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