About Colleen

Adriane Carr has already posted a lovely tribute to our mutual friend, the incomparable activist Colleen McCrory. I know the memorials and accolades will flood in, as they should. The shock is enormous. Not only did her friends only have days to adjust to the unthinkable idea that this extraordinary life force was dying, she only had days herself. Colleen and I have been friends for over twenty years. She is my daughter's godmother. She is someone I could campaign with, lobby with, but also cook with, and do spring cleaning and laugh until our sides hurt. I was with my dad today and he recalled the last time he'd seen Colleen. It was in Ottawa a few years ago. My mum and dad were visiting me, as was Colleen. I must have cooked my father one too many stir fries or curries, because he remembered that Colleen had made them a wonderful dinner. A real life-saver. Fresh fish and veggies and potatoes. He recalled it as heavenly. That was typical of Colleen. She must have been in Ottawa on a mission. She was very busy. She would never have been there otherwise, and she just shopped and made a wonderful meal for my parents because it was in her nature to care for others. I had the luck of interviewing her for things I wrote over the years. I first sat her down for a version of her life story for a book by Farley Mowat called Rescue the Earth. Farley realized he had not interviewed very many women for the book, so he asked me to redress the imbalance by writing about women environmental warriors. So I heard the story of her activism from her earliest battle. I think she was a teenager when the town of New Denver, where she was born and lived and struggled and died, had decided to shoot the bears that were raiding the town dump. To Colleen this was sacrilege. She organized to protect the bears. She was born into a large family. Her brother Wayne became a grizzly bear biologist and the two of them campaigned to save wild place after place. Her first trip to Ottawa was to campaign for South Moresby. She had no place to stay so knocked on the door of her MP's home and slept on the sofa. She figured out how to knock on doors and persuade people to help save precious places. Her legacy includes the Valhalla Provincial Park, sharing the glory with others in the Haida Gwaii (South Moresby campaign), the Spirit Bear campaign, and the first national effort to protect the boreal. It was Colleen who tarred Canada with the label "Brazil of the North." She also was one of the top vote getters in the Green Party in BC. One of my favourite stories about Colleen took place during the South Moresby struggle. John Fraser, former environment minister and Speaker of the House, had phoned Colleen at her store. In addition to her own clothing store, she ran the local Sears outlet in town, so when the Sears line rang, she explained to the Hon. Mr. Fraser that she had to put him on hold for a moment. He protested, "Colleen, I am a very busy man." She replied, "And I'm a very busy woman." She was also a very dedicated mum and grand mom. Colleen had a large and extended family of siblings and in-laws, her own wonderful children and grandchildren. She loved them intensely and took enormous pride in their achievements. Some of life's blows hurt too much to bear examination. The last time she and I had spoken had been in grief over another mutual friend who had died very suddenly. His death made no sense. Neither can Colleen's fit into any sensible framework of rights and wrongs and justice. By rights, she should have lived to be 100, rocking on a front porch overlooking her mountains. No one ever said life was fair. Life is, though, full of vast mysteries and miracles. Colleen was one of them.