Woman, 111, believed oldest Canadian
‘She’s got a great sense of humour’
The joyful spirit that comes with Christmas will arrive two days early this year at a Vancouver Island hospital, where Canada’s oldest known citizen — U.S.-born, Saskatchewan-raised Merle Barwis — will turn 112 years old on Sunday.
If the small gathering of family members planned for this weekend is anything like the 111th birthday party held last year at the Priory Hospital in Langford, B.C., Barwis will take a few swigs of beer and share some laughs with nurses and several generations of her offspring, including 66-yearold grandson (and ale supplier) Richard Barwis from nearby Sooke.
“We’re not doing a big thing, but the family will definitely be there,” he told Postmedia News. “Mentally, she’s pretty sharp. Her eyesight’s gone a little bit and hearing’s gone a little bit. But you can sit down and talk to her, get her talking about the old days. She’s got a great sense of humour.”
That Merle Barwis will reach her remarkable mile- stone in Greater Victoria is particularly appropriate; the B.C. capital was named for the famous queen who ruled for 64 years in pre- and post-Confederation Canada — a woman who knew something about longevity herself.
And Barwis is believed to be this country’s last Victorian — the only person alive in Canada today who was born during Queen Victoria’s reign, an era that ended with the great monarch’s death at age 81 on Jan. 22, 1901.
That was one month after Barwis came into the world — as Merle Emeline Stedwell — on Dec. 23, 1900, in Des Moines, Iowa. As a toddler, she emigrated north and west with her family to the Canadian prairies, settling as homesteaders in Saskatchewan even before it became a province in 1905.
Raised on a horse ranch that her father established at Abbey, Sask., her future husband — ranch hand Dewey Barwis — won her heart and her father’s grudging approval by breaking an unruly filly.
“There was a horse called Blue Jay and nobody could ride her,” she told an interviewer in 2010. “If you got on her she’d go over backwards.” Dewey Barwis, however, “got on and he could ride her.”
The couple married in 1923; he worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway and they raised three children in rural Saskatchewan.
“Some of her favourite memories are of riding horses,” said Richard Barwis. “She was a real cowgirl, for sure.”
As retirement and grandchildren came, Merle and Dewey Barwis moved to B.C. and into a house in Sooke next to one of their sons (Richard’s father), living there for about 15 years before Dewey died in 1966.
Many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren followed, and Merle Barwis’s direct descendants now number about 40. She finally moved to a nursing home in Sooke about a decade a go and later to the long-term-care hospital in Langford.
“If you’re old you’re old, if you’re young you’re young. What can you do about it?” Barwis said two years ago, when she was first identified as B.C’s oldest person. “If every year I get a year older, you can’t do anything about it. You might as well just go along with it.”
Barwis became Canada’s oldest person on April 18 upon the death of 113-year-old Cora Hansen of Medicine Hat. Hailed at the time by Alberta Premier Alison Redford as a “true Alberta pioneer,” Hansen was born in Minnesota before becoming part of the same stream of prairie pioneers that also drew Barwis’s family to Canada.