Dale Gibson.Courtesy of family
Dale Gibson: Scholar. Educator. Grandpa. Scotch Enthusiast. Born May 17, 1933, in Winnipeg; died Jan. 29, 2022, in Edmonton; with an assist from COVID-19; aged 88.
Dale Gibson was woke before woke was woke.
He was a tireless defender of human rights: He advised governments on the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution, the creation and implementation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Manitoba’s Human Rights Code. He also chaired the Manitoba Human Rights Commission.
Dale was born in East Kildonan, a working-class area of northeast Winnipeg. As a young man, he managed a paper route and organized record-listening evenings at high-school, which led to a love of bebop, cool jazz and the jump blues of Wynonie Harris. Dale found his calling in Grade 7 during a classroom “government” when he was appointed the prosecutor in mock trials ruling on students’ misbehaviour.
After a very brief stint with the Canadian Navy, Dale enrolled in United College in Winnipeg. Here he met Lee Patterson. They married in 1956 and, with the benefit of a scholarship that Dale had earned, trooped off to Cambridge, Mass., in a beige Volkswagen Beetle, where Dale later graduated with a Masters’ degree from Harvard Law School. He was appointed a Professor of Law at the Manitoba Law School in the early 1960s and was a central figure in the school becoming associated with the University of Manitoba.
This was a busy era for Dale and Lee as they raised two children, Kristin and Scott. Taking full advantage of sabbatical privileges, the family moved to England in 1966 and toured the country. The kids explored castles, took brass rubbings in churches and scrambled all over the monoliths of Stonehenge.
Dale was supportive and endlessly creative as a father. He tolerated his teenage son’s rock band practising in the basement and when they landed paying gigs he cajoled his friends to come out and listen. When his daughter had a novel idea for a children’s book, he helped her flesh it out and submit it to publishers.
By the late 1970s, Dale had established himself as one of the pre-eminent experts in Canadian constitutional law. One evening, Scott answered the phone at home and heard the unmistakable voice of future prime minister Jean Chrétien asking “…'allo, Dale?”
Dale visited art museums wherever his travels took him. He also liked to draw and paint and often said that the once-a-week afternoons he took off from work to immerse himself in a first-year drawing class at the University of Manitoba were among the happiest hours of his life.
Dale could be devastatingly effective at dismantling the arguments of those with whom he disagreed. He could also be blithely oblivious to some of the niceties of social life, such as remembering birthdays. But he treasured equally everyone’s fundamental right to maintain different belief systems (however wrong he might think they were). A visit from Grandpa would often include lively debates as he nudged those around him to push boundaries and move out of their comfort zones, sometimes to their frustration.
When Dale and Lee’s marriage ended in 1991, he relocated to Alberta where he married Edmonton lawyer Sandra Anderson in 1993. He continued his work and they travelled extensively, particularly enjoying visits to Ontario’s Stratford and Shaw festivals.
In 2017, as life-long Scotch lover, Dale and Sandra travelled to the distilleries of Speyside in Scotland with Scott and his wife, Mary.
There were still flashes of the “Old Dale” even after his dementia diagnosis. And while he had mostly stopped sketching, he nonetheless skillfully executed two new drawings for Mary.
So, what would Dale have thought about the recent antics of the truckers’ convoy and the anti-vaccine recklessness that perhaps led to his own death? He might have reminded us that they have every right to their opinions, “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” And then chuckled at the irony.
Scott Gibson is Dale’s son.
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