Hello, I'm Mark, Evelyn's youngest child.

You've heard about various aspects of my mother's life from my brother and sisters so I'd like to share another facet with you - Evelyn's intense sense of social justice.

This manifested itself in much of her work both within the church and through other organizations and rapidly gained momentum once her children were grown and more of her time became her own.

The cause I remember most vividly was her work helping to settle newly arrived immigrants in Ottawa. These new Canadians hailed from Vietnam, Somalia and many other countries. When they arrived, my mother and her colleagues helped them work through the bureaucracy, acquire apartments and furniture and a myriad of other activities to ease their transition in a strange, often inscrutable new country. Evelyn was also often among their first Canadian friends and I know she valued these new friendships.

My mother's social justice took many other forms as well. She made presentations to Parliamentary committees on issues ranging from nuclear disarmament to opposing legislation enshrining plant breeder's rights. On many occasions she could often be seen on Parliament Hill protesting government policies which she believed to be dangerous or unfair.

Some of the organizations or issues which Evelyn was involved with included:

  - world federalism
  - Ten Days for World Development
  - Amnesty International
  - women's rights
  - peace and the environment

Research for her many causes consumed endless hours of making charts and displays, writing speeches, articles and briefings and engaging in conversation with hundreds of others of like-minded people. She was at the church on many evenings working with her colleagues, briefing them on the latest developments and sharing her insights.

I can't count the number of evenings that I came home to find my mother either up at the church or seated at the dining room table, her work spread out before her as she developed strategies and materials to advance her causes.

My mother's overwhelming desire to do the right thing spread into family life as well. She and my father were among the first recyclers in Ottawa, transporting glass and metal to one of the handful of depots set up around the city.

She embraced health food when it was still a fringe movement, baking with whole grains, cutting back on sugar and using the most unprocessed ingredients she could find. Sometimes the results weren't great culinary successes, but we all knew we were eating healthy.

I suppose you could say my mother was a progressive - an activist who was ahead of her time who took responsibility for furthering causes that may not have been mainstream or even popular at the time. Her selfless attitude is due in no small measure to her faith. But it is also a reflection of her upbringing as the child of Canadians who traveled to China to spread the gospel, of someone who knew great hardship during the Great Depressions and as a young woman whose fiancé spent most of World War II incarcerated in prison camps.

It's this aspect of my mother that gives me great pride, recognizing in retrospect what an incredible role model she was for someone finding his way in the world. No one can ever say she didn't try to right injustices wherever she saw them. This planet and its inhabitants regardless of race, creed or gender are all the richer for her presence among us for so many years.

Mark