Manitoba premier Duff Roblin is surrounded by microphones at the PC leadership convention in Toronto on Sept. 5, 1967. Roblin, the dapper former Manitoba premier who came within a whisker of leading the national Progressive Conservative party, has died.Chuck Mitchell
John Henry Babcock will be remembered as the last Canadian veteran of the First World War.
More than 650,000 Canadians fought for King and country; despite his best efforts, Mr. Babcock was not one of them. Born on July 23, 1900 on a farm north of Kingston, Ont., the fair-haired Mr. Babcock stood all of 5 feet 4½ inches and was just 15 when he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Mr. Babcock recalled hearing a recruiter declaim Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade before he affixed his name in a schoolboy scrawl on the enlistment form in May, 1916. He made it by train to Halifax, but was asked to step aside by the company commander when he tried to march up the gangplank of the troopship moored at the quay.
Undaunted, Mr. Babcock volunteered again in 1917. Still underage, he was sent overseas with a Young Soldiers Battalion and posted to the southwest coast of England for training. Before he could be deployed to the front lines, the Armistice was declared on Nov. 11, 1918. Mr. Babcock's achievement was twofold: a long life and a becoming modesty when he valiantly resisted efforts by the Dominion Institute and the Government of Canada to turn him into a symbolic Known Soldier with a full state funeral. Instead, after Mr. Babcock's death in Spokane, Washington, at age 109, on Feb. 18, his family held a simple cremation and scattered his ashes in the mountains where he had loved to hike in the Pacific Northwest.
Dufferin "Duff" Roblin was Manitoba's most significant politician in the 20th century. A Red Tory, Mr. Roblin, who was born in Winnipeg on June 17, 1917, transformed a rural and old-fashioned province into a modern entity. As Manitoba's 14th premier, from June 30, 1958 to November 27, 1967, he expanded and integrated government services, upgraded highways, created provincial parks, revamped hospitals, re-introduced French language teaching, enhanced post-secondary education, amalgamated Winnipeg's outlying municipalities into a single metropolitan municipality and built the Red River Floodway - forever known as Duff's Ditch - to curb the errant river from overflowing its banks in the spring runoff.
He resigned as premier to contest the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party, following the ouster of John Diefenbaker. A loyalist to the West, the party and the former leader, he played down ambition to decorum and waited so long to declare himself that he lost delegates and organization to his primary rival, Robert Stanfield, the popular premier of Nova Scotia. Had he won the leadership, could Mr. Roblin have defeated Pierre Trudeau or would he, like Mr. Stanfield, have led the party to three successive defeats? Nobody will ever know. Mr. Roblin was appointed to the Senate by prime minister Trudeau in 1978 and later served as government leader in the Senate under prime minister Brian Mulroney. He was the oldest living former premier when he died age 92 in Winnipeg on May 30.
Singer and songwriter Kate McGarrigle's clear, light voice and whimsical writing style created a musical conversation with her sister Anna.
The youngest of three daughters of Frank McGarrigle, an Anglophone, and his Québécoise wife, Gabrielle, Ms. McGarrigle was born on Feb. 6, 1946 in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. She grew up playing and singing music from myriad traditions. But she also had analytical and rebellious sides. After studying engineering at McGill University, she began writing and singing songs in Greenwich Village coffee houses. In 1971, she married Loudon Wainwright III, with whom she had two children, the singers Rufus and Martha Wainwright; the marriage quickly fractured and she returned to Montreal when baby Martha was two months old.
By then Kate and Anna had been sending tapes of songs back and forth across the border. Their 1975 debut album, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, contains Anna's Heart Like a Wheel and Kate's hauntingly beautiful (Talk to Me of ) Mendocino. Melody Maker named it as Best Record of the Year; two subsequent albums, Matapedia (1996) and The McGarrigle Hour (1998) won Junos. After Ms. McGarrigle was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, she continued to perform with her sister and her children, as treatment allowed, including a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London to raise money for a cancer research and treatment fund she had endowed. She was 63 when she died in Montreal, surrounded by family, on January 18.
Billy Diamond, former grand chief of the Quebec Cree, died of a heart attack on Sept. 30, at age 61. He was the key strategist behind the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. That deal, which wrested compensation for Cree and Inuit in exchange for allowing Quebec Hydro to harness the mighty northern rivers flowing into James Bay, set the benchmark for negotiated land claims elsewhere in the country.
With some of the settlement money, he helped create Air Creebec, a native airline, Cree Construction Company Limited, and Cree Yamaha Motors. Besides helping the Cree to achieve self-government and economic self-sufficiency, he was a prime lobbyist in enshrining aboriginal hunting, fishing and logging guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Born on May 17, 1949 in a tent near Rupert House, Quebec, on the shore of James Bay, Diamond was only seven when his father sent him south to the residential school at Moose Factory. After high school, he wanted to become a lawyer, but his father, who didn't speak English, needed his help and so he became involved in native politics, becoming chief of the Waskaganish Cree when he was 21. Much has been said - correctly - to condemn the sexual and physical abuses at residential schools and the alienation that First Nations' children suffered by being separated from their families and forced to learn English. But, for all that, Diamond (who later battled alcoholism) used the hateful experience to learn the white man's ways and to form a political network of other smart, well-educated Cree leaders - skills and contacts that were invaluable in negotiating a better deal for his people.
Best known as the twitchy and eccentric schoolteacher Hetty King in the television series Road to Avonlea, Jackie Burroughs was a classically trained dancer who used every ounce of her being to create emotion and character on stage. She loved improvisation, rather than nailing down a performance that she could repeat by rote every night. Director Robin Phillips, who worked with her at the Stratford Festival, said Burroughs had "the ability to find humour in the tragic roles and tragedy in the humorous ones."
Although she never went "Hollywood," she appeared in more than 75 films, delivering luminous performances as Kate Flynn opposite Richard Farnsworth in The Grey Fox, and Maryse Holder in A Winter Tan, a strange biographical portrait of the feminist writer and hedonist, which Ms. Burroughs also co-directed and co-wrote. Born in Lancashire, England, on Feb. 2, 1939, Ms. Burroughs came to Canada with her family in the early 1950s. Briefly married in the late 1960s to the late Zalman Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful, Ms. Burroughs, a bohemian by inclination, was an intense friend to generations of women in and out of the arts. Actress and director Sarah Polley, who worked with Burroughs on Road to Avonlea, said she was "passionate, fierce, uncompromising, honest." A committed smoker and a former drinker, Ms. Burroughs died, surrounded by family, of gastric cancer in Toronto on Sept. 22. She was 71.
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Roll call
Writers and thinkers
Beryl Bainbridge, novelist; Dick Francis, thriller writer; David French, playwright; Peter Hart, historian; Jill Johnston, feminist; Tony Judt, political scientist; Frank Kermode, literary critic; P.K. Page, poet; Paul Quarrington, novelist, songwriter; J.D. Salinger, novelist; Jose Saramago, novelist; Ted Sorensen, speechwriter; Howard Zinn, historian.
Visual and Performing Arts
David Bolduc, painter; Louise Bourgoise, sculptor; John Dankworth, musician; Lhasa de Sela, singer; Mira Godard, art dealer; Lena Horne, singer; Otto Joachim, composer; Ben Keith, steel guitarist; Kenneth McKellar, Scottish singer; Alexander McQueen, fashion designer; Mitch Miller, bandleader; Gordon Rayner, painter; Paul Rockett, photographer; Tom Rolston, violinist; Arnold Spohr, artistic director; Shirley Thomson, arts administrator.
Film makers
Claude Chabrol, director; Maury Chaykin, actor; Tony Curtis, actor; Dino de Laurentiis, producer; Blake Edwards, director; Corey Haim, actor; Dennis Hopper, actor; Robert Kerr, Imax co-founder; Patricia Neale, actor; Leslie Nielsen, actor; Arthur Penn, director; Lynn Redgrave, actor; Eric Rohmer, director; Jean Simmons, actor; Denis Simpson, actor; Tracy Wright, actor.
Politics and the Professions
Norman Atkins, political organizer; Clare Baker, cardiac surgeon; Vernon Baker, soldier; Carl Beigie, economist; Jim Bohlen, Greenpeace co-founder; Robert C. Byrd, politician; Michel Chartrand, labour leader; Michael Foot, politician; Myron J. Gordon, economist; Alexander Haig, soldier and politician; Richard Holbroke, diplomat; Hans Hoffman, paleontologist; Benoît Mandlebrot, mathematician; Arthur Menzies, diplomat; Robert Salter, orthopedic surgeon; Marie Sanderson, geologist; John Yaremko, politician.
Business and Sports
Ron Atchison, football player; Robert Bandeen, president of CNR; Glen W. Bell, founder Taco Bell; Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse; Chris Haney, co-inventor of Trivial Pursuit; David Mitchell, founder Alberta Energy Corporation; Wilf Posluns, CEO Dylex; Bob Probert, hockey player; René Provost, Provigo co-founder; Cy Saimoto, entrepreneur; Bobby Thomson, baseball player.