Former RCMP officer from Gatineau led a full life
Manitoba-born Métis was police officer, soldier, family man and vegetable farmer
Guy Lafrenière believed in the value of hard work and in the pursuit of adventure.
They were the guideposts of a life that saw him take over his uncle's Manitoba farm while still a boy, enlist in the RCAF during the Second World War and join the RCMP.
For 50 years, he lived in Gatineau, where he raised seven children with his wife, Rosemary, while managing a large vegetable garden and a bird farm with more than 1,000 pheasants. Proud of his Métis heritage, he was a skilled hunter and trapper in addition to being fluently bilingual.
He earned his first university degree by taking night classes, learned to fly an airplane in his 50s and graduated with his second degree — in legal studies — from Carleton University at the age of 73. He climbed trees into his 80s to trim and fell them.
Lafrenière died last month at the Perley and Rideau Veterans' Health Centre months after recovering from COVID-19. He was 96.
“He was always busy,” said his daughter, Aline.
His daughter, Lorraine, said, “I think he got the most out of life. He was so bound and determined not to have any regrets.”
“Once he got an idea in his head, there was no stopping him,” said his son, Pat. “He had a pioneer's spirit.”
Born in Swan Lake, Man., on May 19, 1925, the third of five children, Lafrenière's character was forged by the Great Depression. At the age of 13, he was sent away from home to work the farm of an uncle who had died suddenly. “It was a life-altering event for him, but he was the oldest boy in the family and he had to contribute,” said Lorraine.
At 18, he enlisted in the RCAF and trained as a heavy bomber crew member.
After the war, he moved to Toronto and joined the police. While in the city, his sister introduced him to an acquaintance, Rosemary Dunn. The first time he was invited to Dunn's home for dinner, Lafrenière presented her mother with a 50-pound sack of potatoes to endear himself.
The couple married and moved to Gatineau after Lafrenière secured a job with the RCMP. He would spend most of the next 22 years working in the National Capital Region, where he served on security details for then prime minister John Diefenbaker and governor general Georges Vanier.
He told people that he never saw Diefenbaker as worried as he was in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States and Russia faced off over Soviet missiles being installed on the Caribbean island. Lafrenière was assigned the night detail at 24 Sussex Dr. and stationed in the kitchen.
“He (Diefenbaker) wasn't sleeping much,” Lafrenière later told Citizen columnist Dave Brown. “Often in the middle of the night, he would come to me and ask, `Do you think there's going to be a war?' He didn't wait for an answer.”
Lafrenière once drew his service revolver while on duty at the prime minister's residence after a persistent raccoon kept scratching at the back door. Fortunately, he didn't shoot the masked animal since he later learned that Diefenbaker's wife, Olive, fed the raccoon and considered it a pet.
In April 1967, Lafrenière was one of four RCMP officers who accompanied veterans of the Battle of Vimy Ridge to France to mark the 50th anniversary. He said it was among the most stirring moments of his life: “As the vets marched onto the Vimy Memorial, the cheers from the crowd were hair-raising, especially from the old French veterans,” he wrote of the moment.
Lafrenière worked in the RCMP's fraud section and its bomb disposal unit, and was called upon to investigate suspicious mail packages during the FLQ crisis.
He retired as a staff sergeant in the mid-1970s, and went to work in government before turning to tree cutting and truck driving. All the while, he tended his one-acre lot, which at various times played host to pheasants, quail, ducks, chickens and cows.
Lafrenière enlisted his seven children in the chores. Lorraine remembers having to weed two garden rows first thing every morning, and being paid 25 cents for each pail of rocks she collected.
“I remember being frustrated he made me work so hard, but I thank him for it now: He showed me discipline. I attribute so much of who I am to his approach,” said Lorraine Lafrenière, CEO of the Coaching Association of Canada.
Pat Lafrenière slept in the basement of the house with his two brothers and remembers his father regularly waking them by starting his chainsaw. “If we didn't get up, he'd come and throw water on us,” said Pat, who recently retired as an Ottawa constable. “My dad was a hard ass, but he was a good father.”
He was also gregarious, fair and generous, his children say. Lafrenière died in late June after just two days in bed.