bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001) — Fall 2001 // Automne 2001, p. 28
Friday, 31st August, 2001, St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, Ottawa
Iknew Sandy as a colleague, as an amateur musician and as a family man, but above all, I knew him as a friend
We first met nearly forty years ago at a party in New Edinburgh. I particularly remember my first exposure to his blazing intellect—strongly held opinions well-defended by rows of good arguments, and flashing eyes!
Sandy was, I am told, the sort of student who would lounge casually through his course work, and only at the last possible minute produce a brilliant term paper, and then with effortless ease, ace the final examination. This is how, I am told, he won the History Prize that year at Queen’s. From these early days, it was evident that he was looking for a cause to which he could devote his life. He found it, as did many of us here today, in the Department of External Affairs, now Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
After his post-graduate studies in economics at Cambridge, he returned to Ottawa as a junior officer in the Department, where we resumed our friendship.
As a colleague, Sandy was admired for his willingness, indeed his eagerness, to tackle the tough issues and difficult challenges like the Russian language. He served on his first posting with great distinction in Moscow. This was during the deepest, most frozen part of the cold war. He had to contend with many powerful forces well beyond his control, including the visit to his post of a new and demanding Prime Minister.
Sandy’s professional interests shifted gradually over the years — from socialist economics in the USSR, to resource economics in Australia, to trade policy in Geneva, to concerns in recent years about the environment. He felt passionately about environmental issues, worked on them assiduously and communicated the depth of his concern to others very effectively. He was always sending me e-mail on climate change, global warming, desertification and hazardous substances. He sent me some verses of his own composition on deforestation. He was driven by intuition as much as by reason on these questions. He sensed their importance well before they became matters of everyday concern to us all.
Sandy would not want us to underestimate the importance which he placed on the environment. Let me mention, therefore, the lead items on CBC TV and CBC radio on August 27, the day he died: winding up of the Walkerton Inquiry arsenic contamination and toxic soil in Cape Breton
• radioactive contamination leaking into Lake Ontario
• thallium poisoning in Trail, B.C.
• the West Nile virus, and • the fisheries dispute at Burnt Church, New Brunswick. Sandy would not have been surprised by any of this. He felt with his whole person that our exploitation of the natural environment was unsustainable. He felt that the successful resolution of this issue was the most important and the most urgent on the human agenda. I never heard Sandy swear or say a mean word about anyone. He was the enemy of waste and extravagance in any form — in the Government of Canada, in his office, or in his home. He liked things to be correct, decent, properly in order, efficient. If, as some people think, efficiency is the great if unrecognized Canadian virtue, then Sandy was a most virtuous Canadian.
He could be frustrating sometimes, in determined pursuit of his self-given goals, but he was a total stranger to guile. He was intolerant only of woolly thinking, and bad drafting.
He felt bound by the duties he had freely chosen and accepted as an officer in the Canadian diplomatic service, and by his obligations as a husband and father.
I will remember Sandy as he looked when we first met: dapper, independent, vigorous in the extreme, tremendously bright, brimming over with good humour, enthusiasm and intuition about the future. He was capable, loyal, musical, modest about his accomplishments, and friendly — to me and to those of us who were lucky to know him.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001) — Fall 2001 // Automne 2001, p. 28. Read the rest of this issue →
