 16, 1930, to American artist Alice (née Sawtelle) Mackenzie and Hugh Mackenzie, a Canadian businessman. Mr. Mackenzie used to joke that his daughter was his good-luck charm, as he had been promoted to general manager of Labatt’s Brewery on the day she was born.

The youngest of three, Ms. Pearson grew up as a “self-confident, sunny little girl” who even viewed being sent to boarding school at age 11 as a positive turn of events, said daughter Hilary Pearson. (In a 2014 profile in Maclean’s magazine, the elder Ms. Pearson attributed her lifelong commitment to children’s issues as “a combination of having a happy childhood and thinking everyone else should have the same.”)

She was 20 when she met Geoffrey Pearson at the wedding of a mutual family friend. Mr. Pearson left for England shortly after to attend Oxford University, but the smitten couple couldn’t bear being apart. They married a year later, and the late Mr. Pearson’s career as a Canadian diplomat and ambassador was soon underway.

"I think back on the life my mother lived in those years - there were five of us kids and all but one was born abroad, because my father was posted in Paris, then Mexico, India, the Soviet Union. I don't know how she did it.

“She was so interested in all of us kids, in seeing how we grew and the environments that we flourished in. And everywhere she went, she engaged with people to get her head around the new culture she was living in, to learn the language and find out how children were doing in that country.”

In India, Ms. Pearson worked with local women to open a daycare for the children of migrant mothers. In Russia, she interviewed dozens of children for what eventually became a book, Children of Glasnost: Growing up Soviet.

The family returned to Ottawa in between overseas postings, where Ms. Pearson began to be sought out for high-profile federal roles involving children’s issues. She was appointed chair of the Canadian Council on Children and Youth, and worked with the Canadian Coalition on the Rights of Children to promote the 1991 ratification and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Her appointment to the Senate came in 1994, the year she turned 64. It was her first paid job, and a position she held for 11 years. Media coverage from that period routinely referred to her as “the children’s senator” for her unwavering focus.

When joint Senate-Commons committees were struck to work on reforms to Canada’s Divorce Act and review laws and processes around child custody and access, she co-chaired both committees. When then-minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy went looking for an adviser on children’s rights in 1996, Ms. Pearson got the job.

She was a familiar face at UN events related to children and youth, and challenged the federal government often over the years to do more to meet its commitments.

One of her favourite initiatives was “Shaking the Movers,” an annual workshop launched in 2007 by the Landon Pearson Centre. The youth-led workshops continue to bring young people ages eight to 18 together with decision-makers for dialogue on a different article of the UN convention each year.

Ms. Pearson attended a virtual meeting with the 2022 team just weeks before her death, telling the group that it would likely be her last one.

During her years as a senator and long into retirement, Ms. Pearson campaigned for change across a broad spectrum of child and youth issues in Canada.

She worked to end corporal punishment in the family home, and the sexual exploitation of children. She spoke out on the high rates of homelessness among young people coming from government care, and the dire plight of Indigenous children and families in remote communities.

Her efforts brought her international recognition. She was one of nine Canadian women among 1,000 globally to be nominated in 2005 for a Nobel Peace Prize for their collective efforts on behalf of peace, justice, education and sustainability.

Ms. Pearson “always had a very deep sense of the capacities of women,” said daughter Patricia Pearson. “She had to fight to be as effective as she was for children. She couldn’t have been ‘the children’s senator’ if she hadn’t first been a feminist.”

Ms. Pearson was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2008, and awarded five honorary degrees over her lifetime.

“Landon was incredibly intelligent, resourceful and enlightened, but what we all valued most about her was that she met people in a relational way. Relations were the source of power,” said Judy Finlay, Director of the School of Child and Youth Care at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“Landon was always engaged at multiple levels, always integrating all the parts of herself – her political life, family life, her work as an advocate. That’s what made her so powerful.”

Ms. Pearson was 78 when she and Ms. Finlay visited seven First Nations in Northern Ontario at the request of Oji-Cree Elders, who asked them to document the Elders’ stories in a book for those communities’ Indigenous youth.

The trip unfolded during one of the hardest years of Ms. Pearson’s life, 2008, when her husband and then their daughter Katharine died within two months of each other.

“That was a very sad time for her,” Ms. Finlay recalled. “She was very close to each of her children in very different ways.”

Ms. Pearson leaves her children Hilary, Anne, Michael and Patricia; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

The Mamow Sha-way-gi-kay-win initiative – the North-South Partnership for Children – lives on as a legacy of Ms. Pearson’s 2008 trip. The partnership has brought together a coalition of Ontario individuals and organizations with 30 First Nations communities in the north, with a goal of learning from each other and opening “pathways of hope” for Indigenous youth.

“She did make an impact,” Chief Donny Morris of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation said of Ms. Pearson, who sat on the partnership’s governing council alongside Chief Morris and Ms. Finlay.

“For an individual from down south to take notice of what our living conditions are for our youth, our children, our remote communities – that matters. Both her knowledge and the expertise she brought to us, that’s something I will cherish and try to learn from.”

A dedicated journal writer from the age of 16, Ms. Pearson’s hundreds of journals provide an incomparable documentation of her daily life and times, her daughter Hilary Pearson said. The journals spill over with the memorabilia of past symphonies, events and travel tucked into their pages.

Ms. Pearson’s niece Landon Mackenzie remembers her as “the most ordinary aunt you could have,” one whose lack of interest in cooking was family legend and whose absence of ego likely meant many people who met her had no idea of her accomplishments.

“She was this little, plain woman who dressed to fit in,” Ms. Mackenzie said. “She never tooted her own horn, always asked how you were. She lived her time – I’ve got letters between her and my mother where they talked for days about bridal gowns and whether bridesmaid dresses should go modern.

“But there’s her desk covered with letters on the Suez Canal crisis, and this life of moving all over the world, the daughter-in-law of a former prime minister, the diplomat’s wife. Through it all, she always kept in mind that this privilege came with a duty to give back.”

People like to muse about how different things might be if women ruled the world, Patricia Pearson said.

“My mother was a model for that. She used her power for good, and was so thrilled when her appointment to the Senate put her in a position to be able to do even more,” Ms. Pearson said. “More of her, please.”

Published in The Globe and Mail on Feb. 17, 2023

Sarah Doherty: Dec. 21, 1959 - Jan. 11, 2023

Sarah Doherty’s life was forever changed one evening in 1973 when a drunk driver slammed into her while she was cycling to a friend’s house in her hometown of Taunton, Mass. The near-fatal impact tore off her right leg and shattered her pelvis.

But while no one could have known it then, the horrific crash would ultimately benefit thousands of people. The accident launched Ms. Doherty on a lifelong quest for better crutches and mobility aids for active amputees – work that has improved the quality of life of amputees and people with spinal cord injuries around the world.

The grateful beneficiaries of her life’s passion poured their thanks out on social media last month as word spread of Ms. Doherty’s sudden death on Jan. 11 at age 62 from a suspected brain aneurysm.

“I never met her but she changed my life. Because of her, I have a life in the outdoors. I am so, so grateful for her and her contribution to the disability community,” wrote one person on the Facebook page for SideStix Ventures Inc., the small business in Sechelt, B.C., that Ms. Doherty founded in 2010 with her husband, Kerith Perreur-Lloyd.

Ms. Doherty and her identical twin sister were born in Taunton to John and Jane Doherty on Dec. 21, 1959. They were the sixth and seventh children for the big Irish-Catholic family, with two more still to come.

Ms. Doherty was an active child before the accident but not particularly sporty, her twin, Susan Gabriel, recalls. That would all change as the adventurous young woman healed from her traumatic injury and looked for new ways to maintain her enjoyment of the outdoors.

Six months after her accident, she had taken up skiing. She joined the New England Handicapped Sports Association, and under the coaching of fellow amputee Kirk Bauer – who would go on to found Disabled Sports USA – began making a name for herself as a competitive ski racer.

In her early 20s, she moved to Winter Park, Colo., to devote more time to the sport. She was chosen for the U.S. Paralympic team in 1988, which competed in the debut of adaptive skiing at the Winter Olympics in Calgary that year.

She started climbing mountains, summiting Washington’s Mt. Rainier in 1984, the first woman on one leg to achieve the climb. The following year, she became the first amputee without a prosthetic to summit North America’s highest peak, Alaska’s Denali.

The final leg of that climb had to be completed on just one crutch after her other crutch broke under the strain, Ms. Gabriel notes.

Every adventure was a chance not just to test her abilities doing things she loved, Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says, but to test and modify her crutches for higher performance and comfort. Ms. Doherty was committed to finding a crutch design that allowed active people with disabilities to enjoy the outdoors.

“The way we’ve been trained to think of disability is that a person should buy the cheapest mobility aid possible and use it as little as they can to deny the ‘defeat’ of needing it in the first place,” Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says.

“But you wouldn’t try to drive a nail in with the palm of your hand. Sarah understood mobility aids as tools that could expand how you live your life. She demonstrated that every day, just by being.”

Ms. Gabriel says her sister wore a prosthesis in her school years, as self-conscious as any teenager about her appearance. But the amputation was so high on her body that the prosthesis was never comfortable, and Ms. Doherty gave it up entirely as a young adult.

Mountain-climbing and ski racing took a back seat to motherhood and a career as a pediatric occupational therapist after Ms. Doherty met and married her first husband, Dr. Russ Kellett. Their children, Hannah, Abilee and Joshua were born in Roberts Creek, B.C., where the couple settled after first visiting the Sunshine Coast in the years when Dr. Kellett was in medical training.

The marriage later ended, and Ms. Doherty returned to her dream of designing a better crutch. An opportunity came in May, 2004, to join a group of women who had come together to walk the 800-kilometre Spanish pilgrimage, Camino de Santiago.

Setting out on prototype crutches that she had developed, Ms. Doherty walked from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, accompanied by a Canadian woman and a German man whose paces were similar to hers.

“She walked with two complete strangers right over the Pyrenees,” Ms. Gabriel marvels. “She was an extraordinary person.”

The Canadian, Georgina Foster-Haig, was left in awe of Ms. Doherty’s tremendous athleticism and indomitable spirit.

“One day it had rained and rained, and we were walking down to a place to stay for the night that was pure mud,” Ms. Foster-Haig says. “We were slipping and sliding all over the place, and it was really hard for Sarah to get traction for her crutches. She never complained, just kept going. She was a force of nature.

Fortunate coincidences have altered the course of Ms. Doherty’s life at various points over the years, starting with the police officer who happened to be parked on the block where Ms. Doherty was hit by the drunk driver. His decision to lift her into the back seat of the squad car to get her to hospital faster was a factor in saving her life.

Then there were the two surgeons newly returned from field hospitals in Vietnam who happened to be working at the Taunton hospital that day, fresh from the experience of dealing with horrendous traumatic injuries.

A coincidence on the sidelines of an elementary-school soccer game in Roberts Creek in the early 2000s was another life-changer for Ms. Doherty. She found herself chatting with a man whose 10-year-old son was on the same soccer team as her own son.

The man was a structural engineer who shared her love of hiking and the outdoors. They made plans to go hiking, and were soon having regular conversations about how to build a better crutch. Ms. Doherty had the real-life experience, while Mr. Perreur-Lloyd knew the science.

Recalling that fateful encounter at the soccer field, Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says he was “in it from the start” with the woman he would one day marry. But Ms. Doherty’s trust had been badly shaken by the failure of her first marriage, and it took the long walk of the Camino in 2004 to clarify things for her.

She came back from the walk knowing two things: She was ready to love again; and the crutches she had used on the walk needed further adaptation.

And so began SideStix. Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says the little company couldn’t have gotten off the ground without the grants and support of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, which “walked alongside of us for years.”

Ms. Doherty’s efforts on behalf of people with disabilities got noticed. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, and named a Woman of Achievement in 2014 by the service organization Girls Incorporated of Taunton.

For many years, Ms. Doherty wrote monthly online features of people whose own lives were changed by SideStix. Those powerful testimonials kept her going through years of business ups and downs, Ms. Gabriel says.

The couple made a successful pitch on the sixth season of CBC’s Dragons’ Den in 2011. Plans went no further, however, after they realized that the Dragons envisaged a factory in China pumping out ready-made crutches, not the highly individualized product that Ms. Doherty had in mind.

“Sarah was our icon, our chief guinea pig, and so central to this company,” Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says. “There’s so much I haven’t wrapped my head around about how SideStix will go on, but we have to. This was so important to Sarah.”

Those who knew Ms. Doherty recall a charismatic listener who gave people her whole attention in any conversation. Her daughter Hannah Kellett – the only one to miss out on the 2009 family hike of Vancouver Island’s difficult West Coast Trail – says that beyond all the accomplishments, her mother was simply “a really good human.”

“She trusted in things happening the way they were meant to. She equipped all of us with the tools we needed to move forward, even now,” Ms. Kellett says.

Pain was a constant in Ms. Doherty’s life, and recent years were particularly hard, Ms. Gabriel says. She lived with an undiagnosed broken pelvis for three years after a fall. Another fall broke her sacrum.

Even as her family mourns her death, Mr. Perreur-Lloyd says they take comfort knowing she’s no longer in pain: “Anyone who loved her will know her energy is still with them.”

Predeceased by her older brother, Steve, Ms. Doherty leaves her siblings Mary, John, Paul, Margaret, Susan, Elizabeth and Bill; children, Hannah, Abilene and Joshua; husband, Mr. Perreur-Lloyd; stepson, Kelly; and grandsons, Ivan and Zeke.

Published in The Globe and Mail on Feb. 7, 2023

Mary-Wynne Ashford: March 17, 1939 - Nov. 19, 2022

Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford was never a person for half-measures.

Nola-Kate Seymoar recalls her older sister rising to the top of whatever she set out to do, whether that was dazzling her grade-school teachers, becoming a physician after raising three children, or influencing world leaders and several generations of Canadians as an internationally respected anti-nuclear activist.

“Plunge, immerse, master. That was her,” Ms. Seymoar said. “When I heard about her accident, I thought, ‘This is not how it’s supposed to end.’”

Dr. Ashford died Nov. 19 in hospital from complications of a head injury incurred after she fell Halloween night while out walking her labradoodle, Suzy, near her Victoria home. She was 83, and at the time of her death still very much the engaged and passionate peace activist she had been for nearly 40 years.

“We had plans for next year to roll out a curriculum to high schools throughout B.C.,” said Dr. Jonathan Down, president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Canada (IPPNW), which Dr. Ashford had led 25 years earlier. “Mary-Wynne’s death is such a loss to the community of peace activists trying to make this world move in a different direction.”

Dr. Ashford was born Mary-Wynne Moar on March 17, 1939, the third of Jack and Kitty Moar’s four children. The family lived in Indian Head, Sask., but would soon move to Edmonton. Ms. Seymoar said the siblings grew up being entertained by the colourful stories of their bush pilot father and his friends, while their highly competent mother carried out one big community volunteer project after another.

The future activist’s first career was as a home economics teacher in Calgary after graduating from the University of Alberta. Then came a few years as a stay-at-home mother while her three children were small.

She was an engaged and thoroughly fun mother, her son Graham Ashford recalled. That just added to the grand unhappiness of the children in their secondary school years when their mother enrolled in medicine at the University of Calgary at age 38.

(Dr. Ashford told a humorous story in her 2013 TEDx Talk of daughter Karen writing a high-school essay around that time lamenting “the last day my mother made my lunch.”)

“We were furious,” Karen Barnett remembers. “We hated it, so we interrupted her all the time. She basically had to do pre-med in blocks of two or three minutes, because that was all she had. And she retained that ability. She built on it.”

Dr. Ashford’s medical career first focused on end-of-life care. But she was set on a new course in 1984 after hearing Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott speak at the University of Victoria. “I was shocked by what I heard – 60,000 nuclear warheads??” Dr. Ashford recalled later. “I could not believe that political leaders could be so reckless or stupid.”

Three sleepless nights later, Dr. Ashford decided to devote her life to world peace and nuclear disarmament. She saw it as integral to the duty of care she had sworn to uphold as a physician.

Her commitment to peace and nuclear disarmament would win her a global following, multiple awards and international recognition, as evidenced by photos her friends and family have of Dr. Ashford alongside world figures including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa and actor Michael Douglas.

But family, friends and colleagues say that Dr. Ashford’s true gift was to have achieved all that – to have shared the world stage with political leaders and celebrities – and yet still valued a casual conversation with a passing stranger or young person the most.

“I’ve met very famous people, but they are not the ones who stay in my brain. It’s the courageous, ordinary people who do,” she told one TEDx audience.

Denis Donnelly got to know her through their mutual connection to the Gettin’ Higher Choir in Victoria, which he used to co-lead. “She was not a person you would ever forget if you met her,” Mr. Donnelly said. His wife, Lynn, added that Dr. Ashford felt called to peace activism, “and it radiated out of her.”

Singing was both a personal pleasure and a strategic tool for Dr. Ashford. She regularly called upon the Gettin’ Higher SWAT team – Sing When Asked To – to help her wrap up a presentation on nuclear disarmament with a singalong.

She believed that singing not only lifted people out of the bleakness that can take hold when talking about nuclear devastation, but connected them more firmly to the issue. People coaxed into a singalong stuck around longer and talked more after a presentation, she’d noticed.

“I didn’t share that view initially,” acknowledged Dr. Down of his own presentations with Dr. Ashford, which they started after he took over the leadership of IPPNW in 2015. “I went into this work somewhat naively, thinking that if you give people the data, they will draw their own conclusions. But I learned from Mary-Wynne. She had the charisma and I had the PowerPoint.”

Dr. Ashford raised her family in Alberta with her late husband Dr. David Ashford. “We had a really experiential childhood – acting out plays, making puppets, travelling,” recalled her son, Mr. Ashford, of his time growing up on a wooded acreage outside Calgary.

“We had an unusual childhood because my dad did pathology work at the Calgary Zoo, so there were times when we’d have a baby orangutan or a polar bear cub or some animal like that at our house. We have all these photos of us holding or feeding some strange animal. Our mother always let us take the risk.”

By the time of her Helen Caldicott revelation, Dr. Ashford had moved to Vancouver Island and was remarried to Victoria physician Dr. Russell Davidson. After hearing how deeply his wife felt the call to action, Dr. Davidson shared his own horrifying memory of witnessing the impact of nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1958 when he was in the British military. He offered to care for their seven collective children through their final at-home years so she could devote her energy to nuclear disarmament.

Dr. Ashford wasted no time. That same year, 1984, lifelong nuclear disarmament activist Senator Douglas Roche remembers meeting Dr. Ashford in Ottawa, when he was Canada’s ambassador for disarmament and she was a member of the Consultative Group on Arms Control and Disarmament.

“I immediately recognized the depth of Mary-Wynne’s knowledge and commitment to nuclear disarmament issues,” Mr. Roche said. “She was engaging and passionate in the expression of her views. I saw her at many meetings thereafter.”

Dr. Ashford was an accomplished writer, authoring the 2006 book Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror and War and writing a number of articles for Peace Magazine. She launched an online course last year, Global Solutions for Peace, Equality, and Sustainability.

Her decades in the peace movement sparked a spiritual journey as well, as she frequently encountered members of the Baha’i faith who were living out the faith’s tenets around working for peace and a just society. Coincidentally, her daughter, Ms. Barnett, converted to Baha’i, having been so impressed by the Baha’i young people she’d gotten to know as a high-school teacher that she wanted the same for her own children.

Other members of the family soon followed Ms. Barnett’s lead, as did Dr. Ashford in 2008. Dr. Ashford went on to become an active member of the Baha’i community, serving at the institutional level and promoting the faith’s teachings on world peace and global governance.

Dr. Ashford briefly stepped back from some of her peace work to care for her late husband Russell Davidson through his dementia and 2018 death. But even in the year he died, she gave 23 presentations that reached 1,200 people.

Dr. Ashford fell ill in early 2022 from what her family believes was long COVID. Ms. Barnett temporarily moved in with her in April for three months after discovering she was too weak to walk up her own stairs and subsisting on bread and honey.

“I’d never been with her when she wasn’t just bubbling over with joy. But this time it took three weeks before I saw her laugh again,” Ms. Barnett recalled.

“As soon as she started feeling better, she said what she wanted to do most while I was there was to go through all her documents. Those months were such a joyful time. Her memory for people and stories was incredible.”

The documents relevant to her public life have now been donated to the University of Victoria, where she taught for five years in the late 1990s.

Dr. Ashford was still shaking off the last wisps of brain fog when her daughter’s visit ended in July, but she had returned to her peace work and choir. Her last public presentation was Oct. 17 for the Greater Victoria Peace School, two weeks before her fall.

Dr. Ashford’s high profile put her at the centre of some of the world’s biggest peace gatherings, whether she was giving a keynote at Moscow’s 1997 International Forum for a Nuclear Free World for the Survival of Mankind or introducing musician and peace activist Graham Nash at the 1988 Concert for Peace in the Montreal Forum.

She was in Kazakhstan in 1990 to witness the protests that forced the Soviet Union’s then-president Mikhail Gorbachev to end underground nuclear testing. She led IPPNW delegations to North Korea in 1999 and 2000, and returned again in 2018 to walk with 1,200 female peace activists during the Singapore Summit between then-U.S. president Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.

While the number of nuclear warheads around the world declined significantly in Dr. Ashford’s lifetime, so did public awareness of nuclear risks and the commitment of younger generations to peace activism. A lifetime devoted to nuclear disarmament can be lonely and disheartening work, Dr. Down said.

Dr. Ashford confronted her own dilemma around “how to face hopelessness” in a 1998 article for Peace Magazine. She concluded that she would keep working for nuclear disarmament even in the absence of hope.

“Whether or not I could really make a difference, leaving [disarmament] undone was a resignation to despair,” she wrote. “At the very least, the individual can challenge the silence of assumed consensus. By breaking the silence, by refusing to collude with evil and insanity, one resists the darkness.”

Dr. Ashford leaves her sisters Nola-Kate and Bonnie; her children, Karen, Graham and Patrick; stepchildren, Katyann, Victoria, Gillian and Emma; and 10 grandchildren.

Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 1, 2022

Jim Hume: Dec. 27, 1923 - April 13, 2022

British Columbia political columnist Jim Hume took much pride in having never missed a deadline in 70 years. He missed his first one April 9 when admitted to hospital in Victoria, where he died four days later at age 98.

“Jim always said he wanted to die with a pen in his hand,” recalls Joan Sawicki, who knew Mr. Hume first in the mid-1960s when she was a young server in a Victoria pub and much later when she was a politician.

They met as Mr. Hume was beginning his decades-long reign as a political columnist at the Victoria Times and its successor, the Times Colonist. Ms. Sawicki jokes that he gave her the same advice as a server and, 27 years later, a new MLA.

“He’d give me little lectures about how I deserved better than to be slinging beer in a pub. He was such a good influence,” Ms. Sawicki says. “When we next met after I was elected to the legislature in 1991, he told me the same thing. Jim Hume is one of my favourite people.”

James Hume – no middle name, a family tradition he followed by not giving any of his own six sons a middle name – was born in Coventry, England, on Dec. 27, 1923, the fourth of five children.

Mr. Hume’s father, Thomas Dodds Hume, and mother, Ann (née Startin), met after Thomas was badly injured in the First World War’s bloody Gallipoli battle, says Stephen Hume, James’s son, who has documented several generations of the Hume lineage. Ms. Startin was a young nurse at the Coventry hospital where Thomas was recovering.

Jim Hume was deeply affected by his father’s war history and resilience in managing lifelong disabilities, his son says. Jim’s years as a conscientious objector during the Second World War followed a childhood of living with a father who rejected the annual tradition of wearing a poppy as a “feel-good for the people who were never there.”

Jim Hume was “very interested in the now” right up to his death, says Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer. His seven-decade run of commenting on current affairs through the lens of history and his own life experiences lives on in Canadian newspaper archives and the blog he kept from ages 90 to 98.

“When people can marshal history to make a point about now, it’s not just to reminisce,” Mr. Palmer says. “The knowledge of history, Hume’s passion for research, the degree he embedded his own personal experiences – he brought that together. He was a stretcher bearer in the bombing of Coventry. His dad was injured at Gallipoli. Hume was there for all of it.”

Mr. Hume had a job delivering bread in Victoria when he interviewed the first of what would ultimately be 13 B.C. premiers, spanning from Boss Johnson in the early 1950s through to the current incumbent, Premier John Horgan.

One of his customers happened to be Mr. Johnson, who was charmed by the delivery boy’s request for an interview. A journalist was born.

In those years, Mr. Hume was married to the late Joyce (née Potter) Hume, the mother of his first five sons. Like his own parents, Mr. Hume and Ms. Potter had met when he was in hospital and she was a nurse, though in his case he was recovering from an appendix operation.

They married in Coventry in 1945. Son Stephen was born a year later; with baby still in arms and Timothy on the way, the couple left Coventry the next year on a quest for a new life in British Columbia. Jim worked whatever jobs were available but dreamed of becoming a reporter.

His wife had set her sights on British Columbia after eating a B.C. apple while in hospital delivering Stephen. Soldiers in the hospital were so pleased to learn of a civilian birth, they raised money to buy her a fruit basket. Moving to wherever those apples had come from was on her mind when talk turned to leaving England.

Arriving in Halifax in 1948, they bought a ticket to travel as far west as they could go, which turned out to be Victoria.

As was common for reporters, Mr. Hume and his family moved frequently once he became a journalist. He loved sports-writing as much as politics, believing sports to be “the arena for the working class,” Stephen Hume says.

Mr. Hume freelanced first, then went on to stints at newspapers in Nanaimo, Port Alberni, Penticton and Edmonton. He started at the Victoria Times in 1964.

His years there encompassed a divorce in the late 1970s, a second marriage in 1981, to Candide Temple, and the birth of their son, Nicholas, in 1982, when Mr. Hume was 58 and Ms. Temple was 38.

When Ms. Temple died in 1995 of pancreatic cancer, Mr. Hume was suddenly a single dad at 71. Young Nic was not yet 13.

Nic Hume remembers that even before his mother died, his father worked hard to balance parental and professional responsibilities. “But after her death, it became clear that raising me to adulthood was now the priority. I never felt I came second to his work.”

Journalists working alongside Mr. Hume in those decades recall a man who despised “pack journalism” and wasn’t shy about providing sharp but deserved criticism of any political coverage that he found underwhelming.

“I always felt that with Jim, journalism school was always open,” Mr. Palmer says.

Globe and Mail reporter Justine Hunter still appreciates Mr. Hume’s long-ago advice to do her own digging.

“The idea that you could go away from a scrum and make your own inquiries was something I took to heart,” Ms. Hunter says. “There was one piece of advice I did not take from Jim, however. Years back, I visited him with my fussy little newborn and his advice was to dip the baby’s soother in Scotch.”

Scotch comes up often in recollections of Mr. Hume, though as a younger man he spent many years as an abstaining Christadelphian.

Middle age brought a love of both Scotch and cigarettes. The latter led to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which likely contributed to his death from pneumonia.

The critical eye that Mr. Hume cast on political coverage extended to his own writing. His views on Indigenous issues shifted dramatically over time as the ugly history of residential schools emerged, his son Stephen says.

University of Victoria professor emeritus Hamar Foster recalls frequent wrangling in the late 1980s with Mr. Hume on his viewpoints. Twenty years later, Mr. Hume wrote “a most favourable review” of a book on aboriginal title co-edited by Mr. Foster.

Bob Plecas knew Mr. Hume through his own years as a B.C. bureaucrat and deputy minister. Mr. Hume’s years as a conscientious objector shaped a man so sure of his values that he could be considered a trusted friend even while publicly scrutinizing your work life, Mr. Plecas says.

Beyond political writing, Mr. Hume is noted for 12 years of volunteering as a crossing guard at St. Michaels University School, starting when his youngest son was in Grade 1 and continuing years after the boy had moved to the junior school.

He founded and led the Velox Rugby Club in 1969 after son Mark and his teenage friends asked for his help. In 1994, he received one of B.C.’s highest journalism honours, the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation.

A favourite memory of son Nic is being age 15 on a trip to Australia with his father. Wanting to linger on the Gold Coast with friends, Mr. Hume gave his son an allowance, warned him that he’d “call the cops” if he didn’t get a daily call, and sent the boy off on his own for several weeks to scuba dive at Cairns.

Nic Hume recalls that trip as significant not only for his first lessons in how to drink, but for the gift of his father’s trust.

Mr. Hume’s last blog post cast a critical eye on the war in Ukraine. Long-time friend and colleague Brian Kieran has helped edit the blog since Mr. Hume launched it in 2014 after the Times Colonist ended his column.

“He did not want to be the last person in B.C. to know it was time to hang up his quill,” Mr. Kieran recalled in his newsletter for former MLAs, Orders of the Day. “He asked us to edit him weekly, and be the first to tell him it was time to retire. We never came close.”

Published in The Globe and Mail on May 2, 2022

Remi De Roo: Feb. 24, 1924 - Feb. 1, 2022

Roman Catholic Bishop Remi Joseph De Roo considered himself a pilgrim. Those who knew and loved him consider him a prophet as well, and some believe he will ultimately be remembered as one of history’s greatest Catholic bishops for his lifelong commitment to modernizing the Church.

Bishop De Roo died in Victoria on Feb. 1, three weeks before his 98th birthday. While his time as the charismatic and controversial bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Victoria had come to an end long before, he continued to lecture and minister right up until the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

“During the pandemic, he spent a lot of time reflecting – for all of us, it has been a time to reimagine what we want to be, what will come next,” says Pearl Gervais, a lifelong friend and co-worker who first met Bishop De Roo when he was a young chaplain for a Winnipeg youth group she belonged to.

Ms. Gervais provided a suite in her Nanaimo, B.C., home for Bishop De Roo after he retired from the diocese in 1999. He lived there until his worsening health forced a move into Victoria’s Mount St. Mary Hospital four months before his death.

“In these past two years, Remi continued to be on the phone at least three or four times a week, calling someone who was elderly, lonely, needing comfort,” says Ms. Gervais, who lectured extensively with Bishop De Roo over the years.

“We took a lot of courses together on Zoom. He constantly reminded all of us that ministry never stops, personal growth and spiritual growth never stop. It was very moving to be around Remi in this last period.”

Born in Swan Lake, Man., on Feb. 24, 1924, Remi De Roo was one of eight children born to farmers Josephine (née de Pape) and Raymond De Roo.

He graduated from Winnipeg’s Saint-Boniface College (now Saint-Boniface University) then earned a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Rome.

He was the youngest Catholic bishop in history when Pope John XXIII appointed him as bishop of the Victoria diocese in 1962. That year was also the start of the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II.

The 16 directives that came out of that council launched difficult conversations for Roman Catholics that continue to this day around topics such as contraception, women’s role in church leadership and whether priests should be allowed to marry.

Vatican II also marked a momentous shift in the Catholic world view from one of a hierarchy with the Pope at the top, to one of a circle with all Catholics equal. That was a view that Bishop De Roo had held from his earliest days in the Church.

“Remi’s impact was to bring about a more human-centred church that cared about people – simple words but powerful in the application,” says former Canadian senator and author Douglas Roche, another lifelong friend of Bishop De Roo who met him 60 years ago when Mr. Roche was editor of the now-defunct Western Catholic Reporter.

“He was a prophet, and prophets have a rough go. Prophets are almost by definition set apart from the establishment of their era – you never find a prophet who’s giving you the establishment line. People who liked him really liked him. People who didn’t like him really didn’t like him.”

One of the most difficult chapters in Bishop De Roo’s life were the years immediately after his mandatory retirement from the Victoria diocese at the age of 75. His successor, the late Bishop Raymond Roussin, went public soon after with allegations of questionable investments by the diocese.

Funds had been invested in Arabian horses. When that resulted in losses, the diocese partnered with the same person, Seattle lawyer Joseph Finley, on a property investment in Washington State. Instead of receiving a quick return, the diocese ended up the guarantor for a high-interest mortgage.

For 10 years, Bishop De Roo endured much media scrutiny as Vancouver Island Catholics reached deep to raise $13-million in bonds to buy out the mortgage, some diocese properties were sold, and Mr. Finley pursued the diocese in court for breach of contract.

A damning report in 2000 from the Canadian Catholic Commission found it “truly beyond belief” that Bishop De Roo had put such trust in the diocese’s long-time financial administrator Muriel Clemenger. No outside audits of diocese finances had been conducted for the 15 years that she and Bishop De Roo worked together.

Never one to lay blame, Bishop De Roo wouldn’t comment about how such investment decisions had come to be, even while his silence confused supporters and provided fodder for his critics.

Over time, matters sorted out, though not without lingering bitterness. Bond purchasers got their money back. A Washington appeals court ruled in 2005 that the land investment was “sound,” and the diocese sold the property the next year for $16.5-million. Mr. Finley’s lawsuit was thrown out in 2008.

Ms. Clemenger finally sent a letter of apology to Bishop De Roo in 2009, two years before her death, and asked that he make it public. “The fault was mine,” she wrote. “It was a very serious miscarriage of all that is just that you were made to take the blame publicly.”

That Bishop De Roo not only survived that period but continued his lecturing and ministry for 22 more years speaks to his resilience, says Patrick Jamieson, whose 35-year career as the editor of Island Catholic News has revolved around the life, times and teachings of Bishop De Roo.

“Church politics are things that can destroy people, so for Remi to withstand that was really something,” Mr. Jamieson says.

Ms. Gervais says Bishop De Roo found consolation in those difficult years knowing that the man he revered the most, Jesus, had endured much worse. “Remi had people who held onto him. They knew enough to support a fellow pilgrim. They reached out, loving and without judgment.”

Cardinal Michael Czerny travelled from Rome to speak at Bishop De Roo’s Feb. 12 funeral at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Victoria. The two men met in the late 1970s in El Salvador, where both were part of an emerging “liberation theology” that led them to stand with impoverished people and challenge authority.

Cardinal Czerny spoke at the funeral of Pope Francis’s words in January, when the pontiff urged people to “walk the paths of the people of our time” and to draw close to those who have been wounded by life.

“The Holy Father could easily have had our beloved Bishop Remi in mind when, with a certain tough love, He spelled out these challenges,” Cardinal Czerny said. “With the intercession of our beloved ancestor, let us – even with the risk of being, once in a while, just a little bit irritating – embrace them with firm resolve and inextinguishable hope.”

Bishop De Roo found many opportunities to apply the tenets of liberation theology in Canada as well. He was a vocal critic of the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement in the late 1980s, and on occasion got on the wrong side of then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He challenged 1980s-era B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm’s government for its union-busting legislation.

When media mogul Conrad Black wrote in a 1987 piece in Maclean’s magazine that capitalism was “a concept profoundly rooted in the human personality and antedates Christ,” Bishop De Roo responded that capitalism “is not Christian and not even authentically human.”

An enduring legacy from Bishop De Roo’s time leading the diocese is the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. Centre director Paul Bramadat says Bishop De Roo was “at the very genesis” of the centre when it was founded in 1991, and helped raise the majority of the endowment that the centre relies on.

“Remi liked the idea of a research centre in which experts from any scholarly discipline would pursue their own research projects in a supportive environment,” Dr. Bramadat says.

“He had a huge footprint within especially progressive Catholic circles. And yet, when he would join our daily meetings at the CSRS, he would treat a 22-year-old atheist master’s student with the same care, curiosity and respect as he would treat a world-famous Oxford scholar who was a fellow at the centre.”

Under Bishop De Roo, the diocese gave the university a priceless collection of almost 1,700 books on theology and philosophy from the 16th century that Victoria Bishop Charles Seghers had brought back to the city from Europe in the 1800s. It also gifted a $155,000 St. James Bible to the centre that recreates hand-drawn calligraphy and illustrations from the Middle Ages.

Bishop De Roo had the rare honour of receiving an Indigenous name upon his arrival in the diocese in 1962. He was named Siem Le Pleet Schoo-Kun, roughly translated as “High Priest Swan,” in a Tsawout First Nations ceremony that re-enacted the arrival of Victoria’s first bishop in 1845.

He continued to drum and dance with local First Nations many times over the years, Ms. Gervais says. But Mr. Jamieson notes that relationships started to change in the 1990s, when “things got more political” between First Nations and the Church.

Bishop De Roo, who maintained strong family relations throughout his life, leaves three sisters, Clara Major, Alma Verdonck and Madeline Martinez.

In his eulogy at the funeral, Mr. Roche said history will eventually make visible the tremendous impact of Bishop De Roo’s commitment to advancing the directives of Vatican II.

“Bishop Remi is gone from us. I have lost my dearest friend,” Mr. Roche said. “But I know that I will see him soon. And I’m sure that in our next conversation, he will tell me something new about the Second Vatican Council.”

Published in The Globe and Mail on Feb. 17, 2022