Gordon Gibson helped shape policy at two levels of government on national unity, electoral reform, Aboriginal issues, and the future of Confederation.
Gordon Gibson liked to say his life was about luck. He celebrated his good fortune in family, friendship, journalism, business – and most of all public life – as if it were all happenstance.
“At life’s end, I won’t be singing ‘I did it my way!’” he wrote in a reflective autobiographical essay in 2022. “It will be a quiet, ‘Thank you, Lady Luck.’”
Mr. Gibson was a formidable presence in the country’s intellectual and political life for a generation. He helped shape policy at two levels of government on national unity, electoral reform, Aboriginal issues, and the future of Confederation. To this he brought passion, honesty and independence.
“Gordon Gibson was a warm, gregarious man of strong opinions and seemingly limitless energy,” says Bob Rae, veteran politician and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. “He never allowed himself to be defined by others – a life force of individualism, commitment to the West and Canada, driven by a commitment to freedom and the well-being of the communities to which he was so attached.”
But there was more than good fortune in Mr. Gibson’s busy, curious, and important life of 86 years. There was hard work and blazing ambition. Sometimes things didn’t go his way. Still, he carried on. And in the end – the very end – he did it his way.
Luck? There was a glorious season in the 1960s in Ottawa. There were two terms in politics in British Columbia. There was business and there were books. There were also five children and two stepchildren in three marriages. His was a large, long life, which ended on Nov. 10.
The unlucky side: divorce, death, defeat, debt and decline. That Mr. Gibson spoke less of those, or not all, is the measure of his gratitude, optimism and resiliency.
Gordon Fulerton Gibson was born in Vancouver on Aug. 23, 1937. Timing was his first stroke of luck; he arrived near the beginning of what he called “perhaps the 50 best years in human history.” His father, Gordon Gibson Sr., made a living lumbering and fishing on the West Coast and became a provincial politician. His mother, Louise (née Bepple), was one of 11 children born on a small farm in eastern Washington.
“We never had any money and never wanted for anything,” he recalled of his childhood with his sister, Louanne.
In high school he was named “most likely to succeed.” At the University of British Columbia, he studied mathematics and physics, which “my brain found extremely easy.”
Then to Harvard, where he studied business (MBA) and the London School of Economics, where he “studied London.” Returning to Vancouver, he formed a company making prefab buildings. It was the first of his ventures in business, some successful, one disastrous.
First, politics. Art Laing, a British Columbian, was named to Lester Pearson’s first cabinet in 1963 as Minister of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. He asked Mr. Gibson to be his special assistant. Mr. Gibson sold his business and moved with his wife, Valerie (née Gauthier), and two children, Michelle and Marc, to Ottawa. A third child, Melissa, arrived in 1964.
In Mr. Laing, Mr. Gibson learned that “one could be scrupulously honest … and a good politician at the same time.” He travelled 800,000 kilometres a year with the minister in propeller aircraft, learning the country.
More luck. In 1967, Marc Lalonde, who was advising Mr. Pearson, ran into Mr. Gibson and suggested he join Pierre Trudeau, then justice minister, who was running for the Liberal leadership. Mr. Gibson became Mr. Trudeau’s special assistant. “Getting to know him was one of the great privileges of my life,” Mr. Gibson recalled. “He was an absolute straight arrow, totally honest. … A magnificent human being.”
Here was the making of a public man. Mr. Gibson joined the Prime Minister’s Office as one of the impressive cadre of “new guys with new ideas,” including Tim Porteous, Jean Le Moyne, Jim Davey, Fernand Cadieux, Ivan Head, and Thomas d’Aquino. “I took an instant liking to the man because of his warm and welcoming manner,” says Mr. d’Aquino. “He was a player in Camelot North. His collegiality was infectious and his judgment sound.”
Mr. Gibson became known as the small “l” liberal idealist in the office, wrote Richard Gwyn, Mr. Trudeau’s biographer. Mr. Gibson produced long memos and was of the few who could get Mr. Trudeau to think about the West. He was known for other things, too. He and Valerie “gave the best parties in Ottawa,” Mr. Gwyn wrote. When Barbra Streisand (who was dating the prime minister) visited Ottawa, Mr. Gibson picked her up at the airport in his two-seater sports car. When Mr. Trudeau secretly married Margaret Sinclair in 1971, Mr. Gibson announced the nuptials.
In 1972, Mr. Gibson returned to Vancouver to run for Parliament. He lost then, and again in 1979 and 1980. Defeat didn’t faze him. In between, he ran provincially. He won a seat in 1974, the sole Liberal in the B.C. legislature.
“I was a threat to no one, and therefore a friend to all. There can be a lot of decent moments in politics,” he remembered. When Mr. Gibson lost the provincial party leadership to Gordon Campbell in 1993, he left politics for good.
Then, journalism. Having been a business columnist for the Vancouver Sun, he began appearing in other newspapers, and finally The Globe and Mail. He recalled writing some “1,000 mini-essays on every subject under the sun. I enjoyed it immensely.”
Out of politics, Mr. Gibson wrote commissioned studies on citizens’ assemblies and the future of the West if Quebec became independent. In 2009, he examined Indigenous affairs in New Look at Canadian Indian Policy: Respect the Collective – Promote the Individual. He called his approach “revolutionary, but threatening to the Indian Industry which took the effective path of ignoring it.”
If his views were provocative, his manner was courteous. “You could disagree and still be treated with respect,” observed Vaughn Palmer, a long-serving columnist with The Sun, heard often from Mr. Gibson, often with humour.
Mr. Gibson was a Liberal, but after politics he was his own man, a commercial and cerebral entrepreneur trading in the frothy marketplace of ideas. In all ways, he was a maverick, eclectic and confident.
He told his readers in 2018: “I am non-partisan. In the last election, let the record show I gave $2,000 to the campaign of NDP MLA Carole James.” Then, to prove a point, Mr. Gibson denounced the NDP’s electoral reform plans.
Mr. Gibson knew the issue well, having run a citizens’ assembly on electoral reform at the request of Mr. Campbell, the Liberal premier. It was “the gold standard for citizens’ assemblies around the world,” Mr. Gibson declared. “I think it would have changed Canadian politics forever, and for the better.”
He was named to the Order of British Columbia in 2008, which called him “a significant contributor to informed public discourse on pubic issues.” He was other things, too: a pilot, a mariner (he owned a 99-year-old converted fishing vessel) and a tinkerer (he’d try to fix anything, from automobiles to democracy).
He remained a free spirit but on electoral reform, as in Indigenous affairs, he didn’t always get his way. There was an unruliness to him that was his great strength, friends said, but limited his success.
For him, business, like politics, could be erratic. A large investment in commercial real estate went bad. He declared bankruptcy, but in time, he recovered.
His marriage to Valerie ended in divorce. His second wife, Kilby, died in 2009. They had two children, Paige and Adrian. He found love, again, with Jane Baynham, and her two children, Kelsey and David. The couple were together a dozen years, travelling widely and sailing. He cherished his 12 grandchildren.
Earlier this year, his heart began to fail. He was often weak and listless. And yet, he told Ms. Baynham, his last six months among family were the happiest of his life, because, she says, “his world narrowed and he loved the people in it.”
In November, he chose medical assistance in dying. The family gathered at his bedside. As he slipped away, he asked how long it would take the sedative to act. He wanted to know how many more words he could form, Ms. Baynham says, each one an expression of love.