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
I am a Victoria, BC writer and occasional contractor with The Globe and Mail newspaper, writing obituaries on noteworthy people. The Globe has a paywall but I own the copyright to the writing, so I am featuring my obits here, with links for Globe subscribers at the bottom to enjoy them in a much prettier layout format than I am able to offer. Enjoy!
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.
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.
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