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
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!
Mary-Wynne Ashford: March 17, 1939 - Nov. 19, 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
“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
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
Cherry Lynne Kingsley: June 7, 1969 - Nov. 30, 2021
Cherry Lynne Kingsley knew too well that the ghosts of a brutal, broken childhood are never truly vanquished.
The illustrious list of people who admired Ms. Kingsley included Canadian senators, political leaders, a decorated lieutenant-general and people around the world moved by her passionate work on behalf of Indigenous and sexually exploited children and youth.
But no amount of love and support was enough whenever those ghosts came for her.
“Sometimes people have the impression there was a transformation, like a cloak, and I just took it off. ‘You’ve overcome so much,’ ” Ms. Kingsley said in the 2002 film Recognizing the Person, which documented her journey from a violent childhood to international renown as a brilliant and charismatic young leader changing thinking and attitudes around the sexual exploitation of children.
“I don’t know if I overcame any of it, to be honest. I think I live with it every single day. There is no destination that you get to when you’re healed and that’s it. It’s like this constant path you’re on.”
That path ended in the palliative-care ward of a Vancouver Island hospital on Nov. 30, where Ms. Kingsley died of a post-COVID-19 respiratory infection at the age of 52. She spent her final month in hospital surrounded by friends from the Nanaimo, B.C., women’s shelter where she had been living after a decade marked by poverty and addiction.
“There is this belief that you have to have your hurts and harms fixed and healed before you can go out and do this work,” says Megan Lewis, who met Ms. Kingsley in the mid-1990s when both were emerging as powerful young voices on behalf of sexually exploited youth. “But Cherry was absolutely an example of someone who fought for other people while continuing to fight the same hurts in herself.”
Ms. Kingsley was called upon many times during her years in the spotlight to tell the haunting story of her escape, along with her younger sister, from a violent stepfather when she was 11. The children walked along the railway tracks for three days from Calgary to Cochrane before being picked up by authorities and put into foster care.
But foster care only launched a new painful chapter, as Ms. Kingsley was placed in 20 foster homes over the next eight years. In the midst of such upheaval, she fled to Vancouver at age 14 with an older couple who she thought were friends – until they turned her out to work the streets as a condition of staying with them.
By the time she returned to Calgary in 1988, she had been trafficked in British Columbia and California and was using street drugs to try to anesthetize herself from the pain. A police officer introduced her to a young law graduate, Kim Pate, who connected Ms. Kingsley to the Alberta Youth in Care Network and hired her for a new peer leadership project for youth with experiences in custody and foster care.
“Cherry’s work that summer started opening up opportunities for her in Canada and globally. She was an amazing communicator and thinker. She was brilliant at putting a human face on the big issues,” recalls Ms. Pate, who went on to a career leading the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies before being appointed to the Senate in 2016.
Former senator Landon Pearson – one of many lifelong fans who helped bring Ms. Kingsley’s message to larger and larger audiences – vividly remembers her speaking at the 1996 World Congress on Commercial Exploitation of Children in Stockholm. Ms. Kingsley’s son Dakota, her only child, was four years old at the time.
“She was part of a panel with various religious groups represented, and they went down the line saying they cherished children, they were committed to fighting against sexual exploitation, and so on. Cherry was fourth or fifth in line and when it came her turn, said, ‘Well, no, they don’t.’ I saw her speak truth to power.”
Surprised to learn that only three of 1,300 delegates at the Stockholm congress had been sexually exploited youths themselves, Ms. Kingsley and Ms. Pearson returned to Canada committed to organizing an event that would do things differently.
They worked with Peers Victoria to put on Out From the Shadows, a week-long symposium in Victoria that brought 60 young people from throughout the Americas to share their lived expertise on sexual exploitation while policy makers and politicians listened.
That “child prostitutes” were in fact sexually exploited children was an uncommon idea in those years.
“Cherry really started to be able to articulate what was wrong with the concept of children being sexually available,” says Ms. Pate, whose close relationship with Ms. Kingsley and her son included times when both lived with Ms. Pate and her family. “Cherry became more and more clear, and Landon provided more international opportunities.”
In 2000, Ms. Kingsley and Melanie Mark spent months together on the road gathering the stories of sexually exploited Indigenous youth across Canada for the report Sacred Lives. The unforgettable trip was equal parts exhilarating and traumatizing as the young women documented one horrifying story of abuse after another, recalls Ms. Mark, now B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport.
“I was 25 at the time, and had the honour to be Cherry’s handler,” Ms. Mark says. “She called me her medicine. I was in Japan with her, Ottawa, all across Canada – and everywhere, she lit up the room and always left people in tears.”
That same year, Ms. Kingsley received the Governor-General’s Award after being nominated by then-MP Ethel Blondin-Andrew, who – like so many others influenced by Ms. Kingsley – felt a personal bond with her.
Victoria filmmaker Peter Campbell says he read news of that award and instantly knew he’d just seen the happy ending to his next project. The resulting 2002 documentary, Recognizing the Person, captures Ms. Kingsley’s sharp insights, quick wit but also pain as she and the film crew undertake an epic cross-Canada road trip to reconnect Ms. Kingsley with the people and places of her past.
Mr. Campbell plans to use some of that footage for a video tribute to Ms. Kingsley for her funeral at Alkali Lake next spring on her home Secwepemc First Nation territory.
But even while she dazzled international audiences, Ms. Kingsley continued to struggle in private. “She was expected to be all together, but without the day-to-day supports she needed for that,” Ms. Pate says.
No one recognized that more than Ms. Kingsley.
“Everyone thinks when you quit drugs, life is great, right? Like drugs are the problem,” Ms. Kingsley said in 2005. “All of a sudden I quit drugs, I’m straight now and my life still sucks – only now I’m really grimly aware of it.”
Anyone who has seen what it takes to support friends and family with mental-health problems knows how hard that work is, Ms. Pearson says. “There was no one to do that for Cherry. I don’t know if there was anything that any of us could have done that would have replaced what she didn’t have in the first place.”
Disowned by her mother after going into foster care, Ms. Kingsley’s only family connection for many years was her sister Terry-Lynn Murray, who had run away with her down the railway tracks when they were children. But in 2002, their mother’s sister, Marcelle Hines, spotted a Reader’s Digest article on Kingsley’s Governor-General Award and reached out to connect Ms. Kingsley to more of her family.
Ms. Kingsley leaves her son Dakota, 29, as well as Ms. Murray and two younger half-brothers, Eric and Cyrus Nelson, and older half-sister Leanne Lewis. Ms. Lewis was put up for adoption as a newborn and didn’t find Ms. Kingsley and the rest of her birth family until 10 years ago, when Ms. Hines went looking for her.
Ms. Kingsley’s life had taken a hard turn for the worse by the time the sisters met, Ms. Lewis says, adding that they had few chances for time together.
“But at least she spent her last month in hospital. I’m grateful that it gave her that clarity at the end,” says Ms. Lewis, who is raising funds for Ms. Kingsley’s tombstone and funeral service through GoFundMe. “She wasn’t on street drugs – she didn’t overdose. Her son was able to visit her that month. Her brain was clear.”
The difficult circumstances of Ms. Kingsley’s last years have many friends wondering whether there was more they could have done.
“Lots of folks fell away,” notes Ms. Pate, whose last contact with Ms. Kingsley was in the summer. “I remember her once saying, ‘I’m getting older – I’m no longer the exceptional youth who has been in care.’ But she also didn’t like to let us know when she wasn’t doing well.”
Ms. Pearson now questions whether her efforts to help Ms. Kingsley publicly share her story helped or harmed her.
“I felt there was so much good in her – I wanted to help her try to be what she could be,” she says. “But was it the wrong thing to help her get that profile? On the other hand, she really did change things. Out of her story, there’s something good – even though it’s not for Cherry.”
Another high-profile supporter, retired lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, remembered Ms. Kingsley as an extraordinary young woman, but “already so martyred by the cultural displacement from her First Nation roots, and abused by an apathetic social milieu she was thrown into,” he said in a written statement.
“Cherry Kingsley was a noble warrior, a proud mother and a brave soul,” Lt.-Gen. Dallaire wrote. “Let us cherish her memory with the respect and honour it so rightfully deserves.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Jan. 2, 2022
The illustrious list of people who admired Ms. Kingsley included Canadian senators, political leaders, a decorated lieutenant-general and people around the world moved by her passionate work on behalf of Indigenous and sexually exploited children and youth.
But no amount of love and support was enough whenever those ghosts came for her.
“Sometimes people have the impression there was a transformation, like a cloak, and I just took it off. ‘You’ve overcome so much,’ ” Ms. Kingsley said in the 2002 film Recognizing the Person, which documented her journey from a violent childhood to international renown as a brilliant and charismatic young leader changing thinking and attitudes around the sexual exploitation of children.
“I don’t know if I overcame any of it, to be honest. I think I live with it every single day. There is no destination that you get to when you’re healed and that’s it. It’s like this constant path you’re on.”
That path ended in the palliative-care ward of a Vancouver Island hospital on Nov. 30, where Ms. Kingsley died of a post-COVID-19 respiratory infection at the age of 52. She spent her final month in hospital surrounded by friends from the Nanaimo, B.C., women’s shelter where she had been living after a decade marked by poverty and addiction.
“There is this belief that you have to have your hurts and harms fixed and healed before you can go out and do this work,” says Megan Lewis, who met Ms. Kingsley in the mid-1990s when both were emerging as powerful young voices on behalf of sexually exploited youth. “But Cherry was absolutely an example of someone who fought for other people while continuing to fight the same hurts in herself.”
Ms. Kingsley was called upon many times during her years in the spotlight to tell the haunting story of her escape, along with her younger sister, from a violent stepfather when she was 11. The children walked along the railway tracks for three days from Calgary to Cochrane before being picked up by authorities and put into foster care.
But foster care only launched a new painful chapter, as Ms. Kingsley was placed in 20 foster homes over the next eight years. In the midst of such upheaval, she fled to Vancouver at age 14 with an older couple who she thought were friends – until they turned her out to work the streets as a condition of staying with them.
By the time she returned to Calgary in 1988, she had been trafficked in British Columbia and California and was using street drugs to try to anesthetize herself from the pain. A police officer introduced her to a young law graduate, Kim Pate, who connected Ms. Kingsley to the Alberta Youth in Care Network and hired her for a new peer leadership project for youth with experiences in custody and foster care.
“Cherry’s work that summer started opening up opportunities for her in Canada and globally. She was an amazing communicator and thinker. She was brilliant at putting a human face on the big issues,” recalls Ms. Pate, who went on to a career leading the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies before being appointed to the Senate in 2016.
Former senator Landon Pearson – one of many lifelong fans who helped bring Ms. Kingsley’s message to larger and larger audiences – vividly remembers her speaking at the 1996 World Congress on Commercial Exploitation of Children in Stockholm. Ms. Kingsley’s son Dakota, her only child, was four years old at the time.
“She was part of a panel with various religious groups represented, and they went down the line saying they cherished children, they were committed to fighting against sexual exploitation, and so on. Cherry was fourth or fifth in line and when it came her turn, said, ‘Well, no, they don’t.’ I saw her speak truth to power.”
Surprised to learn that only three of 1,300 delegates at the Stockholm congress had been sexually exploited youths themselves, Ms. Kingsley and Ms. Pearson returned to Canada committed to organizing an event that would do things differently.
They worked with Peers Victoria to put on Out From the Shadows, a week-long symposium in Victoria that brought 60 young people from throughout the Americas to share their lived expertise on sexual exploitation while policy makers and politicians listened.
That “child prostitutes” were in fact sexually exploited children was an uncommon idea in those years.
“Cherry really started to be able to articulate what was wrong with the concept of children being sexually available,” says Ms. Pate, whose close relationship with Ms. Kingsley and her son included times when both lived with Ms. Pate and her family. “Cherry became more and more clear, and Landon provided more international opportunities.”
In 2000, Ms. Kingsley and Melanie Mark spent months together on the road gathering the stories of sexually exploited Indigenous youth across Canada for the report Sacred Lives. The unforgettable trip was equal parts exhilarating and traumatizing as the young women documented one horrifying story of abuse after another, recalls Ms. Mark, now B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport.
“I was 25 at the time, and had the honour to be Cherry’s handler,” Ms. Mark says. “She called me her medicine. I was in Japan with her, Ottawa, all across Canada – and everywhere, she lit up the room and always left people in tears.”
That same year, Ms. Kingsley received the Governor-General’s Award after being nominated by then-MP Ethel Blondin-Andrew, who – like so many others influenced by Ms. Kingsley – felt a personal bond with her.
Victoria filmmaker Peter Campbell says he read news of that award and instantly knew he’d just seen the happy ending to his next project. The resulting 2002 documentary, Recognizing the Person, captures Ms. Kingsley’s sharp insights, quick wit but also pain as she and the film crew undertake an epic cross-Canada road trip to reconnect Ms. Kingsley with the people and places of her past.
Mr. Campbell plans to use some of that footage for a video tribute to Ms. Kingsley for her funeral at Alkali Lake next spring on her home Secwepemc First Nation territory.
But even while she dazzled international audiences, Ms. Kingsley continued to struggle in private. “She was expected to be all together, but without the day-to-day supports she needed for that,” Ms. Pate says.
No one recognized that more than Ms. Kingsley.
“Everyone thinks when you quit drugs, life is great, right? Like drugs are the problem,” Ms. Kingsley said in 2005. “All of a sudden I quit drugs, I’m straight now and my life still sucks – only now I’m really grimly aware of it.”
Anyone who has seen what it takes to support friends and family with mental-health problems knows how hard that work is, Ms. Pearson says. “There was no one to do that for Cherry. I don’t know if there was anything that any of us could have done that would have replaced what she didn’t have in the first place.”
Disowned by her mother after going into foster care, Ms. Kingsley’s only family connection for many years was her sister Terry-Lynn Murray, who had run away with her down the railway tracks when they were children. But in 2002, their mother’s sister, Marcelle Hines, spotted a Reader’s Digest article on Kingsley’s Governor-General Award and reached out to connect Ms. Kingsley to more of her family.
Ms. Kingsley leaves her son Dakota, 29, as well as Ms. Murray and two younger half-brothers, Eric and Cyrus Nelson, and older half-sister Leanne Lewis. Ms. Lewis was put up for adoption as a newborn and didn’t find Ms. Kingsley and the rest of her birth family until 10 years ago, when Ms. Hines went looking for her.
Ms. Kingsley’s life had taken a hard turn for the worse by the time the sisters met, Ms. Lewis says, adding that they had few chances for time together.
“But at least she spent her last month in hospital. I’m grateful that it gave her that clarity at the end,” says Ms. Lewis, who is raising funds for Ms. Kingsley’s tombstone and funeral service through GoFundMe. “She wasn’t on street drugs – she didn’t overdose. Her son was able to visit her that month. Her brain was clear.”
The difficult circumstances of Ms. Kingsley’s last years have many friends wondering whether there was more they could have done.
“Lots of folks fell away,” notes Ms. Pate, whose last contact with Ms. Kingsley was in the summer. “I remember her once saying, ‘I’m getting older – I’m no longer the exceptional youth who has been in care.’ But she also didn’t like to let us know when she wasn’t doing well.”
Ms. Pearson now questions whether her efforts to help Ms. Kingsley publicly share her story helped or harmed her.
“I felt there was so much good in her – I wanted to help her try to be what she could be,” she says. “But was it the wrong thing to help her get that profile? On the other hand, she really did change things. Out of her story, there’s something good – even though it’s not for Cherry.”
Another high-profile supporter, retired lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, remembered Ms. Kingsley as an extraordinary young woman, but “already so martyred by the cultural displacement from her First Nation roots, and abused by an apathetic social milieu she was thrown into,” he said in a written statement.
“Cherry Kingsley was a noble warrior, a proud mother and a brave soul,” Lt.-Gen. Dallaire wrote. “Let us cherish her memory with the respect and honour it so rightfully deserves.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Jan. 2, 2022
x
Ken Lyotier: Feb. 7, 1947 - Nov. 27, 2021
Ken Lyotier was living down and out in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when the revelation came to him that would lay the foundation for the next four decades of his life.
It was the late 1970s, and Mr. Lyotier was one of many broken men living in a neighbourhood marked by poverty and hardship. A friend had taken him for his first soup-kitchen visit, which he recalled years later in a CBC Ideas episode as a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder experience of eating soup out of repurposed plastic margarine containers amid the poorest people he had ever encountered.
“It was a very uncomfortable experience to be that close,” Mr. Lyotier remembered in the 2005 episode. “But as I was chewing on a crust of bread, I started to get high. It was like a psychedelic experience. Maybe for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a place where I belonged.
“God, I was so hungry for that. It’s probably what real communion is like – here we all were, eating together, just people being people.”
That sense of community would drive so much of what Mr. Lyotier went on to accomplish. His efforts over the next decades would win him international recognition, and lead change on social and environmental fronts that few people were contemplating until Mr. Lyotier got the conversation going.
“I don’t think you could look back at any of the current day’s zero-waste policies without finding the influence of Ken,” public policy strategist Michael Magee says. “Ken was the original ‘green jobs’ guy.”
And it all began with dumpster-diving.
Kenneth Hugh Lyotier was born Feb. 7, 1947. He grew up in North Vancouver with brothers John, Keith and cousin Marcia Craig, who moved in with the family after her parents died. Until developing Crohn’s disease at 17, Mr. Lyotier was on track for a typical life trajectory of university, a decent job, a family.
But the chronic pain and intestinal agony that are hallmarks of Crohn’s changed everything.
“I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and was really sick for a lot of years,” Mr. Lyotier said in the Ideas episode. “I also learned there were things that could distract me from the pain: alcohol and drugs.”
Mr. Lyotier worked when he could during those years, but his pain – and then his addictions – complicated things. He was soon living an impoverished life on income assistance in the Downtown Eastside, and took up dumpster-diving to fill time and add to his sparse income.
“It’s amazing how much stuff people throw away,” Mr. Lyotier noted in his 2005 interview. “We’re an incredibly addictive society all the way round. We squander so much, consume so much. It’s like this never-ending hole that we’re trying to fill up, and it’s not all that different than the hole in somebody’s arm.”
It was the late 1970s, and Mr. Lyotier was one of many broken men living in a neighbourhood marked by poverty and hardship. A friend had taken him for his first soup-kitchen visit, which he recalled years later in a CBC Ideas episode as a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder experience of eating soup out of repurposed plastic margarine containers amid the poorest people he had ever encountered.
“It was a very uncomfortable experience to be that close,” Mr. Lyotier remembered in the 2005 episode. “But as I was chewing on a crust of bread, I started to get high. It was like a psychedelic experience. Maybe for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a place where I belonged.
“God, I was so hungry for that. It’s probably what real communion is like – here we all were, eating together, just people being people.”
That sense of community would drive so much of what Mr. Lyotier went on to accomplish. His efforts over the next decades would win him international recognition, and lead change on social and environmental fronts that few people were contemplating until Mr. Lyotier got the conversation going.
“I don’t think you could look back at any of the current day’s zero-waste policies without finding the influence of Ken,” public policy strategist Michael Magee says. “Ken was the original ‘green jobs’ guy.”
And it all began with dumpster-diving.
Kenneth Hugh Lyotier was born Feb. 7, 1947. He grew up in North Vancouver with brothers John, Keith and cousin Marcia Craig, who moved in with the family after her parents died. Until developing Crohn’s disease at 17, Mr. Lyotier was on track for a typical life trajectory of university, a decent job, a family.
But the chronic pain and intestinal agony that are hallmarks of Crohn’s changed everything.
“I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and was really sick for a lot of years,” Mr. Lyotier said in the Ideas episode. “I also learned there were things that could distract me from the pain: alcohol and drugs.”
Mr. Lyotier worked when he could during those years, but his pain – and then his addictions – complicated things. He was soon living an impoverished life on income assistance in the Downtown Eastside, and took up dumpster-diving to fill time and add to his sparse income.
“It’s amazing how much stuff people throw away,” Mr. Lyotier noted in his 2005 interview. “We’re an incredibly addictive society all the way round. We squander so much, consume so much. It’s like this never-ending hole that we’re trying to fill up, and it’s not all that different than the hole in somebody’s arm.”
Mr. Lyotier was almost 40 before he agreed to undergo surgery to remove part of his damaged intestine. The surgery dramatically reduced his chronic pain. For the first time in his adult life, he saw a life beyond daily survival.
He sobered up. He found stable housing. His soup-kitchen revelation was years behind him at that point, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He didn’t yet know where it was leading him, but knew it would involve the people of the Downtown Eastside.
There was much shame to dumpster-diving back then for the unemployed and injured resource industry workers who accounted for much of that neighbourhood’s population. But Mr. Lyotier saw the work ethic that drove these “binners.”
He believed that organizing them could bring more respect to the work, and perhaps convince the province to expand the bottle-deposit system to more types of beverage containers. As a binner himself, he dreamed of an alternative to the humiliating daily experience of trying to get judgmental store owners to accept binners’ bottles and cans for refund.
But his binner colleagues were reluctant to give up time on their “trap lines” to attend a meeting. Long-time friend Patsy George recalls encouraging Mr. Lyotier to reach out to government or a local church for a small grant to test his theory.
So he did. He got $1,500 to organize a one-day bottle depot in the fall of 1991 at Vancouver’s Victory Square. Binners were invited to pile their carts with beverage containers that at the time weren’t refundable and take them to the square, where they were paid $10 a load.
The mountain of containers got the attention of media and government alike (though most of the $1,500 went toward hiring a truck to take it all away). The visuals of all those drink containers destined for the landfill planted the seed for the universal beverage deposit system that British Columbia put in place seven years later.
“It was Ken helping to push the province to put deposits on all these items, because binners could then go and source this ‘gold’ in garbage cans,” says Sean Condon, managing director of the Vancity Community Foundation project 312 Main, who first met Mr. Lyotier as a journalist. “How many tonnes of waste have been diverted from the landfill because of Ken’s work?”
Mr. Lyotier’s signature achievement was his social enterprise United We Can, which opened in 1995 in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
Finally, binners had a place to call their own. They found economic opportunity and community in the welcoming space. There were jobs and training for those able to work, no daily limit on how many containers they could bring in, and nobody judging them.
That enterprise has now grown into a diverse recycling business run out of a 2,300-square-metre building that is three times the size of the original site. It processes an average 60,000 containers a day, employs 120 people, and refunds $2-million a year in deposits to about 700 binners.
“What Ken did with the binners was remarkable,” former MP Libby Davies says. “He realized something so important that beats back on that terrible stigma that says that if you’re poor, you must be lazy and stupid. Ken knew that there was this entrepreneurial spirit in the Downtown Eastside, a great work ethic.”
Mr. Lyotier followed up United We Can with the Binners Project in 2016, continuing his efforts to bring respect and dignity to the work. That year, binners were hired as “zero-waste ambassadors” for Vancouver’s annual Pacific National Exhibition.
“He was a bridge builder. I don’t know very many people who could navigate that many levels of bureaucracy,” says Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, a friend of Mr. Lyotier’s since meeting him in the early 1990s when she was a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside.
Mr. Lyotier’s hard work didn’t go unrecognized in his lifetime. He received Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal in 2005, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. The City of Vancouver gave him a Civic Merit award. He was a torchbearer ahead of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games. (And brought the torch into United We Can the next day so binners could get their photos taken with it.)
He travelled with the City of Vancouver contingent to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. He and University of Victoria geographer and waste-picker researcher Jutta Gutberlet went to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2008 for the Waste and Citizenship Festival. Royal Roads University professor Ann Dale enlisted him as a co-researcher for projects on social capital and agency. The University of British Columbia gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2011.
But Mr. Lyotier’s most powerful impact was on the lives of the binners and inner-city residents whom he tirelessly championed.
“While Ken’s list of life accomplishments will be cherished and celebrated in many circles, I will simply reflect for now on his personal impact on my life,” friend and neighbour Mikeal Frazer wrote. “Ken really showed me that it is easy to love, and that it is also all too easy for us to forget that love when we are judging others.”
Mr. Lyotier and his brother John lost touch with each other for many years, but reconnected 20 years ago. “I remember thinking here’s my little brother, sober and doing wonderful things,” John says. “I’ve been packing up his possessions this week, and one thing I’ve learned doing that is that he was so loved.” (His other brother, Keith, died in 2007.)
Mr. Lyotier always wanted people to understand that binning was a real job. The $170,000 in savings he had accumulated when he received his cancer diagnosis in September proves his point. “All from bottles and cans!” marvels United We Can board member and former Tourism Vancouver head Geoffrey Howes.
Those savings have launched a new Vancity Community Foundation fund in Lyotier’s name to continue his work in the Downtown Eastside. “It’s classic Ken to do that,” says Mr. Howes, one of eight friends who Mr. Lyotier hand-picked to administer the fund.
The group got in one meeting with Mr. Lyotier before his medically assisted death on Nov. 27. The meeting turned into a living wake as each person shared memories with the soft-spoken binner and community organizer.
“What drives the advisory group in the best of ways is that we’re really determined to create a legacy in Ken’s name,” Mr. Howes says. “He needs to be known and remembered for what he did.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 20, 2021
He sobered up. He found stable housing. His soup-kitchen revelation was years behind him at that point, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He didn’t yet know where it was leading him, but knew it would involve the people of the Downtown Eastside.
There was much shame to dumpster-diving back then for the unemployed and injured resource industry workers who accounted for much of that neighbourhood’s population. But Mr. Lyotier saw the work ethic that drove these “binners.”
He believed that organizing them could bring more respect to the work, and perhaps convince the province to expand the bottle-deposit system to more types of beverage containers. As a binner himself, he dreamed of an alternative to the humiliating daily experience of trying to get judgmental store owners to accept binners’ bottles and cans for refund.
But his binner colleagues were reluctant to give up time on their “trap lines” to attend a meeting. Long-time friend Patsy George recalls encouraging Mr. Lyotier to reach out to government or a local church for a small grant to test his theory.
So he did. He got $1,500 to organize a one-day bottle depot in the fall of 1991 at Vancouver’s Victory Square. Binners were invited to pile their carts with beverage containers that at the time weren’t refundable and take them to the square, where they were paid $10 a load.
The mountain of containers got the attention of media and government alike (though most of the $1,500 went toward hiring a truck to take it all away). The visuals of all those drink containers destined for the landfill planted the seed for the universal beverage deposit system that British Columbia put in place seven years later.
“It was Ken helping to push the province to put deposits on all these items, because binners could then go and source this ‘gold’ in garbage cans,” says Sean Condon, managing director of the Vancity Community Foundation project 312 Main, who first met Mr. Lyotier as a journalist. “How many tonnes of waste have been diverted from the landfill because of Ken’s work?”
Mr. Lyotier’s signature achievement was his social enterprise United We Can, which opened in 1995 in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
Finally, binners had a place to call their own. They found economic opportunity and community in the welcoming space. There were jobs and training for those able to work, no daily limit on how many containers they could bring in, and nobody judging them.
That enterprise has now grown into a diverse recycling business run out of a 2,300-square-metre building that is three times the size of the original site. It processes an average 60,000 containers a day, employs 120 people, and refunds $2-million a year in deposits to about 700 binners.
“What Ken did with the binners was remarkable,” former MP Libby Davies says. “He realized something so important that beats back on that terrible stigma that says that if you’re poor, you must be lazy and stupid. Ken knew that there was this entrepreneurial spirit in the Downtown Eastside, a great work ethic.”
Mr. Lyotier followed up United We Can with the Binners Project in 2016, continuing his efforts to bring respect and dignity to the work. That year, binners were hired as “zero-waste ambassadors” for Vancouver’s annual Pacific National Exhibition.
“He was a bridge builder. I don’t know very many people who could navigate that many levels of bureaucracy,” says Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, a friend of Mr. Lyotier’s since meeting him in the early 1990s when she was a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside.
Mr. Lyotier’s hard work didn’t go unrecognized in his lifetime. He received Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal in 2005, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. The City of Vancouver gave him a Civic Merit award. He was a torchbearer ahead of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games. (And brought the torch into United We Can the next day so binners could get their photos taken with it.)
He travelled with the City of Vancouver contingent to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. He and University of Victoria geographer and waste-picker researcher Jutta Gutberlet went to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2008 for the Waste and Citizenship Festival. Royal Roads University professor Ann Dale enlisted him as a co-researcher for projects on social capital and agency. The University of British Columbia gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2011.
But Mr. Lyotier’s most powerful impact was on the lives of the binners and inner-city residents whom he tirelessly championed.
“While Ken’s list of life accomplishments will be cherished and celebrated in many circles, I will simply reflect for now on his personal impact on my life,” friend and neighbour Mikeal Frazer wrote. “Ken really showed me that it is easy to love, and that it is also all too easy for us to forget that love when we are judging others.”
Mr. Lyotier and his brother John lost touch with each other for many years, but reconnected 20 years ago. “I remember thinking here’s my little brother, sober and doing wonderful things,” John says. “I’ve been packing up his possessions this week, and one thing I’ve learned doing that is that he was so loved.” (His other brother, Keith, died in 2007.)
Mr. Lyotier always wanted people to understand that binning was a real job. The $170,000 in savings he had accumulated when he received his cancer diagnosis in September proves his point. “All from bottles and cans!” marvels United We Can board member and former Tourism Vancouver head Geoffrey Howes.
Those savings have launched a new Vancity Community Foundation fund in Lyotier’s name to continue his work in the Downtown Eastside. “It’s classic Ken to do that,” says Mr. Howes, one of eight friends who Mr. Lyotier hand-picked to administer the fund.
The group got in one meeting with Mr. Lyotier before his medically assisted death on Nov. 27. The meeting turned into a living wake as each person shared memories with the soft-spoken binner and community organizer.
“What drives the advisory group in the best of ways is that we’re really determined to create a legacy in Ken’s name,” Mr. Howes says. “He needs to be known and remembered for what he did.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 20, 2021
Bill Nelems: April 26, 1939 - March 31, 2017
Bill Nelems's daughter Sarah was joking with him recently about planning his final exit on his 100th birthday, in another 22 years. They agreed that going out like Tolkien's hobbit Bilbo Baggins wouldn't be so bad: setting sail from Middle Earth toward whatever new adventure awaited.
Things didn't turn out that way. But by all accounts, Dr.
Nelems would have been content that his sudden death from cardiac failure on
March 31 took place in his family's beloved cabin at Coldstream, B.C., to which
he regularly cycled from his home in Kelowna, 80 kilometres away. A man of many
enthusiasms, he'd recently developed a passion for bird-watching, and loved the
wild and marshy property.
"The thing I loved about my dad was that he was always
reinventing himself," recalls Sarah Nelems, the oldest of Dr. Nelems's
four daughters. "He had so many interests, from his athletic endeavours to
his charity in Zambia to his five grandchildren, whom he was completely devoted
to. He was so much larger than life, but what made him real was the presence he
had in so many people's lives."
Dr. Nelems will be remembered by history as a renowned
thoracic surgeon who was part of the Toronto General Hospital transplant team
that performed the world's first successful lung transplant, in 1983. But that
accomplishment was just one on a very long list, say those who knew him.
Philanthropist, athlete, mentor and citizen of the world, Dr. Nelems was
happily preparing for a new career as an end-of-life counsellor when his own
life ended shortly before his 78th birthday. "The world feels a lot less
interesting without him in it," says his daughter.
Bill Nelems was born April 26, 1939, in Springs, South
Africa, the second-born child of British Columbia couple Harry and Dory Nelems.
Harry was a young mining engineer who had found work in Johannesburg at the
start of the Depression. He returned to the Fraser Valley in the mid-1930s,
just long enough to marry Dory and move her back to South Africa.
Dr. Nelems and his older sister, Beverley Barron, also a doctor,
spent much of their childhood in the care of nannies and travelling back and
forth to boarding school. Dr. Barron remembers the family's return to Canada in
1956 as one of the first times in her life that she and her brother had lived
under the same roof.
The family settled in Toronto. Bill, 17 years old at the
time, initially followed in his father's footsteps and studied at the
University of Toronto to be a mining engineer. That career choice didn't last
long, but did help pay his way through medical school after he had an epiphany
soon after graduating as an engineer in 1962 and realized he'd rather be a
doctor, Dr. Barron says. He finished his medical studies in 1966.
"Those first years in Toronto weren't that happy for
any of us," Dr. Barron recalls. "My father hated his new job. My
mother was very unhappy. I couldn't get into medical school because Canada
wouldn't accept my credentials from South Africa. Bill couldn't get into
university because they had an extra year of high school in Ontario, Grade 13.
When he was finally able to start at the University of Toronto, I think he
found his companionship among the ex-pats who played on the university's rugby
team."
And what a team it was. Team captain in 1960 and 1961, Dr.
Nelems saw two undefeated seasons during his five years with the team. When the
University of Toronto inducted the 1959-63 Men's Rugby Team into its Sports
Hall of Fame last year, Dr. Nelems and his former teammates regaled the
audience with a tune they once sang when headed for the pub after practice.
Dr. Nelems and his first wife, Wendy Nelems (née Brown),
moved west in the early 1980s, settling in Vancouver and later Kelowna with
their three school-age daughters, Sarah, Martha and Rebeccah. He was much in
demand for the next 30 years, during which time he worked at the University of
British Columbia's faculty of medicine, established a new cancer centre in
Kelowna and developed a tele-consultation program to improve access for
patients outside of the urban core. He and his first wife divorced in 1990 and
Dr. Nelems went on to marry Mary Ellen McNaughton; they had a daughter, Rachel.
He leaves his wife; four daughters; sister; Bev York, for
whom he was a guardian; grandchildren, Alexander, Kate, Lucy, Willem, Evy;
Bev's children, Amanda and Tess; and his ex-wife.
Dr. Nelems's curiosity and compassion led him into many side
projects. His sister recalls him helping a group of Sudbury miners get
compensation and surgery for lung cancers resulting from workplace exposure to
radiation. While at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, he led a project
involving 10,000 British Columbia miners that piloted the use of a blood test
to detect early changes related to lung cancer, the first mass screening of its
kind.
A trip to Zambia in 2006 took him back to Africa for the
first time in decades, and ignited a new passion. While there, he met up with
an old University of Toronto classmate, Chifumbe Chintu, who had become a
renowned pediatrician there. Dr. Chintu introduced him to the assistant dean at
the University of Zambia's Faculty of Medicine, who was deeply concerned at the
dismal medical outcomes in Zambia's impoverished Western Province. (In a twist
of fate, Dr. Chintu died not much more than a month after Dr. Nelems.)
That meeting got Dr. Nelems enthused with the idea of
bringing Canadian doctors and nurses to Africa to mentor and support their
Zambian peers. The Okanagan-Zambia Health Initiative (OkaZHI) was born in 2009,
and continues to bring medical professionals and nursing students into Zambia
to teach, mentor and learn.
"What was so great about Bill was that he not only
genuinely saw nurses as the equals of doctors, but he had that same approach in
his Zambia work," says Muriel Kranabetter, a former OkaZHI board chair and
a UBC nursing instructor who leads student groups to Zambia. "We were
never the Canadians who knew all, coming to Zambia to tell people what to do.
We were equals. That was the essential piece that made the initiative so
effective."
Dr. Nelems blogged about Africa being "in his
blood," and how he felt driven to help the continent of his birth.
"Simply stated, I have been blessed beyond reason by the education, the
good fortune and the career opportunities that I have enjoyed," he wrote
on the OkaZHI website.
"I have lived a charmed life. It is time for me to give
back a little of what was so abundantly gifted to me."
To raise funds and public awareness for the Zambia work, Dr.
Nelems joined the 2010 Tour d'Afrique annual cycling event for the final
4,500-kilometre leg from Lilongwe, Malawi, to Cape Town, South Africa. He
marked his 71st birthday that year by riding 204 kilometres in a single day.
His blog posts from that period are filled with enthusiastic
accounts of his daily adventures, like the time he cycled through a herd of
angry water buffalo blocking the road by drawing on remembered advice from back
in B.C. to "look big" if a grizzly bear attacks. Another day, he
performed impromptu plastic surgery on a fellow cyclist who sustained serious
facial injuries after colliding with another cyclist.
UBC nursing instructor Jessica Barker helped Dr. Nelems
launch his Zambian non-profit, and cycled with him on the Tour d'Afrique. She
was in Zambia with a group of student nurses when Dr. Nelems died, and said his
Zambian friends and co-workers were deeply saddened by the news. "I had
the pleasure of working with him as a surgeon, too. He was so good with his
patients," Ms. Barker recalls. "He pulled out stories from people,
and connected with them through those stories."
Dr. Nelems never lost the drive to tackle new challenges and
test his capabilities, notes his daughter Sarah. At the time of his death, he
was working at a pain management clinic in Kelowna, with plans to add another
medical specialty to his list of accomplishments and become the oldest Canadian
ever to write a Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada exam.
"There were a lot of milestones in Dad's life,"
Ms. Nelems says. "We hoped for many more, of course, but we are so
grateful for a life well lived."
Arthur Manuel: Sept. 3, 1951 - Jan. 11, 2017
Arthur Manuel was born into Indigenous activism. Working with the seeds his father, George, first sowed in the 1970s in the early days of Canada's Indigenous rights movement, the tireless B.C. aboriginal leader was on the front lines of the international fight for aboriginal title and self-determination right up until he drew his last breath.
"Art went into hospital on Jan. 5 and went from talking about organizing his next meeting to being on a respirator," said his spouse, Nicole Schabus, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. "He was sending people messages about the February meeting on the very day he went into the intensive care unit. He had been in North Dakota at Standing Rock just a couple weeks before that. He didn't know how sick he was."
Those who have worked alongside Mr. Manuel during a lifetime of Indigenous activism were in awe of his commitment, strategic thinking and persistence, says Indigenous policy analyst and long-time friend Russ Diabo. "Like his father, he definitely wasn't in it for the money," Mr. Diabo says. "The Manuel family is the closest thing we have in Canada to the Mandela family in terms of what they have sacrificed and contributed to First Nations rights."
Mr. Manuel died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 11, at the age of 65. His shattered family and friends around the world say the Secwepemc Territory leader is irreplaceable. Ms. Schabus says his unexpected death galvanized his many supporters to carry on his legacy of activism. The Vienna-born Ms. Schabus first met Mr. Manuel in Geneva, Switzerland, in the late 1990s, when Mr. Manuel took his concerns with the Canadian treaty process to the United Nations to make the case that the process contravened UN principles regarding self-determination.
Community organizing was such a big topic of conversation at Mr. Manuel's funeral on Sunday in Kamloops that one visitor noted to Ms. Schabus later that the service felt more like an educational opportunity than a funeral, especially with so many of the country's highest-profile rights activists in attendance. (Mr. Diabo says the service was a powerful call to action, "more like a symposium.")
Arthur Manuel was born Sept. 3, 1951 to Marceline (née Paul) of the Ktunaxa Nation and Grand Chief George Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation. He grew up on the Neskonlith reserve in the B.C. Interior, and went on to be educated at residential schools not because the government ordered him to, but because his impoverished father told his son he'd have to pick between residential school or a foster home. "[Arthur] didn't have an easy life as a child," Ms. Schabus says.
Mr. Manuel was at residential school when he first started organizing, to protest the terrible food. By his 20s, he was president of the national Native Youth Association. Over the years he went on to be a four-term elected chief of the Neskonlith Reserve, six-year chair of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, spokesperson for the Interior Alliance, and co-chair of the Assembly of First Nations' Delgamuukw Implementation Strategic Committee.
He continued as a spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade until his death, and was a director with the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples. He was a popular interview subject in the Indigenous media; numerous video interviews can be found online of the unassuming and soft-spoken Mr. Manuel arguing passionately for Indigenous self-determination and title.
Mr. Manuel's father was president of the fledgling National Indian Brotherhood in the early 1970s – the foundation for what ultimately became the Assembly of First Nations – and of the World Council of Indigenous People. Arthur followed his father into Indigenous activism from a young age and raised his own five children to do the same.
His twin daughters, Mayuk and Kanahus, have both served jail time for land-use protests at the Sun Peaks Resort, near Kamloops, in 2000 and 2001, and they continue to be involved in actions related to land use and resource management in their nation's traditional territory. Arthur's sister Doreen Manuel is a filmmaker who teaches and co-ordinates the Indigenous Independent Digital Filmmaking program at Capilano University.
Mr. Manuel's family first attracted media attention in B.C. in the mid-nineties, when he and his then-wife, Beverly Manuel, owned a gas station and store on the Neskonlith Reserve. They successfully fought the federal government's plan to create a complicated "coloured tag" system for cigarette sales, an attempt by Ottawa to combat cigarette smuggling by sorting buyers by race.
But it was his family's long protest against Sun Peaks Resort that brought him the most headlines. Angered by the ski resort's expansion plans and water-main construction on Neskonlith territory, Mr. Manuel and his supporters organized road blocks and protest camps for more than a year around the resort, 56 kilometres northeast of Kamloops. The case was in and out of B.C. Supreme Court for many years after that.
The foundation of Mr. Manuel's activism was fighting for Indigenous people's rights to acquire and control traditional lands and the resources they hold.
He rejected the modern-day style of treaty negotiation, believing that it was more likely to lead to municipal-style governments under federal and provincial control rather than free Indigenous nations controlling their own lands. Canadian law recognizes the inalienable right of Indigenous people to their land, and Mr. Manuel pushed back hard against a B.C. government treaty strategy that envisioned First Nations agreeing to give up those rights in exchange for getting a treaty.
"It was the rise of the B.C. treaty process and the push to terminate Aboriginal title throughout British Columbia in the early nineties that drew Arthur into the struggle in a way that he would never turn back from," wrote Dawn Morrison, chair of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Security for the B.C. Food Systems Network, in Mr. Manuel's memorial booklet.
Mr. Manuel made the point in all his public presentations that as long as Indigenous people in Canada control just 0.2 per cent of the land base, aboriginal poverty will never be addressed.
"Self-determination is the international remedy for colonialization," he told CBC Radio in an interview about his 2015 book Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call. "The big issue is to deal with this 0.2 per cent so we can become more self-sufficient in our own territories. The land is big. There's no reason why Indigenous people should be totally impoverished generation after generation after generation when the land is that large."
Mr. Manuel co-authored the book with his lifelong friend Ron Derrickson, a Kelowna developer and six-time elected chief of the Westbank First Nation who is known for being one of the wealthiest Indigenous people in the country. (Mr. Derrickson funded much of Mr. Manuel's international travel, and recently described his friend as "the most intelligent person I've ever known.") The book won the 2016 Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Book Prize. The pair's second book, Settling Canada, is expected to be released in April.
In addition to his writing, Mr. Manuel typically worked long into the night on organizing. "We all don't have his endless energy," Ms. Schabus says. "I lived with him. I saw that he was constantly working. But he was also a good dad and a good granddad. He was a good sle7e, which is Grandpa in his language. He used to come home from a meeting saying he didn't want his grandkids to have to experience the same struggle."
The Manuel family's principled activism came at a price. Ms. Schabus recalls nights after the Sun Peaks protest when she and Mr. Manuel struggled to comfort his four-month-old grandson after his daughter Kanahus was jailed for four months for her part in the protest and wasn't allowed to take the baby with her. The family was vilified as trouble-makers in some media accounts, and in the late nineties, Mr. Manuel often found himself on the wrong side of other Indigenous leaders who supported the proposed B.C. treaty process.
For much of the past 15 years, Mr. Manuel's activism focused increasingly on the international community. In 2009, he returned to Geneva to petition the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to review the B.C. treaty process. In 2003, he sided with the U.S. lumber industry in front of the World Trade Organization to successfully argue that logging on traditional aboriginal territory constituted a form of trade subsidy because the real owners of the land weren't being compensated. Frustrated with his inability to sway the thinking of Canada's federal and provincial governments, he opted to ignore them instead.
"Going to Ottawa is a waste of time," he told Red Rising Magazine in an interview published last summer. "You have to quit crying on the shoulder of the guy who stole the land. … Take lawful action, but back it up by going all the way to Geneva."
But even while on the world stage, he remained committed to regional activism, according to those who knew him. The February meeting he was organizing at the time of his death was to plan the next steps for stopping the expansion of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs 1,150 kilometres between Strathcona County (near Edmonton), Alta., and a marine terminal in Burnaby, B.C.
"He gave us the map," Ms. Schabus says of her late spouse's recent work. "We've just got to keep pulling the pieces together. My world is shaken, but at the same time I've learned so much from these years with him. We must keep it going."
In the hours after his death, friend and fellow activist Naomi Klein tweeted: "Arthur Manuel had a beautiful and transformational vision for the world we need. But he died fighting in the world we have. Heartbroken."
Mr. Manuel leaves behind Ms. Schabus; sisters Emaline, Martha, Doreen and Ida; brothers George, Richard and Ara; children, Kanahus, Mayuk, Ska7cis and Snutetkwe; and nine grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Neskie Manuel, who died in 2011.
"Art went into hospital on Jan. 5 and went from talking about organizing his next meeting to being on a respirator," said his spouse, Nicole Schabus, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. "He was sending people messages about the February meeting on the very day he went into the intensive care unit. He had been in North Dakota at Standing Rock just a couple weeks before that. He didn't know how sick he was."
Those who have worked alongside Mr. Manuel during a lifetime of Indigenous activism were in awe of his commitment, strategic thinking and persistence, says Indigenous policy analyst and long-time friend Russ Diabo. "Like his father, he definitely wasn't in it for the money," Mr. Diabo says. "The Manuel family is the closest thing we have in Canada to the Mandela family in terms of what they have sacrificed and contributed to First Nations rights."
Mr. Manuel died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 11, at the age of 65. His shattered family and friends around the world say the Secwepemc Territory leader is irreplaceable. Ms. Schabus says his unexpected death galvanized his many supporters to carry on his legacy of activism. The Vienna-born Ms. Schabus first met Mr. Manuel in Geneva, Switzerland, in the late 1990s, when Mr. Manuel took his concerns with the Canadian treaty process to the United Nations to make the case that the process contravened UN principles regarding self-determination.
Community organizing was such a big topic of conversation at Mr. Manuel's funeral on Sunday in Kamloops that one visitor noted to Ms. Schabus later that the service felt more like an educational opportunity than a funeral, especially with so many of the country's highest-profile rights activists in attendance. (Mr. Diabo says the service was a powerful call to action, "more like a symposium.")
Arthur Manuel was born Sept. 3, 1951 to Marceline (née Paul) of the Ktunaxa Nation and Grand Chief George Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation. He grew up on the Neskonlith reserve in the B.C. Interior, and went on to be educated at residential schools not because the government ordered him to, but because his impoverished father told his son he'd have to pick between residential school or a foster home. "[Arthur] didn't have an easy life as a child," Ms. Schabus says.
Mr. Manuel was at residential school when he first started organizing, to protest the terrible food. By his 20s, he was president of the national Native Youth Association. Over the years he went on to be a four-term elected chief of the Neskonlith Reserve, six-year chair of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, spokesperson for the Interior Alliance, and co-chair of the Assembly of First Nations' Delgamuukw Implementation Strategic Committee.
He continued as a spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade until his death, and was a director with the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples. He was a popular interview subject in the Indigenous media; numerous video interviews can be found online of the unassuming and soft-spoken Mr. Manuel arguing passionately for Indigenous self-determination and title.
Mr. Manuel's father was president of the fledgling National Indian Brotherhood in the early 1970s – the foundation for what ultimately became the Assembly of First Nations – and of the World Council of Indigenous People. Arthur followed his father into Indigenous activism from a young age and raised his own five children to do the same.
His twin daughters, Mayuk and Kanahus, have both served jail time for land-use protests at the Sun Peaks Resort, near Kamloops, in 2000 and 2001, and they continue to be involved in actions related to land use and resource management in their nation's traditional territory. Arthur's sister Doreen Manuel is a filmmaker who teaches and co-ordinates the Indigenous Independent Digital Filmmaking program at Capilano University.
Mr. Manuel's family first attracted media attention in B.C. in the mid-nineties, when he and his then-wife, Beverly Manuel, owned a gas station and store on the Neskonlith Reserve. They successfully fought the federal government's plan to create a complicated "coloured tag" system for cigarette sales, an attempt by Ottawa to combat cigarette smuggling by sorting buyers by race.
But it was his family's long protest against Sun Peaks Resort that brought him the most headlines. Angered by the ski resort's expansion plans and water-main construction on Neskonlith territory, Mr. Manuel and his supporters organized road blocks and protest camps for more than a year around the resort, 56 kilometres northeast of Kamloops. The case was in and out of B.C. Supreme Court for many years after that.
The foundation of Mr. Manuel's activism was fighting for Indigenous people's rights to acquire and control traditional lands and the resources they hold.
He rejected the modern-day style of treaty negotiation, believing that it was more likely to lead to municipal-style governments under federal and provincial control rather than free Indigenous nations controlling their own lands. Canadian law recognizes the inalienable right of Indigenous people to their land, and Mr. Manuel pushed back hard against a B.C. government treaty strategy that envisioned First Nations agreeing to give up those rights in exchange for getting a treaty.
"It was the rise of the B.C. treaty process and the push to terminate Aboriginal title throughout British Columbia in the early nineties that drew Arthur into the struggle in a way that he would never turn back from," wrote Dawn Morrison, chair of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Security for the B.C. Food Systems Network, in Mr. Manuel's memorial booklet.
Mr. Manuel made the point in all his public presentations that as long as Indigenous people in Canada control just 0.2 per cent of the land base, aboriginal poverty will never be addressed.
"Self-determination is the international remedy for colonialization," he told CBC Radio in an interview about his 2015 book Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call. "The big issue is to deal with this 0.2 per cent so we can become more self-sufficient in our own territories. The land is big. There's no reason why Indigenous people should be totally impoverished generation after generation after generation when the land is that large."
Mr. Manuel co-authored the book with his lifelong friend Ron Derrickson, a Kelowna developer and six-time elected chief of the Westbank First Nation who is known for being one of the wealthiest Indigenous people in the country. (Mr. Derrickson funded much of Mr. Manuel's international travel, and recently described his friend as "the most intelligent person I've ever known.") The book won the 2016 Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Book Prize. The pair's second book, Settling Canada, is expected to be released in April.
In addition to his writing, Mr. Manuel typically worked long into the night on organizing. "We all don't have his endless energy," Ms. Schabus says. "I lived with him. I saw that he was constantly working. But he was also a good dad and a good granddad. He was a good sle7e, which is Grandpa in his language. He used to come home from a meeting saying he didn't want his grandkids to have to experience the same struggle."
The Manuel family's principled activism came at a price. Ms. Schabus recalls nights after the Sun Peaks protest when she and Mr. Manuel struggled to comfort his four-month-old grandson after his daughter Kanahus was jailed for four months for her part in the protest and wasn't allowed to take the baby with her. The family was vilified as trouble-makers in some media accounts, and in the late nineties, Mr. Manuel often found himself on the wrong side of other Indigenous leaders who supported the proposed B.C. treaty process.
For much of the past 15 years, Mr. Manuel's activism focused increasingly on the international community. In 2009, he returned to Geneva to petition the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to review the B.C. treaty process. In 2003, he sided with the U.S. lumber industry in front of the World Trade Organization to successfully argue that logging on traditional aboriginal territory constituted a form of trade subsidy because the real owners of the land weren't being compensated. Frustrated with his inability to sway the thinking of Canada's federal and provincial governments, he opted to ignore them instead.
"Going to Ottawa is a waste of time," he told Red Rising Magazine in an interview published last summer. "You have to quit crying on the shoulder of the guy who stole the land. … Take lawful action, but back it up by going all the way to Geneva."
But even while on the world stage, he remained committed to regional activism, according to those who knew him. The February meeting he was organizing at the time of his death was to plan the next steps for stopping the expansion of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs 1,150 kilometres between Strathcona County (near Edmonton), Alta., and a marine terminal in Burnaby, B.C.
"He gave us the map," Ms. Schabus says of her late spouse's recent work. "We've just got to keep pulling the pieces together. My world is shaken, but at the same time I've learned so much from these years with him. We must keep it going."
In the hours after his death, friend and fellow activist Naomi Klein tweeted: "Arthur Manuel had a beautiful and transformational vision for the world we need. But he died fighting in the world we have. Heartbroken."
Mr. Manuel leaves behind Ms. Schabus; sisters Emaline, Martha, Doreen and Ida; brothers George, Richard and Ara; children, Kanahus, Mayuk, Ska7cis and Snutetkwe; and nine grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Neskie Manuel, who died in 2011.
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