Margaret Lidkea estimates she spends more than 1,000 hours every year spreading the joy of the outdoors to area schoolchildren.
The 78-year-old, who will receive an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Victoria on June 11 for her commitment to environmental stewardship, grew up in a small postwar home in Victoria’s Oaklands neighbourhood at a time when Gordon Head was still filled with farms and the Cedar Hill Golf Course was a natural wetland.
“Our mums would pack lunches for us, and we would take off and be told to come home at 5 p.m.,” she said, adding kids on her street would wander to natural areas like Mount Tolmie and Bowker Creek.
Lidkea said her passion for plants and animals stems from those free-roaming childhood days, many of which were spent playing in groves of Garry oaks.
That passion led her to study zoology at the University of B.C. She worked as a lab technician in Manitoba after graduating but eventually wound up being a teacher in Delta.
“I found that I didn’t like the isolation of working in a lab,” Lidkea said.
After taking a career break to raise her three daughters, Lidkea had to decide whether to go back to school or continue teaching children about nature.
She soon found herself running a popular preschool nature program at the Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary.
“Getting kids outside, having them have wonderful experiences, and learning to love the land … I feel that’s very important for healthy minds and bodies,” she said. “It’s really important that people feel that they are a part of the natural world. We are all a part of the ecosystems that we exist in.”
She also began working on environmental restoration in Uplands Park and Anderson Hill in 1992.
“I started with the Girl Guides, and then the Boy Scouts came along,” she said. “I now work with pretty much all the kids in Oak Bay, all the schools [who] are involved in restoration of natural areas.
“The Garry oak ecosystem is globally endangered, and it needs the help of everybody in the community to become healthier.”
Following her retirement in 2009, Lidkea co-founded Friends of Uplands Park, a group that regularly engages in ecological restoration, earning a spot on Oak Bay’s wall of fame in 2021.
Lidkea is one of three people receiving honorary degrees from UVic this year.
Retired lawyer Eloise Spitzer, who will receive an honorary law degree on June 12, was a founding member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and successfully litigated Canada’s first Charter case.
The case, filed at the Whitehorse courthouse on April 17, 1985, overturned a Yukon law that required a woman to have her husband’s consent before changing her surname. Her client was Suzanne Bertrand, a French-Canadian teacher working in the Yukon who wanted to retain her name after marriage.
“It was actually a fairly simple case,” said Spitzer.
The Oak Bay resident said she was inspired to become a lawyer after her father, who was jailed in the U.S. on suspicion of being a communist during the McCarthy era, was defended by lawyers on a pro-bono basis before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“My parents were left-wing, they were not communist, but they got caught up in all of that,” she said, adding her family moved to Canada shortly thereafter. “They instilled that sense of justice in me, to advocate for those around me who are less privileged.”
Spitzer was a long-time public servant in B.C. and the Yukon and also a former CEO of the Yukon Energy and Development corporations.
She’s been an advocate for legal aid, which helps people access lawyers and the justice system regardless of income, having assisted in legal-aid efforts in three Canadian legal jurisdictions over more than four decades.
Spitzer continues to serve on the board of Legal Aid B.C., despite having stage four cancer.
The third recipient, Prof. James Carley, will receive an honorary doctor of letters degree on June 13.
Carley, a medievalist who holds a Distinguished Research Professor position at York University in Toronto, is a scholar in book history, manuscript culture and medieval libraries.
Born and raised in Victoria, Carley was the first Canadian to head one of 111 historic livery companies in London, England (a livery is similar to a guild, historically tied to work such as haberdashery or goldsmithing, although modern versions mostly do charity work).
He remains an honorary assistant of the court in the Worshipful Company of Barbers and Surgeons, established in 1163.
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