GHOSH o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-07-25 published
Margaret ALLEMANG,
Nurse And Scholar: 1914-2005
Pioneer in applying methodology to traditional care, she wrote
the first paper on Canadian nursing history
By Sabitri
GHOSH,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, July
25, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- Decades after the entrance exam that secured her a
spot in the University of Toronto's School of Nursing, Margaret
ALLEMANG -- by then a much-honoured professor emeritus -- was
still mulling over her response to the question of why she wanted
to be a nurse. "I guess I just used the pat answer," she mused
in a 1993 interview, "that 'I wanted to be of service to others."
An inveterate deep thinker, Dr.
ALLEMANG could never settle for
a pat answer if a more profound one could be unearthed. As her
nephew, Globe and Mail writer John
ALLEMANG, recalls, "She had
a professorial way of dealing with issues: you always allow time
for further thought and consideration, and you don't close off
any avenues for possibility." Yet in spite of her second-guessing,
what she said in 1937 proved inescapably true -- both of her
career as a researcher, teacher and historian, and of herself
in general.
One of a new breed of nurses who emerged from an academic program
instead of from an in-hospital apprenticeship, Dr.
ALLEMANG was
a pioneer in applying research methodology to traditional nursing.
"Essentially, nursing wasn't a research-oriented profession or
academic pursuit," Mr.
ALLEMANG says. "It was simply the business
of training nurses to be nurses. So she was kind of on the edge
of that transition, where they started doing clinical studies
of nursing care."
Her 1956 master's thesis on "factors affecting the sleep of patients"
was among the earliest dissertations in clinical nursing. It
was unique, too, for its emphasis on the individual patient --
a marked contrast from other studies of the era. Throughout the
1960s, Dr.
ALLEMANG continued to broaden the purview of contemporary
clinical research, chronicling the experiences of hospitalized
cardiac patients and leading an experimental research unit at
Sunnybrook Hospital trying out more patient-centred systems of
nursing.
"She was very concerned with the patient as a person -- a whole
person," says her friend and teaching colleague, Judith
YOUNG.
Dr. ALLEMANG's quest to meet the "patient's physical, emotional
and spiritual needs" was one charted by personal experience.
As a child, she suffered from osteomyelitis, a chronic bone infection
that left her bed-ridden for most of her youth. Later, studying
philosophy in university, she came to embrace the existentialist
view of how a crisis like hers could be transformative. "There
was the idea in my thinking," she said, "that this fits into
the sick person, because illness is a crisis, that people can
grow and learn through illness."
For her PhD, Dr.
ALLEMANG initially wanted to construct a theory
of nursing "based on the existentialist approach to man." But
her PhD committee at the University of Washington nixed the idea.
So instead, she turned to the development of nursing education
in North America from 1873 to 1950, focusing on the leaders who
ushered in its most important changes. The project took her nearly
20 years to complete, with Dr.
ALLEMANG working on it in between
teaching duties at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Nursing.
She was, remarks her nephew, "a great procrastinator."
When Dr. ALLEMANG's paper finally did come out in 1976, it was
the first ever published on Canadian nursing history. Moreover,
points out Kathryn
McPHERSON, dean of women's studies at York
University, it also deposited a crucial piece of scholarship
into the hands of social historians just as they were starting
to take stock of women's history-making contributions. "It was
consistent with a genre of women's history which was about looking
at Canada's female leadership," Dr.
McPHERSON says.
While pursuing her PhD, Dr.
ALLEMANG became familiar with another
group of history-making women through the Nursing Sisters Association
of Canada. She herself served as a nursing sister in the air
force during the Second World War. While she did not go overseas,
she later discovered dozens of women who had been principal actors
in the drama of war. From 1977 until the early 1990s, she systematically
interviewed 30 of them in a monumental oral history project.
"It's very different view of the war," Dr.
YOUNG says. "Nurses
were the only women who were close to the front lines. I think
Margaret saw them all as heroines."
During the 1980s, a group interested in nursing history, including
Dr. YOUNG and Dr.
McPHERSON, began to coalesce around Dr.
ALLEMANG
in meetings hosted at her West Toronto home. In 1993, the group
formalized as the Margaret M. Allemang Centre for the History
of Nursing. Even without a building or staff, Dr.
McPHERSON believes
their advocacy helped prevent precious archival materials from
being lost during the wave of cutbacks that swept health care
in the mid-1990s. She also credits Dr.
ALLEMANG for bringing
nursing history into its own in Canada through her tireless support
of academics like herself.
"She was a real encourager, a co-ordinator," Dr.
McPHERSON says.
"Nursing history is so much part of general social history, so
much on the map."
Never married, Dr.
ALLEMANG was particularly close to Mr.
ALLEMANG,
her twin brother's son. In her retirement, the two regularly
went to the opera and restaurants together, and would indulge
in substantive conversations about the arts, history, food and
philosophy. Somehow, Mr.
ALLEMANG marvels, she managed to be
a critical thinker without ever being critical. "I never knew
if she had a bad thought about anybody," he says. "I'm sure she
did, but you had to work pretty hard to get a sense that she
didn't approve of something."
Even when a boarder from Hong Kong took her prized red Mustang
on a wild joyride that ended in it being totalled, Mr.
ALLEMANG
says his aunt barely budged. Nor did it discourage Dr.
ALLEMANG
from her practice of opening her home to strangers. The last
in a long series of tenants was Gizaw
CHUTA, a refugee from Ethiopia
and a minister in training. Today, Reverend
CHUTA says he initially
worried that the elderly white Canadian would see his presence
as an imposition. "What she told me, she has experience with
all people, with all cultures, so she liked to talk with all
people. For her, really, all the world's people are the same."
When Mr. CHUTA learned last November that his wife and children
had finally received visas to come to Canada, Dr.
ALLEMANG insisted
on paying their airfares.
Margaret ALLEMANG was born in Toronto on July 19, 1914. She died
in Toronto on April 14, 2005. She was 91.
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GHOSH o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-07 published
Wilbur Roy
JACKETT,
Jurist (1912-2005)
Bad-tempered but committed chief justice of the Federal Court
had an enormous impact on the administration of the law in Canada
By Sabitri
GHOSH,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, November
7, 2005, Page S8
Kingston -- When an admirer wanted to write his biography, Wilbur
JACKETT, the retired chief justice of the Federal Court of Canada,
nearly dismissed the idea out of hand. It was, he opined with
his signature bluntness, "a damn fool idea and waste of time."
But then, as he was wont to do, the judge reconsidered his position,
eventually agreeing to tell the would-be biographer, Montreal
lawyer Dick Pound, how he went from small-town Saskatchewan to
engineering some of the most important developments in Canada's
postwar legal system.
That he almost forfeited the chance to make his case to posterity
was characteristic of a man to whom the opinions of others mattered
little and who thought, Mr. Pound said, "judges' judgments should
speak for themselves, and that's all you needed to know: A judge
was what his judgment was."
Mr. JACKETT entered the University of Saskatchewan's law school
in 1928, apparently at the urging of his stern, emotionally distant
father. After an outstanding academic career, culminating in
a Rhodes scholarship, he joined the Department of Justice in
The department was then the busiest in Ottawa, the place where
everyone else offloaded their legislative homework under the
frenetic deadlines of the war. In the close quarters of the 10-person
office, Mr.
JACKETT's skill at crafting solid pieces of legislation
fast -- he guessed that he drafted eight bills in his first year
alone -- soon came to the attention of the deputy minister of
justice, Frederick
VARCOE. By the late 1940s, he was handling
everything from staff recruitment and training to all civil litigation,
so that his appointment as Mr.
VARCOE's successor in 1957 surprised
no one.
At 5-foot 4, with an ink-black, rubberstamp moustache, Mr.
JACKETT
inspired both respect and hostility within the department. He
would reassign employees without consultation, demand they work
evenings and weekends, and rail at them for minor mistakes. At
the same time, he could be generous in recognizing and encouraging
people's gifts, even those dissimilar from his own.
Marguerite
RITCHIE,
Canada's first female Queen's Counsel, saw
both sides of Mr.
JACKETT within the span of a few months. Then
in charge of international law, she was called into his office
and "informed that he didn't believe in international law," she
said, "and that he was going to more or less watch everything
that I was doing from then on."
Ms. RITCHIE apprehensively continued her work -- which at that
time centred on the legal structure surrounding the United Nations
until, one day, Mr.
JACKETT called her back into his office:
"He said he'd changed his mind and something to the effect that
you really do need someone to assist you, which was a tremendous
reversal." To her, this was evidence of his overriding sense
of fairness.
Under Mr. JACKETT's direction, the department developed the 1953
Crown Liability Act, removing many archaic impediments that prevented
citizens from suing the government. And, at the request of the
Diefenbaker government, he was also responsible for drafting
the Bill of Rights, a statutory precursor to the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms.
Despite these achievements, Mr.
JACKETT wanted to sit on the
bench and felt he had to -- in Mr. Pound's words -- "sanitize"
himself for the role. Choosing Canadian Pacific Railway as his
quarantine, he accepted a position as its general counsel in
1960. Once gone from the Department of Justice, he let it be
known that he would welcome a judicial appointment, specifying
the Exchequer Court of Canada as his first choice.
The itinerant court, which specialized in suits against the government
and in federally regulated areas such as intellectual property
and income tax, was widely considered sluggish and inefficient,
with some of its cases running on for five years. Mr.
JACKETT
became its president in 1964 and right away stopped assigning
judges to files until they finished writing their judgments in
reserve. In the meantime, he and another judge took on virtually
all new cases. Within a year, the backlog was cleared.
Impressed, the Department of Justice took note when Mr.
JACKETT
suggested replacing the Exchequer Court with a wholly new body
whose jurisdiction would extend to rulings by federal tribunals,
boards and commissions.
Then-justice minister John
TURNER found the proposal both legally
and politically appealing, and agreed to pilot the necessary
legislation through Parliament. On June 1, 1971, the Federal
Court of Canada officially opened, with Mr.
JACKETT as its chief
justice.
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GHOSH o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-12-02 published
Magnus ELIASON,
Politicial
Organizer: (1911-2005)
He joined the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation the year it
was founded and became a gifted backroom planner who groomed
such up-and-comers as Ed
SCHREYER
By Sabitri
GHOSH,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, December
2, 2005, Page S9
Kingston, Ontario -- In 1957, officials at Co-Operative Commonwealth
Federation headquarters were looking for somebody to drive Magnus
ELIASON. It was one nomination that Ed
SCHREYER, then an ambitious
young politico, would rather not have got.
"Frankly, I thought it was going to be a drag, driving around
a political organizer," Mr.
SCHREYER said. "At the age of 20,
I had other things in mind."
But the white-haired éminence grise -- who was severely visually
impaired as a result of congenital albinism -- turned out to
be no ordinary passenger. As Mr.
SCHREYER drove him through the
Manitoba countryside, he cracked picaresque jokes, told stories
from Norse mythology, and recounted stirring anecdotes from his
days as an original Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation member.
"He was such a marvellous, marvellous storehouse of knowledge
and so entertaining as a raconteur that, after that first chore,
I genuinely volunteered to drive him around," Mr.
SCHREYER said.
They talked so much, added the former Manitoba premier and governor-general,
"we never turned the radio on once."
Though his own résumé as a politician was limited, Mr.
ELIASON
played a singular role in the rise of the Co-Operative Commonwealth
Federation and its successor, the New Democratic Party, through
tireless organizing and nurturing political talent like Mr.
SCHREYER,
who described him as a "tremendous influence on my early life."
The son of Icelandic immigrants, Mr.
ELIASON heard of the 1932
founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation while homesteading
with his brothers in Sunnybrook, British Columbia An immediate
convert, he became one of the party's most zealous missionaries,
preaching its program of socialism and full employment as he
freight-hopped during the Depression in search of work. In March
of 1935, he went on a proselytizing trek across northern British
Columbia and Alberta, walking to every farm in a 60-kilometre
radius to drop off Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation pamphlets
and spread the party's message. By his calculation, he achieved
a 65-per-cent success rate.
As Mr. ELIASON's activism grew, the Co-Operative Commonwealth
Federation hired him as an organizer to reinforce its Prairie
base. His tactical savvy and attention to detail proved critical
in winning Tommy Douglas a second term as Saskatchewan premier
during a close 1956 campaign.
"Magnus could walk into a room and know where everybody was and
who they were, and zero right in, find out just what the details
were," said Jim
MALOWAY,
Mr.
ELIASON's long-time business partner.
"So if he wanted them to come to a meeting, he would have their
name and phone number and the time they were home, and then organize
a car to go pick them up. You can't beat a guy with organizational
ability like that."
In 1958, Mr.
ELIASON returned to his native Manitoba to work
full-time for the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation national
office. Over the next decade, he more than tripled party memberships
in the province. A born marketer, he loved going to people's
homes, setting out the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation platform
as tangibly as he would demonstrate the merits of no-rip nylons
or encyclopedia sets in his erstwhile career as a door-to-door
salesman.
"He loved sales and getting directly to the sales pitch in a
way that would just make me cringe," Mr.
SCHREYER said. "But
most of the time, it worked."
One winter, Mr.
SCHREYER said, he drove Mr.
ELIASON to a tumbledown
farm -- "the farmer was chopping ice in the water trough for
his livestock; you could see he was just struggling, financially"
and watched with consternation as Mr.
ELIASON unloaded his
high-powered sales pitch.
"He probably was pleased that he could afford $5 to help out
a people's movement," Mr.
ELIASON later said when Mr.
SCHREYER
remonstrated with him. "Besides, you can't build a viable political
party... on sentiment alone."
While unwavering, Mr.
ELIASON's loyalty to the party was not
unquestioning. By his own admission, he "entertained some doubts
about the political wisdom" of amalgamating with the Canadian
Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party in 1961. At
the New Democratic Party's inaugural leadership convention, he
went against the party mainstream again, unsuccessfully supporting
Hazen Argue over Mr. Douglas.
Convinced the party would lose Saskatchewan if Mr. Douglas left
for Ottawa, Mr.
ELIASON saw its subsequent defeat there as unwelcome
vindication. "In politics," he said in his 1997 memoir, A Life
on the Left, "I often sense a lot of things in my bones."
Mr. ELIASON's political intuition astounded Mr.
MALOWAY, a Manitoba
Member of Legislative Assembly since 1986. "He could predict
the number of seats in an election campaign down to one or two.
He used to phone me before an election and say, 'Well, Jim, I
think you guys are going to get 13, or 20,' or whatever it was:
He just had a great ability to sense this stuff."
In the mid-1960s, certain that Mr.
SCHREYER was the key to an
New
Democratic
Party victory in Manitoba, Mr.
ELIASON secured
an agreement from party leader Russ
PAULLEY to resign in favour
of the young member of Parliament. When Sid
GREEN threatened
to thwart his plan by contesting the leadership, he helped Mr.
PAULLEY stave off the challenge. His protégé's ascension to party
leader in 1969, followed by his election later that year as Manitoba's
first New Democratic Party premier, marked the high point of Mr.
ELIASON's career.
Domestically, the long-time bachelor had also found another kind
of perfect candidate: nurse and New Democratic Party supporter
Catherine MacFARLANE, whom he married in 1965.
Mrs. ELIASON's niece, Wanda
OPANUBI, felt Mr.
ELIASON -- the
consummate political organizer -- craved someone who could bring
order to his chaotic home life. "Magnus was the child of the
marriage," she said. "He was not only the husband, but the kid,
and he did need a certain amount of care."
Backed by his wife, Mr.
ELIASON finally realized some of his
most long-standing ambitions. He bought an New Democratic Party
colleague's insurance company and became a respected businessman.
Then, in 1968, he won a seat on Winnipeg City Council representing
a downtown ward. Championing revitalization of the urban core
and the preservation of heritage buildings, he served five terms
before retiring in 1989.
It was the only public office Mr.
ELIASON ever held. Decades
earlier, he had run for alderman in Vancouver, but managed to
repel both poles of the 1940s electorate by defending Japanese
Canadians' right to vote while simultaneously disavowing communism.
"He had a streak of idealism," Mr.
SCHREYER said, "but he often
spoke of the need to temper that with reality. He used the word
a lot: 'reality,' along with 'common sense,' 'logic' and 'analysis.'"
Mr. ELIASON's deference to reality caused the two men -- who
"had a tendency to agree on just about every issue," Mr.
SCHREYER
said -- to disagree on one point. Mr.
SCHREYER believed a party
should never expel its members under any circumstances, especially
on policy, while Mr.
ELIASON thought it was sometimes necessary
for the sake of party unity.
Mr. SCHREYER found it ironic, then, when Mr.
ELIASON started
taking positions contrary to the party line on issues such as
abortion. In recent years, his commanding baritone could often
be heard at New Democratic Party gatherings projecting a sharply
dissident voice. "I know it irritated some folks," Mr.
SCHREYER
said, "but I admired him all the more for it."
The same fearlessness also characterized Mr.
ELIASON as a salesman
and canvasser. He liked to quip, "An adventure lies behind every
door."
Mrs. OPANUBI offered his family's explanation for it: "He couldn't
read expressions on people's faces. So he just kept on going."
Ultimately, Mr.
ELIASON's readiness to come face to face with
anyone or anything nearly killed him. On his business's busiest
day of 1978 -- the province's February deadline for renewing
car insurance -- he was working late into the night at his home
office. "We closed at 6 o'clock," Mr.
MALOWAY said, "but there
would always be people coming by to insure their cars who would
show up at 7, 8, 9 o'clock, and he would help them: He was extremely
customer-friendly and would never turn a customer away."
Hindered by his near-blindness, Mr.
ELIASON inadvertently opened
the door to a gunman, who threatened to kill him unless his wife
handed over their money. The couple survived the experience physically
unharmed but emotionally brutalized.
What happened next was almost as extraordinary. The usually voluble
Mr. ELIASON never spoke of the traumatic incident with anyone
except his niece and business partner. Nor did his Friends detect
even a subtle shift in his personality or political views: On
crime, he continued to argue, as always, for rehabilitation over
retributive justice. And he still opened his door whenever people
came calling.
Magnus ELIASON was born in Arnes, Manitoba, on June 21, 1911.
He died after a brief illness in Winnipeg on November 11, 2005.
He was predeceased by his wife.
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