on Canadian affairs to the president of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas. Pamela Wallin continued flying to New York for three days’ work a week from Toronto, and then from Ottawa after becoming a senator in 2008. This pattern was maintained for two more years, as she continued to hold this position while also working as a parliamentarian. As a senator, of course, she was also now flying to other spots in Canada and abroad — as she had always done with CTV and CBC — to pursue her work.
Wallin not only lived on airplanes but found this form of travel ideal for her habitual networking with our country’s movers and shakers. She also used flights as her airborne office. “As I settled in for my third flight of the week,” she wrote in 2009 for her Foreword to a book I was publishing of Patricia M. Boyer’s newspaper columns, “I found that rare moment of quiet and calm, and therefore the opportunity to peruse a collection of columns written by my friend Patrick Boyer’s mother.” Pamela Wallin penned a reflective and uplifting message for the book. The quality of her effort was matched by her generosity in reading the manuscript and adding her prominent name to The March of Days: Optimistic Realism through the Seasons of Life, in tribute to a fellow woman journalist with Saskatchewan roots, my mother.
Her capacity for work overwhelmed many people. Sometimes I thought Wallin should just take a break and sort out her priorities. She seemed to be doing so much and, being constantly on the go, raced against herself as much as the clock. But this pattern was deep-seated. At university, she’d been involved in so many projects that “my life was one unending blur.” In broadcasting, she’d rise in the middle of the night to prepare the early morning telecast. In the urgency of her stop-watch-tight routines, Wallin’s need for efficiency often led her to say to others, “I’ll do it myself.” She knew how because over her career she’d learned just about every task that journalism incorporates, and she understood it would be fastest in the brief time available to complete something crucial — check a source, cue up some audio — herself. But often, colleagues instead heard her to be saying, “I can do it better than you.” She could perform miracles, yet sometimes in an off-putting way.
In July 2006, completing her half-decade mission as consul general in New York, Wallin joined the board of Gluskin Sheff & Associates, a small but prosperous Bay Street investment and wealth management firm. The following month she became a director of Bell Globemedia, multimedia owner of the Globe and Mail newspaper and CTV television network. In 2007, she added the Calgary-based exploration company Oilsands Quest, Inc. to her roster of directorships. In March 2007, she became Chancellor of the University of Guelph. In 2008, adding a couple more corporate directorships, Wallin joined the board of Porter Airlines and Jade Tower, an antenna site and tower company. She became a member of the advisory board of BMO Harris Bank, and the board of an obscure entity called Ideas Council. With income and honorariums from these many positions, Wallin was financially very comfortable.
She worked just as hard in charitable organizations for which she received no payment, co-chairing the National Strategy Council for the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, and other volunteer boards such as the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. She became a volunteer member of the Advisory Council of Breakout Educational Network, a non-profit public policy organization that I’d founded in 1995 with Manitoban Kitson Vincent.
Along the way, Wallin garnered some fourteen honorary doctorates and fifteen national and international awards, including being inducted into the Canadian Broadcasting Hall of Fame, receiving a national Visionary Award, being awarded the Toastmasters’ “Golden Gavel,” and twice being recognized by Queen Elizabeth for her public service and achievements.
If Canada had a celebrity, it was Pamela Wallin. Her work in New York had added an important international affairs component to her already impressive life. In 2007, Prime Minister Harper asked her to serve as a member of his independent advisory panel on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, a high-level group chaired by John Manley. Their work concluded in 2008. In February that year, Pamela Wallin was inducted into the Order of Canada, our country’s highest civilian honour.
By year end, Prime Minister Harper asked Pamela Wallin if she believed in Senate reform. When she said “Yes,” he invited her to become a member of his Conservative caucus as a senator. The people of Wadena took even greater pride in seeing her name on their water tower.
Born November 11 in 1974 in the Québec town of Maniwaki, Patrick Brazeau grew up off-reserve with his father, Marcel, an Aboriginal Canadian, living over his father’s grocery store, Dépanneur Brazeau.
Originally, Maniwaki was on land that formed part of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Reserve, where Patrick’s grandmother had been born, a full-status Algonquin Indian. Since then, the municipality had been carved out of the reserve and developed adjacent to it. When Patrick’s grandmother fell in love with a non-native and married him, she was forced off the reserve. The Indian Act stipulated that native women who married non-natives forfeited their Indian status and had to quit their reserved homeland. The policy was designed to contain Indians, not see them multiply in number. She was, to Canadian law, no longer an Indian.
In 1985, the Mulroney government amended the Indian Act to end this discrimination against Indian women. Among the many thousands touched by this reform was the Brazeau family in Maniwaki. The Indian Act change applied not only to Indian women but their families, too. Eleven years after he’d been born Algonquin, Patrick Brazeau became an Indian in law as well as in fact.
Patrick’s father did not want to move back to the reserve because he had his store in town and was conveniently settled in Maniwaki. The Kitigan Zibi reserve is large. It borders on Maniwaki at its southwest edge, is bounded along its western edge by the Eagle River, the Desert River to its north, and the Gatineau River on its east, making the heavily forested 184 square kilometers, with its many lakes and streams, the biggest Algonquin Nation in Canada, both in area and in population. Today, about half of Kitigan Zibi’s three thousand members live off the reserve, while the others enjoy a well-developed community of grocery stores and hardware markets, a gas station, elementary and secondary schools with a library accessible to all, and gift shops. The reserve’s sense of oneness is further strengthened by a local radio station, a day-care facility, the community hall, a health centre, police department, youth centre, the wildlife centre, and an educational and cultural centre.
As a young person growing up in Maniwaki, Patrick would daydream about his life and future, but in 1985 he had to confront a defining reality he faced as an Indian in Canada. He’d been an Algonquin non-status Indian living off reserve one day, and the next, because of Parliament’s change to the Indian Act, he’d become an Algonquin status Indian living off reserve. The rights he’d acquired overnight imparted a lesson in absurdity to young Patrick. Its impact would become manifest over the coming two decades, in his radical reinterpretation of established Canadian policy governing Aboriginal peoples.
Part of young Brazeau’s view resulted from the fact his theoretical upgrade in legal status meant next to nothing in real terms. The Government of Canada funded the system of reserves, and, generally speaking, chiefs within that structure along with their families and supporters were among the principal beneficiaries. Off-reserve natives like the Brazeaus, despite now gaining Indian status, were effectively excluded from this system and its financial benefits. Few spoke up for off-reserve natives, despite the fact they considerably outnumber their on-reserve counterparts. If democracy incorporated majority rule, and if fair government provided the greatest good for the greatest number, then the Indian Act system, in Patrick Brazeau’s eyes, was neither democratic nor fair.
Patrick could do nothing about the situation at the time, though, and so he simply lived his life. He became fluent in Algonquin, French, and English. Strong and athletic, he played hockey and trained in karate. After graduating from local schools, Patrick went to Ottawa and enrolled at HMCS Carleton, a unit of the Canadian Forces Naval Reserve, which each year trains about 230 sailors. Next, he completed studies in social sciences at Gatineau’s
