Hon. Paula Simons: Honourable senators, I never knew Joyce Fairbairn but, as a fellow Albertan and a fellow journalist, I’m grateful for this opportunity to honour her memory.

Joyce Fairbairn was born on November 6, 1939, at the old Galt Hospital in Lethbridge. I mention that because the building is today the Galt Museum & Archives thanks, in part, to her vision and to the funding she secured for the project.

Her father, Lynden Eldon Fairbairn, was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. He was later a Crown prosecutor, a judge and an active Liberal. Indeed, he sat as a Liberal candidate for Lethbridge in the 1935 and 1940 federal elections, which he lost to a Social Credit incumbent.

Lynden Fairbairn died in a riding accident in 1946, not long after Joyce’s sixth birthday, so she was raised primarily by her widowed mother Mary.

She landed her first job in journalism while she was still a high school student, writing a column for the Lethbridge Herald called “Teen Chatter.” She earned a BA in English literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and then headed to Ottawa to take a degree in journalism at Carleton University.

A true journalism pioneer, she was the first woman to be a member of the Ottawa press gallery where she worked until 1970 when she joined the staff of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

Others have spoken about her accomplishments as a political staffer and a senator, about her work as a champion of the Paralympic movement and of literacy charities.

Let me talk about the way Lethbridge will remember Morning Bird Woman as she was named by the Kainai First Nation when they inducted her as an honourary chief in 1990.

In Lethbridge, they remember Joyce Fairbairn as a politician who showed up to public events, parades and festivals, large and small; as someone who fiercely championed their city and region; as someone respected by politicians from across the political spectrum and from every order of government.

David Carpenter, who was mayor of Lethbridge from 1986 to 2001, spoke to the Lethbridge Herald after Joyce Fairbairn’s death.

I remember every year she used to do as many of the parades in the surrounding towns as humanly possible and then come back and smile all through the city’s Canada Day ceremonies. A ferocious speaker, never using notes, she could capture your attention even if you were one of a thousand listening.

David Carpenter added, “My biggest nightmare was to find out that I was scheduled to speak after her.”

In the end, Joyce Fairbairn’s memory failed her in the most treacherous and tragic of ways. But in Lethbridge, her memory will endure as a blessing for generations to come.