Dewar was human rights champion
Two years after his death, tribute salutes Dewar's dedication to human rights
Two years ago, a goodbye message was posted on Paul Dewar's Facebook page.
“It is easy sometimes to feel overwhelmed by the gravity of the challenges we face,” wrote Dewar, who died at the age of 56, a year after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
“The secret is not to focus on how to solve the problem, but concentrate on what you can contribute — to your country, your community and neighbours.”
As Alex Neve, former secretary-general for Amnesty International Canada, pointed out Saturday at a virtual tribute event for Dewar, this parting piece of advice “feels like such a mantra for these times.”
Neve pointed to some of the immense challenges that exist in the world: the inequalities laid bare by COVID -19, the need to address systemic racism, failure to advance reconciliation with Indigenous people, the Myanmar coup, muzzling of free expression in Russia … the list went on.
“Paul's sage words point us in the right direction. Not that we somehow need to each have all of the answers and feel that we should and can personally and directly solve those problems, but that we have an important contribution to make and certainly the power to make a difference.”
Saturday's tribute to Dewar, the New Democrat MP for Ottawa Centre from 2006 to 2015, was organized by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, with a focus on Dewar's dedication to championing those rights.
Neve, one of the guest speakers and himself an Ottawa Centre resident, remembered receiving a call at Amnesty from Dewar shortly after his election in 2006. The two hadn't met, “but it was a top priority for him to let me know that he was in the House (of Commons), and I still remember his words. He said he intended to be an MP for human rights.”
In the time that followed, Neve would come to Dewar with concerns about Canadians imprisoned abroad or family members agonized over the fate of loved ones, and Dewar, “always had the time, made the time, shared the time. Quite frankly, I don't know where he found the time.”
And Dewar's concern wasn't limited to constituents, Neve said. He brought up the case of Bashir Makhtal, subjected to 11 years of unjust imprisonment in Ethiopia. Neither he nor his family had any connection to Ottawa Centre, but Dewar became “one of the most steadfast voices in pressing for his freedom.”
Neve recalled his friend as a man of action who worked to establish an all-party Parliamentary group for the prevention of genocide and other crimes against humanity and introduced private member's legislation targeting trade in conflict minerals.
Former NDP leader Tom Mulcair, another tribute speaker, recalled the day he watched, gobsmacked, as his colleague walked over to Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, chatting and smiling and pulling photos out of his pocket — they had sons in hockey.
After Mulcair gave Dewar a look saying, “What was that about,” he recalled, “He goes, `Tom. Sometimes a hockey dad is just a hockey dad.' ”
For Mulcair, it was a moment that spoke to “the happy warrior that was Paul Dewar.”
Roméo Dallaire, former Canadian senator and leader of the United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide, said Dewar wasn't a parliamentarian who delegated essential face-toface meetings to staff.
Instead he would bring them along.
“He wanted to educate, he wanted to inform the younger crowd, the ones around him, he wanted to build in them that same feu sacré (sacred fire) that he had for human beings and the concept that all humans were equal and that only through respect (would we) be able to achieve, ultimately, peace and security.”
Dallaire said later: “I have not come to grips with the loss of a magnificent man. Of a magnificent human, who was well beyond himself.”