Our Hall of Honour
June Gilbertson 1946 – 2009
To many of her friends, my late wife June Gilbertson was an inspiration and a model of how to live a life of service. June had been born and brought up in Northern Ireland in a province that was deeply divided along sectarian lines. In her teenage years, she joined the Salvation Army in Enniskillen and sold War Cries on the streets and in the town’s pubs. Years later, and through six degrees of separation, she would meet people who had been inspired by her and had gone to the mission fields or become officers in the Salvation Army. At Queen’s University in Belfast, however, she had a crisis of faith because she was unable to reconcile her religious upbringing with the gerrymandered politics and racial bigotry manifest around her. To overcome the boredom of the repressed Sundays in Belfast, when everything – even the swings in the parks – was immobilized, she started an International Club for foreign university students. No matter what culture people had come from, she wanted them to feel included.
June had a wonderful ability to take charge and make the good life happen. I fell in love with her and we married in 1969. On a whim, she suggested that we visit her brother, who was a university student in Canada, and we bought one-way tickets to Toronto. At a party, she met another inspirational fixer and a week later I had my first dream job, working on pollution in the Great Lakes. June was the eternal matchmaker and, of course, we were invited to weddings of the couples she introduced. At one of these weddings, held at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ottawa, she found her new religious home, where she could draw inspiration from all the religions of the world.
While our children were growing up, June was trying to find her own professional identity, but needed to reconcile two divergent parental scripts, the secular script of education from her mother, the teacher, and the religious script of saving souls from her father, the preacher. Through a process of trial and error, she enrolled in the criminology department of Ottawa University and, after graduation, became a probation officer and later manager of probation and parole in Windsor, Ontario.
June would probably look upon her greatest professional triumph as the work that she did with sex offenders. People our courts have condemned as sex offenders tend to be treated as pariahs by the rest of society. But their isolation and lack of community supports encourage re-offending, setting up a cycle of arrests, court appearances, incarceration, half-way-houses and alienation. In an effort to break the cycle, she formed the Windsor-Essex Task Force on Sex Offenders with representation from all sectors of society including the police, the justice system, and the churches. Drawing on the restorative justice inspiration of native cultures, they set up regular meetings for group therapy for all sex offenders sentenced by the courts, and formed circles of support around the most dangerous offenders coming from prisons. In this way, she was able to help protect the most vulnerable members of society from predatory behaviour.
Despite the radical ideological shift brought by ex-Premier Mike Harris and his Conservative Party, June continued her secular ministry of inclusiveness and crime prevention. But the new retributive politics finally caught up with her and she retired in 2004, Then we moved to Guelph to be nearer family and friends. In retirement, June enrolled in Wilfred Laurier University to try to understand the religion of her childhood and to train as a Unitarian Universalist minister. After graduating with a Masters of Divinity, she learned that she had cancer and switched careers to hospital chaplaincy and pastoral care. Through attending at the deaths of patients and ministering to their families, she drew inspiration for the courage to face her own untimely death. June died just after her 63rd birthday which was also our 40th wedding anniversary.
Recurrent themes of the participants, in their tributes to June at the many memorials that we held in Canada, England, and Northern Ireland, were her inclusiveness and the way that she inspired people to attain their dreams.
(Michael Gilbertson, March 30, 2010)
2009 – Michelle Swenarchuk, 59: Activist
Michelle Swenarchuk was born in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, on October 30, 1948. She died of cancer at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto on February 27, 2008. She was 59. She leaves daughter Larissa Swenarchuk, brother Lauren Swenarchuk, sister Bonnie Zwack and parents Michael and Janet Swenarchuk.
Michelle Swenarchuk was a public intellectual. As executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association she fought for sustainable development in Northern Ontario’s forests. Her work and vision contributed to Canada’s most positive environmental footprints, and there is some suggestion that it was she who coined the phrase “environmental crisis.” She also led a successful intervention in the famed Harvard Mouse Case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on whether medical researchers could patent higher life forms. She participated in negotiations and consultations regarding international laws at the World Trade Organization, the Organization of Economic Development, the International Labour Organization and the North American Commission for Environmental Co-operation.
Michelle Swenarchuk was the youngest of three children born into a Ukrainian family in Lloydminster, Sask. As a child, she liked to pedal her bicycle kilometres out of town just for sheer joy and the view of an expanding sky. Her hometown, which straddles the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, had five or six stores, a dragged-down hotel and a handful of grain elevators. Half the population was German Mennonite, the other half English. Including the Swenarchuks, there were three Ukrainian families.
Everything changed when, as a teenager, she moved with the rest of her family to nearby Saskatoon. Her world expanded to included antiwar protests, draft dodgers and an emerging social consciousness. Her mother’s work as a social worker likely also influenced her, for she was briefly tempted to enter the same profession. After getting her BA in English literature at the University of Saskatchewan, she worked as a de facto social worker in rural Saskatchewan but soon realized that becoming a lawyer would be a more effective career path. She moved to Toronto in the early 1970s to attend Osgoode Hall Law School. There, she found that just 10 per cent of the student body was female, with an even smaller number specializing in labour law, as she did. She was called to the bar in 1976 and opened a practice with Judith McCormack, a fellow graduate.
In the early days, she worked primarily with a group of small Canadian unions fighting for the rights of immigrant women, many of whom toiled in the most appalling sweatshop conditions or as building cleaners. The unions were affiliated with the Confederation of Canadian Unions, founded in 1969 by Quebec labour activists Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley, and were often labelled as communist. Choosing to work for them wasn’t generally thought to be a brilliant career move. “Of course this wasn’t exactly high-paying work – or, in some cases, paying work at all,” recalled Ms. McCormack. The firm was audited by Revenue Canada twice in the early days. When she asked the auditor why, he told them that they had made so little money they figured the firm must have been a front for a money-laundering operation. “This was a bit like adding insult to penury,” said Ms. McCormack.
In 1979, Ms. Swenarchuk moved into a more lucrative position as counsel to the Canadian Union of Professional and Technical Employees. One of her responsibilities was representing civil aviation inspectors at a Royal Commission on aviation safety. Next, she took a position with the Federation of Women’s Teachers Associations of Ontario, working on collective bargaining, education and equity policies. In the late 1970s, she joined the National Action Committee on the Status of Women as a member of the employment committee. She became an executive member in 1982 and served under the presidency of Doris Anderson.
But the bonds of sisterhood were sometimes a challenge to negotiate. When Ms. Anderson was NAC president, she confided to fellow executive board members that she didn’t want to go to any meetings “where women held hands or hummed.” Ms. Swenarchuk understood this timidity, agreed, and on all accounts the two women shared a great deal of non-hand-holding success. Ms. Swenarchuk’s three strongest mentors were Ms. Parent, Ms. Anderson and research physicist Ursula Franklin. In 2006, she wrote the forward to The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map.
The late 1980s and early 1990s presented Ms. Swenarchuk with two hugely significant challenges. They were both personal and professional. First, her daughter Larissa was born in Toronto in 1988; second, after having served a few years as chief counsel to CELA, she became the executive director in 1991. Suddenly, at the same time she was knee deep in diapers, she was also on the nightly news warning people about the state of the environment.
“I remember the first time I laid eyes on Michelle Swenarchuk,” said Karen Clark, senior policy co-ordinator for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. “She was on TV saying things that I had never heard anybody say before. I remember the phrase, ‘We’re in the middle of an environmental crisis.’ She was using that kind of very strong language when very few people were talking like that.”
CELA is funded by the Ontario legal aid plan with a mandate to represent environmental groups and low-income individuals affected by environmental problems. In the 1980s, CELA represented a coalition of Northern Ontario environmental groups called Forests for Tomorrow at a landmark hearing into Ontario’s timber management program. It was probably the biggest such hearing in Canadian history, with 440 separate hearings covering a four-year period. “It was mind-boggling – and mind numbing – said CELA’s Rick Lindgren. “And yet, with Michelle as our fearless lead counsel, somehow we survived the ordeal and … achieved some real progress.”
Attending the hearings was a gruelling ordeal. Every Monday, Mr. Lindgren and Ms. Swenarchuk would fly out of Toronto early in the morning, drop baby Larissa off at Thunder Bay daycare, spend the day at the hearing, pick up Larissa and eat dinner at the house they had rented for the duration. After the dishes were done, Ms. Swenarchuk would play with her daughter, tell her stories and put her to bed. Then she’d work until the wee hours reading evidence and preparing cross-examination for the next day.
In a Toronto Star column in 1989, Ms. Anderson described one plane ride where 16-month-old Larissa accidentally kicked over the breakfast tray, spraying scrambled egg across the lap of her mother’s blue suit. “Two hours later, after a quick clean-up, [Ms. Swenarchuk] was cross-examining a top government official.” In the end, they got what Forests for Tomorrow wanted: sustainable forestry.
While Ms. Swenarchuk also served as an advocate for women, trade unionists, aboriginals and immigrant workers, her greatest success – and greatest notoriety – occurred when she argued the Harvard Mouse case at the Supreme Court of Canada. According to Mr. Lindgren, the matter had arrived at CELA’s doorstep just at a time when the struggle for environmental protection was becoming more complex. In addition to being engaged in site-specific battles over such things as dumps, quarries and incinerators, they were becoming increasingly involved in international “mega-cases.”
The Harvard rodent was just such a case. Around that time, scientists at Harvard University had modified mice by inserting a gene that caused them to develop cancer. They acquired a patent for the mouse that extended to all non-human life forms. In the process, they applied for a patent in Canada and the resulting litigation eventually ended up before the Supreme Court. At the proceedings, CELA represented itself and six other public-interest groups, including the Canadian Council of Churches, Greenpeace Canada and the Sierra Club of Canada. In 2002, the court ruled that higher life forms could not be patented in Canada.
It was a staggering success, said Ms. Clark. “For Michelle to have beaten the pharmaceutical industry, that was a signal victory and the organizing point around her life and her work.” It also lay at the root of her beliefs about justice, she said. “It works for you whether you’re rich or you’re poor, that’s what the rule of law is. Michelle believed that very strongly … that was the fight that she was always fighting.”
In 2004, Ms. Swenarchuk was awarded the Law Society of Upper Canada medal for outstanding contributions.
2008 – Karen Willsey
Remembering Karen Willsey: The 2008 Cancer Prevention Challenge is dedicated to Karen for her tireless efforts on behalf of workers who died from occupational cancers linked to their work at the notorious Holmes Foundry in Sarnia, Ontario. Karen passed away from bladder cancer in June 2005 at the age of 47.
As President of Canadian Auto Workers Local 2168 (St. Thomas, Ontario), Karen advocated on behalf of Holmes workers who developed cancer from thier exposure to asbestos. She worked to ensure they or their survivors would receive necessary compensation and benefits.
Nick DeCarlo, National Representative in CAW’s Health, Safety & Environment Department, who worked with Karen on the Holmes Foundry Project, offered this tribute to Karen in 2004 during the presentation of the Bud Jimmerfield Award (named for the late President of CAW Local 89, who passed away from cancer of the esophagus caused by his exposure to metalworking fluids.)
“I have had the privilege,” Nick said, “and it truly has been and is a privilege, of working with Karen Willsey for six years on the Holmes Foundry project where so many of our members have died of occupational disease, mostly from asbestos. Karen not only pursues each and every case with a determination to get acceptance for the worker, she also visits the workers and their survivors in their homes, listens to their concerns, consoles them and answers their questions. Before her illness, every few weeks I would get a call or a voice message from Karen, literally bubbling over with enthusiasm with news of a new victory – a claim granted, a widow stunned and overjoyed at news of receiving benefits. Karen put her heart and soul into each and every case, worked tirelessly 12 and 14 hour days and never let up in her determination.”
Karen Willsey was a very worthy recipient of the Bud Jimmerfield Award, and we are honoured to salute her dedication and courage during The 2008 Cancer Prevention Challenge.
2007 – Ray Matthey, Suzanne Matthey & Jeannette Matthey
Remembering Ray Matthey, his wife Sue and daughter Jeannette. All three died prematurely from cancer. With generosity and foresight, Ray and Sue had the vision to establish the Saunders-Matthey Foundation in 1996, an organization that became solely dedicated to cancer prevention in 2004 under the leadership of Karen DeKoning. The Saunders-Matthey Cancer Prevention Coalition was a proud sponsor of The 2007 Run, Walk & Roll for Cancer Prevention.
2006 – Dick Martin
Remembering Dick Martin: The Lives Lived column of the Toronto Globe and Mail in April 2002 succinctly summed up Dick Martin’s life this way: Labour leader, activist, advocate for health and safety, husband, father, grandfather, brother to thousands. Born May 5, 1944, in St. Catharines, Ont. Died Oct. 30, 2001, in Ottawa, of cancer, aged 57.
Dick Martin was among those very special people who have unquestionably left our world a better place, and we were very proud to dedicate the 2006 Run, Walk & Roll for Cancer Prevention to his memory.
Dick first worked as a union member in 1968 when he landed a job as an underground miner for Inco in Thompson, Manitoba. Even though he successfully completed his electrician’s apprenticeship in The Pas several years later, he never worked in his chosen trade, becoming President of Local 6166 of the Steelworkers instead. A humble man, Dick still renewed his electrician’s license faithfully every year because he always wanted to be prepared for not winning his next election! Dick ultimately worked his way up through labour movement ranks to finish his career as Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress and President of the Inter-American Regional Labour Organization. He always found ways to put worker, community and environmental health at the top of the agenda. Over the years, Dick spearheaded efforts that led to comprehensive health and safety legislation and an occupational health clinic for workers. He was also crucial in establishing The Day of Mourning for workers who suffer occupational injury, illness and death – an event now recognized in more than 100 countries. And he inspired the still-growing movement for ‘green’ jobs, work that promotes occupational and environmental health.
Dick passed away on October 30, 2001 after a battle with colon cancer at the age of 57, leaving his wife, Cathy, three children, a sister and two brothers, as well as legions of union kinfolk from around the globe. At his funeral, Bob White, former president of the Canadian Auto Workers and the CLC, offered this moving tribute: “Dick Martin certainly left large footprints on the sands of life. Footprints for safer workplaces, footprints for a better environment, footprints for worker rights, for human rights all over the world … Dick Martin you were a wonderful friend – thousands of people both here and in other parts of the world benefit from your contribution.”
2005 – Kathryn Manzer
Remembering Kathryn Manzer: The 2005 Run, Walk and Roll for Cancer Prevention was dedicated to the memory of a wonderful human being, Kathryn Hart Manzer of Toronto, who died October 7, 2004 of cancer at age 66, just two days before the marriage of her daughter Jenny.
Throughout her life, Kathryn worked tirelessly for her community, particularly in areas concerning women and children. She believed in the importance of learning a second language and was a long-time advocate for improving and expanding French programs for Canadian children. She served in all the leading roles in Canadian Parents for French, including national president from 1988 to 1990, and she was a founder and director from 1983 to 1991 of Le Camp, a bilingual summer program for children at Glendon College, York University.
Kathryn was an active member of the University Women’s Club of North York, and she initiated the Toronto Caucus of Canadian Federation of University Women’s clubs. For the last five years of her life, Kathryn’s major project was organizing the Toronto Caucus December 6th Luncheon in support of the CFUW Polytechnique Award.
(Note: In the 2005 Run, Walk & Roll for Cancer Prevention, over $14,000 was raised in honour of Kathryn Manzer. Team Kathryn was comprised of several members of her immediate and extended family, including her husband Ron and daughter Jenny.)
2004 – Betty Kang
Remembering Betty Kang: Betty Song was born on August 1st, 1952 in Seoul, Korea. She grew up away from her family, attending boarding school and working part time to support herself. Betty started attending the local Salvation Army Church in her neighbourhood where she became active in the choir and Sunday School. This is also where she met her future husband, David Kang.
In 1974, Betty and David moved to Toronto and were married on April 12th that year. She played a large part in founding the Salvation Army Korean Community Church in Toronto with David. Since she had grown up on her own, she loved having people around, and was always hospitable and generous, making everyone who came into the Kang home instantly feel like they were part of the family.
Betty was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, which eventually spread to her liver and brain. However, this disease did not stop her from being active in her role at the church, as well as with her family. Even from the hospital she would call others to make sure that they were happy and well. Betty was promoted to glory on February 8th, 1992.
Her children – Kimberly 26, Kristen 24, and Kevin 19 – now run for cancer prevention in memory of her. They continue to share the same passion that Betty had for serving their church, family, and friends.
