Illustration by Alex Siklos
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A lot of people share names with famous people. Ordinary folks named Harrison Ford may get a knowing smile or arched eyebrow from a grocery clerk or traffic cop, but there’s no real confusion. The non-Premier Danielle Smiths don’t get her mail. I doubt any of the half-dozen other Sarah McLachlans on LinkedIn get asked for their autograph. Some may be saddled with unfortunate names, but not ruinously, though Canada 411 lists a Danielle Smith in Witless Bay, N.L.
My case is different. I’m a Steven Lewis, not Stephen – not identical, but homophones. Stephen is justly famous: a precocious politician, international statesman, renowned orator and tireless champion of social, political and economic justice. Sadly, he died on March 31. I wasn’t part of his life, but for 40 years, he was part of mine. Our shared name created confusions and amusements – mistaken identity that became part of my identity.
Stephen’s stage was literally the world. Mine is Canadian health policy, a community divided by competing prescriptions for what ails our system and united by the failure to implement any of them. We are a talkative bunch, and there has always been an active health care conference circuit. I’ve been at it for 50 years. I write a lot, both to give rein to my inner journalist and as a dabbling quasi-academic.
To my late mother’s eternal chagrin, I never had any career ambitions, so I am more candid than most of my peers and superiors. In my world, this has created a bit of a niche. I’m fairly well-known in health circles, but in the wider world, I’m not even D-list famous.
Yet Stephen’s world and mine intersected. Stephen was a dynamite speaker and a big draw at major health care conferences. I was a regular on the circuit for less exalted reasons: I was a slightly exotic creature (“Oh yeah, we should get that guy from Saskatchewan”) and, I would like to think, willing to be more usefully provocative than the movers and shakers in my field felt at liberty to be.
A card can hold astonishing weight, so why have we stopped sending them?
I am 14 years younger than Stephen. I spent most of my life in Saskatchewan while he was an Ontarian. We don’t look much like each other. Yet from the 1980s on, a helluva lot of people thought I was him. A few examples:
In the mid-1980s I got a call inviting me to participate in a swish health care meeting in Florida, with a generous honorarium. I accepted. A couple of days later the organizer called again to apologize for the error. Somehow this event planner had called the Saskatchewan Health Research Board expecting to find Stephen Lewis, which was odd to say the least – Stephen was then-ambassador to the United Nations. I asked my secretary to recount the call. She replied, “Well, he asked to speak to the ambassador, but I thought it was just one of your friends making a joke.” This was not implausible.
Stephen and I both spoke at the same conference three times. As soon as I got up, there was a mild sense of betrayal among some in the audience (“What? I thought this was the real Elvis!”). Once, shortly after he had spoken, a woman thanked me effusively for my wonderful speech. I gave her a mild John McEnroe: “You can’t be serious.” She left, bewildered.
Years later an envelope arrived from a speaker’s bureau. Inside was a cheque for $7,500 as my fee for a conference in Toronto. This was a rate unknown to me. Also, I hadn’t given that speech. Reluctantly, I sent it back. Consider the creativity that went into such an error: He was their client, I was not, and yet they found my address in Saskatoon? Maybe I was the famous one!
At a conference in B.C., a physician approached and said, you’re one of my heroes, could I get a picture with you? I thought, lady, you’re in the health field. If you don’t know the difference, I’m not in the mood to explain it to you. We posed. I hope it’s framed and prominently displayed.
Mom chose MAID. I now accept it offered what she wanted: a loving exit
I got an honorary degree from York University in 2022 – 36 years after Stephen got one of his. At the dinner for the honorees, an Olympian (identity 100 per cent confirmed) came up to me, shook my hand and began reminiscing about our previous encounters (we had never met). I’d had a celebratory amount of wine, and I didn’t want to create an awkward moment, so I didn’t de-impersonate. I wonder if she thought my vocabulary had shrunk.
And now my namesake is gone. It is no stretch to place him alongside the Jimmy Carters and Nelson Mandelas, politicians whose mark on the world transcended their politics. To be occasionally mistaken for him was on balance a gift; I am probably better known for not being him than I am for anything I’ve done.
A nice man who lives in my building confided to my partner that he was sad for the hour when he thought it was I, not Stephen, who had died. I had seemed so hale just two days earlier.
Steven Lewis lives in Vancouver.