Pat McGeer has had three notable careers
Vancouver fixture has been a basketball star, provincial cabinet minister and university researcher
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
The McGeer family has been a fixture in Vancouver since the 1880s, when Irish immigrant James McGeer settled in Mt. Pleasant.
He was known as Big Jim, and had a personality to match his size — he was constantly in the papers arguing over politics.
He passed on his love of politics to his son Gerry, a fiery orator who was Vancouver’s mayor for several years during the Great Depression.
Both James and Gerry died relatively young — James at 58 and Gerry at 59. But the third McGeer to achieve local fame has been luckier — Pat McGeer turns 90 on June 29.
Pat is Gerry’s nephew and Big Jim’s grandson. He hasn’t just excelled in one career, he’s had three.
His first brush with fame was as a basketball star. He was on a UBC team that beat the Harlem Globetrotters in 1946, and on the Canadian team at the 1948 London Olympics.
Most British Columbians will remember him as a politician. He was elected a Liberal MLA in 1962, and at one point was provincial leader. When Dave Barrett’s NDP upset W.A.C. Bennett’s Socreds in 1972, he was among three Liberals who defected to the Socreds, forming a new right-wing coalition in power from 1975 to 1991.
McGeer was a prominent member of several Socred cabinets between 1976 and 1986, at various times serving as minister of Education, Universities, Science, Communications and International Trade.
Like his uncle Gerry, Pat McGeer wasn’t afraid of controversy. He made big changes to ICBC, criticized the federal government’s plan to push Canadian content through the CRTC, and advocated building a bridge to Vancouver Island.
In 1986, he left politics to return to his old job in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. But he had never really left — he’d been going in on weekends throughout his political years to do research.
According to his bio on the McGeer and Associates laboratory website, during his time in politics McGeer “produced some 150 scientific papers and the first edition of the Molecular Biology of the Mammalian Brain with Sir John Eccles and Edith McGeer.”
Edith is Pat’s wife, and a renowned researcher at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. The McGeers have authored 760 scientific publications, and in 1995 were given a lifetime achievement award by the Science Council of British Columbia.
They are still working. According to their website, “they now direct the Kinsmen Laboratory research program to eliminate dementia, sponsored by the Pacific Alzheimer Research Foundation program.”