B.C. has lost a great advocate for children’s well-being
B.C. lost one of its finest champions for the rights and the well-being of children with the death of former Province reporter Barbara McLintock.
I first met Barb in the early 1980s when she visited her father Peter, the renowned editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, and her brilliant grammatically correct mother Ruth because my baby daughter Juel and I were their neighbours. When I was appointed B.C. ombudsman in 1992, I had the good fortune to see Barb in a whole new light. I became the direct benefactor of her work on a story about the abuse of children at Jericho Hill School, the provincial residential school for children who were blind and deaf. Her incredible journalistic instincts led to an ombuds investigation, leading to a report being tabled in the legislative assembly.
If it were not for Barb, that story may have taken many more decades to be discovered, delaying righting the wrongs done to the children victims. Her stories informed my later work on Canada’s delegation to assist in drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Barb went on to accomplish many other wonderful things journalistically, as a coroner, and in her volunteer work for the Girl Guides. I will remember Barb most for her unpretentious aptitude for doing what was right and moral that helped lay a brick in the foundation for the rights of children and adults with disabilities in B.C. and around the world, in a way, sadly, that she may not even have been aware.
— Dulcie McCallum, former B.C. Ombudsman