Journalist was nobody’s Girl Friday
Virginia Byfield was no-nonsense midwife of prairie conservatism
Virginia Byfield, reporter, editor, teacher, historian and modern-day Christian crusader, died Monday of cancer at the age of 85. They called her Ginger, an apt nickname for a woman who could be sharp, fierce and fiery in pursuit of her truth. Her husband, Ted Byfield, generally gets credit for founding Alberta Report magazine, for being the godfather of Canada’s modern Conservative movement. But she was his equal co-founder, the editor who whipped two generations of raw reporters into shape, the no-nonsense midwife of western conservative thought.
“It’s like a bloody thunderclap, when you realize the partner you’ve had so, so long, isn’t going to be there,” says Ted Byfield.
“She was the one who was whipping me, to a larger extent than anyone knew. I don’t think I wrote more than a couple of stories in the last 40 years that she didn’t edit.”
“Everybody assumed she was saintly, and the restraining hand. But she would give him some of his most dangerous and demented ideas,” jokes their son, journalist-turned-politician Link Byfield. “She would steer from the helm, and he loved her for that. He had endless respect for her. He never forgot who she was.”
She was born Virginia Luella Nairn in Albuquerque, N.M., the daughter of a Canadian mother and an American father. When the marriage ended, young Virginia moved to Nova Scotia, where she was raised by her mother’s relatives in a lumber town. There, she learned to swear like a lumberjack, and developed her tough sense of humour.
Then her mother remarried into a wealthy Ottawa family, and her daughter was suddenly part of a world of finishing schools and debutante balls. To her mother’s despair, she refused to make a debut, or a society marriage. She won classics scholarships to the University of Toronto, where she studied economics and political science, worked for the campus Communist newspaper, and dated a CCF activist.
At 19, she got a summer job at the Ottawa Journal. There, she met 20-year-old cub reporter Ted Byfield.
“I had never before seen such an absolutely charming woman,” he recalls. “She wasn’t beautiful in the usual sense, but she was very goodlooking. I was just taken with her. She was very literate. She could quote poetry.”
When she returned to the U of T, he quit his job and followed her to Toronto. When he couldn’t find work as a reporter there, he took a job at the Timmins Daily Press. She decided to drop out of school and apply for a job at his paper. Their editor, worried about a scandalous office romance, told the young couple they’d have to get married. So between the first and second editions, they rushed to the United Church manse for a 20-minute ceremony. They stayed married 65 years, sharing passions for sailing, history, political debate, and later, their rediscovered Christian faith.
She was never anybody’s Girl Friday.
In her writing, she vehemently opposed feminism and championed family values. Yet she worked through most of her married life, raising six kids while a reporter and photographer with the CBC and a private school teacher.
“She sure didn’t fit the stereotypical suburban ideal,” says Link Byfield. “She was never a very expressive person to the kids. She was not a demonstrative mother. We loved our mom, but she didn’t want us all giving her Mother’s Day presents. She distrusted sentimentality quite a lot.”
In 1973, the couple started St. John’s Edmonton Report, which grew into Alberta Report, a magazine with a pro-Christian, pro-life, point of view. Staff, though, hailed from varied ideological perspectives. While Ted was out raising funds and the magazine’s profile, Ginger, cigarette in hand, handled the nitty-gritty.
“When she edited your copy, she would go right to the point,” says Mark Stevenson, now editor of Maclean’s Magazine. “If there was a hole in your story, she would zero in on it — and look at you like you were an idiot.”
“She was the crustiest editor I ever had,” recalls Paul Bunner, later a Stephen Harper speechwriter. “She beat up my copy when I was young and green, and taught me to be tight and direct, and those were very valuable lessons.”
She also captained some of the magazine’s more ferocious and unrelenting moral crusades against everything from changes to the Anglican liturgy to what the magazine insisted on calling sodomy. She once sent me out on an assignment to take down a young cabinet minister, whom she deemed too liberal. Her target? Jim Dinning, later a darling of the right.
“She was by nature very conservative, but she came out fighting on its side,” says Ted Byfield. “She could be argued out of a thing, but she couldn’t be pressured out of a thing, just because everyone else was against it.”
The couple also co-edited a series of popular histories of Alberta, and later, a massive history of the Christian faith. In 2007, they suffered a terrible loss, when their daughter Philippa died after a fire that severely damaged their home. But Virginia Byfield carried on writing and editing, right to the end.
She was a difficult, contradictory, exasperating and extraordinary woman — tough, smart, a disciplined writer, dedicated to her principles. We agreed on almost nothing, politically, religiously or ideologically. But she was a role model, a woman who demanded to be judged on her work, not her gender; who never backed away from a fight; who never surrendered her beliefs because it would be popular or easy.
Her funeral will take place at 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Herman’s Orthodox Church. There will be no eulogies. No sentimentality. No modern innovations. Just what Virginia Byfield would have wanted.