She mastered Japanese during the Second World War to work in Intelligence for the Allies.
In only five years in Parliament, she played a critical role in the implementation of the Canada Pension Plan and Medicare, while also managing the Centennial celebrations.
How about… she was also instrumental in establishing the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which brought massive changes to gender equality.
She was one of a kind.
As the only woman in a federal cabinet, she became known for her blunt honesty and biting comments.
And retirement didn’t slow her down.
She wrote three books, defended LGBTQ rights in landmark cases and hosted her own show on CBC Radio.
She was a force of nature, but that description barely does her justice.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are talking about the woman who called herself a bird in a gilded cage,
This is the story of… Judy LaMarsh!
Judy LaMarsh entered the world five days before Christmas1924.
At the time of her birth, the right to vote had been available to most women for only a few years, and they were still not considered persons in British North America.
That would change when LaMarsh turned five.
And no one could have known that LaMarsh would be at the forefront of fundamentally changing Canada forever.
Her father, Clayton LaMarsh, was a well-known lawyer in Chatham who served as the city’s solicitor. He met his wife Rhoda during the First World War and the two married in 1919.
Mere weeks after Judy LaMarsh’s birth, the family moved to Windsor so her father could become a partner in the law firm of Furlong, Brackin, Furlong and LaMarsh.
In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage, LaMarsh said her father was,
“a man of mercurial temperament, strong likes and dislikes, and no one was ever long in doubt as to where he stood on any issue.”
He was a die-hard supporter of the Liberal Party, as his own father, Arthur, had been.
Some of Judy LaMarsh’s early memories of her father are of him crying with joy as Ontario Liberal leader Mitch Hepburn was elected Premier of Ontario in 1934.
From him she learned that politics was everyone’s business and that it was a tough and gruelling game
A mix of great excitement and terrible disillusionment.
She would experience this first-hand in the years to come.
In the 1930s, work opportunities were limited in Chatham, so the LaMarsh family moved to Niagara Falls for her father’s employment.
After the Second World War began, Judy decided she wanted to do her part.
In 1942, she attempted to enlist with the Women’s Division of the Air Force, but she was turned away because of poor eyesight.
Angry over the refusal, Judy travelled to Hamilton where she earned a primary teaching certificate through a one-year course.
Then she enlisted with the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1943
Her first posting was in Halifax with the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, where she spent a lot of time by the ocean and, in her words, learned to love it and the people who lived on, by and with it.
She then traveled to Vancouver to study Japanese. Judy LaMarsh said,
“It was the hardest work of my life, and I slaved like a demon to excel in it.”
But she was taken out of class before completing the course and was immediately posted to a combined British, American and Canadian Intelligence group to translate and evaluate thousands of wires from the war zone in Asia by operatives.
In 1946, she was discharged and she enrolled in the University of Toronto’s Victoria College where she acquired a Bachelor of Arts degree in 13 months.
Hoping to follow in the family tradition, Judy then enrolled at Osgoode Hall to study law where she was asked to join the Young Liberals Club.
The invitation shaped the next 20 years of her life.
She graduated and was called to the Bar of Ontario, upon passing she moved back to Niagara Falls to join her father’s law practice.
As a lawyer, she continued to be involved in politics.
She rose from Treasurer of the Ontario Young Liberal Association to president of the National Women’s Liberal Federation and finally, became a member of the advisory committee of the Liberal Party of Canada.
In 1959, Judy LaMarsh was asked to run for the Liberal Party in the provincial election as a representative from Niagara Falls but she stepped aside so longtime Liberal George Bukator could run in the riding instead.
Impressed with her, Bukator asked her to run his campaign. She agreed and he won the election with 52 per cent of the vote and went on to serve as the MPP for Niagara Falls until 1971.
But Judy LaMarsh wouldn’t stay in the political background for long…
Her father died in 1957, followed by her mother in 1960, Judy LaMarsh was in her mid-30s and running a successful law practice but looking for a new challenge.
That was when Liberal Party leader Lester B. Pearson entered the picture and asked her to be one of three delegates to the first NATO Youth Leaders conference in Paris.
She took him up on his offer and after she returned home, she heard that Bill Houck, the MP for Niagara Falls since 1953 had died.
A by-election was to be held to fill the vacancy, and she was going to run for Parliament in Niagara Falls.
It was a tall order.
The first woman elected to Parliament was Agnes Macphail in 1921.
Over the next 29 years, only nine other women were elected to the House of Commons.
Five of those women had served in the 1950s and only three, Ellen Fairclough, Margaret Aitken and Jean Casselman Wadds, were serving in Parliament in 1960.
As soon as she started the campaign Judy said she kept hearing from Liberal Party members that “No one will vote for a woman.”
She wasn’t so sure they were right. She was well-known in Niagara Falls through her father and her own law practice.
She met with everyone she could, from the man who cut her lawn, to cabbies, to the local Magistrate.
She said to the Liberal Party,
“Let’s not worry about whether the man in the street will vote for a woman, will you vote for me?”
Eventually, she had six male opponents for the nomination.
She said,
“We were ready, and we got to the delegates first. I was a better speaker and better prepared than my male opponents.”
It took until 1 a.m. at the Liberal Party’s Niagara Falls riding convention to get results, but in the end, Judy LaMarsh had won easily and became the Liberal Party candidate for the by-election.
She then assembled a campaign committee of men and women, seasoned veterans and rookies with fresh ideas.
Her riding which had been created in 1953 had been held by William Houck since so it was relatively safe for the Liberals.
Now it was LaMarsh’s turn to take over.
During the campaign, a television station in Buffalo offered to stage a mini debate where she would face off against two other candidates… one from the New Party, now the New Democratic Party and the other from Progressive Conservatives.
Judy LaMarsh said,
“My handsome Tory opponent, keeping his best side to the camera, was all sweet reason. My socialist opponent prattled the old CCF refrain that his party has really been responsible for old-age pension legislation and every other reform of the past twenty years.”
She noticed that the New Party candidate kept one of the party pamphlets before him on the table for reference, so she grabbed it and threw it aside.
Then she accused him of being ignorant of his own party’s program unless it was in front of him
She said,
“In the sudden stillness of the studio, the paper fluttered across the desk as though caught in a draft, and the stricken candidate fell so silent that it appeared my barb was true.”
Her campaign manager, Jack Burnett, told her on the drive back to Canada because she had blown the election with that gesture.
Jack could not have been more wrong.
As she talked to people in her riding over the coming days, she found that they liked her outspoken nature and commended her for taking her New Party opponent to task on camera in front of thousands.
On Oct. 31, 1960, Judy LaMarsh won with 47.3 percent of the vote, and 5,000 more votes than the Progressive Conservative opponent who finished second.
Judy LaMarsh was heading to Parliament.
Parliament convened only two weeks after she won.
For her first day in the House of Commons, Judy LaMarsh was to be led down the centre aisle of the Chambert to be introduced to the Speaker of the House, who then introduced the new member to the leader of her party.
She called Mary Macdonald, executive assistant to Lester B. Pearson, to ask what appropriate apparel would be.
Macdonald told to wear an elegant evening dress.
Judy said quote,
“I was absolutely appalled by the suggestion. Freshly elected as a radical sort of person, struck by the suffering of so many of the unemployed in my riding, all dressed up in evening clothes to claim my seat as a fighter for my people.”
She went against the advice and chose a simple black dress. It was the right call.
Only once had a female Member of Parliament worn an evening dress in the House of Commons and that was Ellen Fairclough in 1958 when Queen Elizabeth II was present to open Parliament.
Prior to Judy LaMarsh, only two women had entered the House of Commons as Parliamentarians for the Liberal Party.
The first was Cora Taylor Casselman, who served from 1941 to 1945, and the second was Ann Shipley, who served from 1953 to 1957.
It seemed the party didn’t care much for their new Member of Parliament and did very little to help her figure out what exactly she was supposed to do.
In her fantastic book, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage, she wrote the isolation she felt at first was deeply depressing.
The Party Whip, who ensured party discipline and helped Parliamentarians, never came to see her.
She didn’t know where to get supplies, stationary, furniture or secretarial help.
Party members didn’t call on her or offer help. Even ones she had known personally when they were in the Young Liberals together.
She said,
“I learned of the false generosity of some of my fellow members very quickly.”
The only person who offered help was Madeleine Ouimet, the secretary to Maurice Bourget who was in the office next door.
At the time, the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker held 208 seats in Parliament, and the Liberals were left with only 48 so her first year and a half was relatively quiet.
But by 1962 Diefenbaker’s government became unpopular.
One reason was the cancellation of the Avro Arrow program which you can hear about in an episode from spring of 2024, so be sure to check it out.
On June 18, 1962, the Diefenbaker government fell from the largest majority in Canadian history to become a minority government of just 116 seats.
The Liberals rebounded with 99 seats.
Diefenbaker’s days were coming to an end, and the Liberals would regain power sooner rather than later.
Part of that effort included taking part in a week-long NATO Parliamentary meeting in Washington DC.
Two Liberals were sent, Paul Hellyer and Judy LaMarsh.
During that trip, LaMarsh had an hour-long meeting with President John F. Kennedy, and she said quote.
“My impression was of a dark-suited figure with smoothed back abundant dark hair and startingly blue eyes. He was busy but he concentrated his attention on us.”
Almost as soon as she returned home, Judt LaMarsh hit the campaign trail once again.
The Diefenbaker government fell in early February 1963, and it was time for the Liberals.
By this point, Judy was a rising star in the Liberal Party and campaigned outside her riding of Niagara Falls just as much as she campaigned within it.
She was also tasked with heading up the Truth Squad, a group that followed Diefenbaker around to fact check his statements on the campaign trail.
She knew it was a bad idea, but those above her paygrade disagreed and she went along with the plan.
It was a terrible idea. Whether Diefenbaker was effective or not as a prime minister is up for debate, but what cannot be debated is his sheer skill as a speaker and campaigner.
At each campaign stop, Diefenbaker ensured they had a table right at the front near the stage with a banner welcoming The Truth Squad. In each speech, he tore the Truth Squad to shreds. Since Judy LaMarsh was the most famous of the members, Diefenbaker directed most of his comments at her.
She said,
“He was merciless. I never made any record of his witticisms at my expense. I hope no one ever did but I still bear the scars.”
After only three days, the Truth Squad was disbanded and Judy LaMarsh got back to work on her re-election campaign.
On April 8, 1963, the Liberal Party returned to power with 128 seats. It was a minority government, but it was a victory, nonetheless.
Judy was also re-elected in her riding but with 819 votes less than in 1962.
She believed the Truth Squad debacle cost her those votes.
But now as a member of the ruling party, it was time for a new step in the career of Judy LaMarsh.
Before we get to that next step, we need to go back a few years to 1957, when John Diefenbaker appointed Ellen Fairclough as the Secretary of State for Canada.
She was the first woman to hold a federal cabinet post.
Over the next six years, she held two other cabinet positions, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Postmaster General of Canada.
With Lester B. Pearson and the Liberals now in power, many pundits believed he would follow Diefenbaker’s lead and appoint a woman to cabinet.
Judy LaMarsh wanted to be in a cabinet post, but she did not want a role that Fairclough had before her.
She said,
“I wanted to be in the cabinet, but I had decided by the time I arrived there that I wasn’t going to do just any old job, one which calls for no real contribution, but just to be there. I wasn’t going to find myself a sop to women voters.”
As it turned out, she wasn’t given a small portfolio. She was named the Minister of National Health and Welfare, an incredibly important portfolio then, and now.
Pearson had pledged to not only create a pension plan for Canadians, but also push through universal healthcare. Both of those would pass straight through the desk of Judy LaMarsh.
When she arrived the Department of National Health and Welfare, the aura of her post was quickly shattered.
She found herself in a gloomy office with a large desk in front of a, in her words, dull painting of Niagara Falls likely borrowed from the National Gallery.
She also discovered that there was no women’s washroom on her floor and was forced to go to a different floor to use a washroom meant for stenographers. She said,
“It isn’t much of a hardship for me, but it can be embarrassing. After all, if someone wants to rant and rave at the boss, the washroom is the one place where it is permissible, but not if, after you have everything, you want to say off your chest, you look up in a mirror and see the boss standing there having heard the whole thing.”
She was offered another, more private, washroom, which she described as dirty, smelly, with flaking paint.
One of her first executive orders as Minister of National Health and Welfare was to find a caretaker for that washroom.
Once the washroom debacle was in order her first major task was to deal with the Canada Pension Plan for which she had to get all the provinces to agree, most of whom wanted their own pension plans.
Time was of the essence as the plan had to be implemented to help those retiring in the coming years not a generation or two later.
That meant getting the pension plan into Parliament by the end of 1963 and preparing the White Paper on Pensions.
Another wrinkle she had to contend with were insurance companies who worried that if the government provided a pension plan, no one would go to them.
She said of those meetings,
“We had no real meetings of the minds at all, although the atmosphere was polite enough, but I could not understand their bland assumption that we would renege on our election promises.”
During the fight for the Canada Pension Plan she realized that some within the party didn’t respect her position or authority.
Thomas Kent, the senior policy aide to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, left Ottawa for Quebec City for a weekend meeting with the provincial political leaders to reach a compromise on the orders of Pearson.
Even though she was the minister in charge of getting the pension plan implemented, LaMarsh was neither told nor invited.
She said,
“I had gone home to my riding for a weekend, a rare occurrence, but no one, neither the prime minister nor Kent, had bothered even to telephone me what was in the wind.”
During the meeting, Kent agreed to make accommodations for Quebec.
When he returned, LaMarsh summoned him directly to her office. She was so angry she picked up an autographed photograph of Lester B. Pearson and slammed it face down on her desk, smashing the glass. She was ready to resign over the matter.
She said,
“I did not want to take the accursed legislation any further. I was already buffeted and bruised enough, and I felt that I had been shamefully treated by my leader. Pearson did not then, nor has he ever, even acknowledged what a dirty trick he played.”
Despite her anger Judy LaMarsh knew that getting approval on a Canada Pension Plan was crucial for Canadians, even if it meant making compromises.
Even if she was disrespected.
She took the Canada Pension Act to the House of Commons in late-1964 and in 1965, it was established.
Today, that pension plan manages $646 billion in investment assets for 22 million Canadians.
As the most prominent woman in Canadian politics Judy LaMarsh had to deal with things her male colleagues did not.
She was paid the same as her male counterparts, but in her words, they did one-fifth the work she did.
LaMarsh was also treated as a token woman If there was a women’s delegation attending something at Parliament, she was expected to be front and centre with them. She said in her memoir,
“Whenever I am pushed by direction of my superior of my office or by public opinion to appear a woman’s representative, I simply do not know what to do. My feelings of resentment and frustration multiply.”
While she was asked to take over the large portfolio of National Health and Welfare, Judy noted that it was not breaking new ground as other women had done similar work elsewhere in the world.
As a lawyer with years of experience, who came from a family of lawyers, LaMarsh had hoped to be appointed as Minister of Justice at some point.
Instead, others such as Lucien Cardin and Pierre Trudeau were promoted, despite Judy having more experience in courts than both men combined.
It wouldn’t be until 1990 when Kim Campbell was appointed that a woman would hold that portfolio.
As a woman, she was scrutinized by the media, to a level rarely seen for her male counterparts. When she went to a hairdresser, reporters followed her in.
In her words, her clothes, stocking and wigs were all a matter for public discourse.
She wrote,
“Executive women followed me into washrooms, wives clustered about me in airports to receive me as a stumbled bedraggled and exhausted, from an aircraft for yet another meeting. Children and teachers wrote me for recipes and for tips on how to get along as a woman. Columnists asked me about anything and everything except my job. Women’s magazines and women’s pages featured articles about me, sometimes without bothering to interview me.”
She also didn’t fit the image of a proper woman.
Her habit of wearing wigs, including purple and blonde ones, in the House of Commons caused extreme irritation to her more conservative colleagues.
The same was true when she wore stockings with her outfits.
She said of Paul Martin, a Liberal Member of Parliament since 1935,
“Paul Martin couldn’t stand the stockings or the wig and complained frequently about them, even though Maryon Peterson finally came to wear some discreetly patterned stockings in public.”
Cartoonists took special delight in drawing her, often exaggerating her clothes and her weight.
The fact she was single, with no children, added extra speculation about her private life.
Rumours swirled about her and the fact she had mostly young men on her staff.
So, Judy LaMarsh was always careful to travel with several of her aides at once, and never one on one.
Despite all the extra attention, and the sexism LaMarsh did her job and did it well.
And when it came time to bring Canadians universal healthcare, she was up to the task.
Whenever the topic of universal healthcare is brought up, three men are given most of the credit.
Tommy Douglas, the leader of the federal NDP who instituted universal healthcare in Saskatchewan when he was premier.
Lester B. Pearson, whose government instituted universal healthcare.
And Allan MacEachen, the Minister of National Health and Welfare when universal healthcare was enacted into law.
Omitted in that discussion is Judy LaMarsh, who started the process and did much of the early work.
In 1963, she called the first of the ministerial meetings to discuss a framework for Canada-wide prepaid medical insurance.
For her, Medicare was of special importance.
In her legal practice, she had seen the devastating impact long-term medical care had on lower incomes.
She herself had to pay large medical bills for her mother prior to being elected to Parliament. B
before that, high medical costs had swallowed t her mother’s savings while in caring for her father.
And she came from means… imagine those who didn’t.
She said,
“I was delighted to be getting on with Medicare. I worked with a real will toward preparing the framework for that legislation.”
In that meeting she obtained approval from her colleagues to put $500 million into the Health Resources Fund which would provide facilities and personnel to implement a national Medicare system.
This fund was also instrumental in getting the provinces to adopt universal health care.
She wrote in her memoirs that the provinces did not contribute anything into that fund when it began, and only argued about who would have what to spend from it.
[BEAT]It wasn’t just Medicare that Judy LaMarsh focused on in her portfolio.
On June 17, 1963, she rose in the House of Commons and stated,
“There is scientific evidence that cigarette smoking is a contributory cause of lung cancer and that it may also be associated with chronic bronchitis and coronary heart disease.”
While that may seem like a minor thing for a politician to say, and far from controversial, it was groundbreaking for the time.
She became the first major western-world government official to oppose tobacco smoking publicly.
Wanting to practice what she preached, LaMarsh went cold turkey on her two decade three-pack a day smoking habit the day she spoke those words in the House of Commons.
She said,
“If I can give up a habit of 20 years and one that is that hard to break, I think it will indicate that I think it is that serious. I didn’t do this as an exercise in will power.”
Overall, the response to her decision to quit and speak out about the dangers of smoking was well received.
NDP leader Tommy Douglas jokingly asked her if she would take up pipe smoking instead, while Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson congratulated her decision to quit smoking.
Hundreds of letters came into her office commending her.
One letter writer sent a basket of apples for her to munch on when cravings became too bad. \
Not all the letters were pleasant though, one came from a tobacco grower who was unhappy with her comments.
And while many in the House of Commons supported her, there were other MPs who made a habit of sending her packs of cigarettes and asking her to come join them for a smoke in an attempt to sabotage her efforts.
As far as we know she was steadfast in her resolve.
While she fought to stay smoke free, she was working on Medicare, and she would likely get more credit had it not been for another federal election in the fall of 1965.
She was torn away to campaign for her own riding and for Liberals across Canada.
She said,
“The framework of the Medicare scheme which came to be adopted by Parliament was wholly structured before I left office.”
In the 1965 federal election, the Liberal Party under Lester B. Pearson returned to power with 131 seats, still a minority but slightly more seats than before.
Judy LaMarsh also won again but after two-and-a-half years working as the Minister of National Health and Welfare, LaMarsh hoped for something larger.
Instead, Lester B. Pearson offered her three options. She could be Secretary of State, Postmaster General or Solicitor General.
LaMarsh stated that Postmaster General was a portfolio of no significance and a job that should have been done away with completely and she didn’t think Solicitor General was even a department.
The previous Solicitor General, J. Watson McNaught, was referred to as McZero.
That only left Secretary of State which she had told Pearson in 1963 she didn’t want because Ellen Fairclough, had held it before.
LaMarsh said,
“I was angry enough to quit, and I should have. I have never questioned the Prime Minister’s right to appoint or discharge whomever he chooses, and to what post, I just could not see any scope in any of the portfolios offered.”
But she relented because it would make her responsible for broadcasting and the Canadian Centennial.
One Ottawa columnist wrote of her appointment,
“Cultured, she ain’t.”
On Dec. 18, 1965, Judy LaMarsh took over as Secretary of State and the Centennial but before she could dig into it, she focused on two important things, the status of women and broadcasting in Canada.
When she first joined Pearson’s cabinet in 1963, she asked him for a public inquiry into women in Canadian society, but she was turned down After taking on this new portfolio in 1965 she asked again only to be turned down…. again.
Eventually, she convinced him and in 1967, he announced the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, in the meantime Judy LaMarsh focused on broadcasting in Canada.
As Secretary of State, she oversaw the White Paper on Broadcasting and presented it to the House of Commons in July 1966.
The 237-page paper was a landmark examination an became and instrumental in creating the Broadcasting Act of 1968, which established a mandate for the CBC and led to the creation of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission.
Eight years later, the CRTC became the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission, and it acts as a regulatory agency for broadcasting in Canada.
On Dec. 31, 1966, LaMarsh, stood outside in the freezing cold with Lester B. Pearson and several other important government officials, to light the Centennial flame and begin Canada’s Centennial Year celebrations.
I went into a great deal of detail about the Centennial Year in the spring of 2024, so be sure to check that episode out too if you haven’t.
LaMarsh would travel thousands of kilometres, back and forth across the country.
When the Confederation Train began its journey across Canada from the West Coast in early January, she was there for the opening ceremony.
As the Centennial Voyageurs began their epic canoe race across the country from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta on May 24, 1967, she saw them off.
When their journey ended in Montreal on Sept. 4, 1967, she welcomed them and she received h a large bison fur coat y, which she described as rough, smelly and something she would treasure for the rest of her life.
She sat in the stands on July 23 for the opening of the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, and stopped in at St. Paul, Alberta for its Centennial Project, a UFO Landing Pad.
When she got word the Alpine Club of Canada’s would attempt to conquer each of the mountains in the Centennial Range of the Yukon, LaMarsh paid them a visit.
She arrived at base camp and then took a helicopter up to view their progress then landed on a small peak of an unnamed mountain She said,
“It was one of the greatest thrills of my life to stand there, waist high in crusty snow, on a peak never before trod by humankind, surrounded by the great ghostly shadows of other individual peaks in this range. I practiced my yodel, which echoed and re-echoed with no human to hear. It was glorious, a sense of peace and freedom such as I had never before known.”
On July 1, Canada’s official 100th birthday, Judy LaMarsh was in charge of making it memorable by arranging the Queen’s visit to Parliament Hill where she cut a six-metre-high cake with the knife King George VI used during his Royal Tour in 1939 in front of 50,000 Canadians.
She also made sure there were tens of thousands of cupcakes available for everyone and Judy wrote about the Queen and the day.
“She was interested in everything, and I feel sure would have liked to linger on that brilliant scene. She was delighted at the burst of balloons and fireworks as she cut the small loaf cake imbedded in the wooden structure. Prince Philip slyly broke off chunks of icing and stood licking his fingers with unabashed pleasure.”
LaMarsh was required to greet visiting heads of state during the Centennial Year as you can imagine it was a very busy year as there were dozens of those By the end of 1967 LaMarsh was deeply unhappy in her position in Parliament and said,
“After Centennial Year, I had come to hate my job more and more. I could often not even bring myself to get up to go to work in the morning. I was afraid that if I stayed much longer, I would destroy myself in bitter frustration. I didn’t care, by this time, where I went, just as long as I got out of politics, and soon.”
Her departure coincided with Lester B. Pearson’ retirement.
At the Liberal Party of Canada leadership convention on April 6, 1968, Judy LaMarsh put her support behind Paul Hellyer, who had served in Parliament since 1949 and aligned the closest with her politics.
Unfortunately for Hellyer, he was lagging in fourth place by the third ballot, and it looked like Pierre Trudeau would win, LaMarsh was caught on a hot microphone saying,
“You’ve got to go to Winters. Don’t let that bastard win it Paul, he isn’t even a Liberal.”
In her memoir, she wrote she did not call Trudeau a bastard but was telling Hellyer to pull out on the third ballot and send his supporters over to Robert Winters.
Her recollection of what she said was,
“Get out now and we’ll go on to stop the bastard.”
Regardless the incident became part of her lore.
When she was at Parliament the following week, she met Trudeau and gave him her congratulations.
He asked her about her hot mic moment to which she said “Of course. You have what you sought; I have what I sought. Why not? I’m still a Liberal and you are the Liberal leader.”
She quit soon after Trudeau became Prime Minister which led people to believe she left politics because of him something she denied, after all she stayed in Parliament until the next election was called two months later, when she began her next chapter LaMarsh was 43 and ready to get back to her first love…. the law.
She sold her law practice in the 1960s to concentrate on politics; and part of that sale included a clause stating she wouldn’t practice in Niagara Falls until 1973.
Soshe moved to nearby St. Catharine’s, Ontario in May 1969.
That same year, she released Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage which was highly controversial.
she anticipated this and wrote,
“I will be criticized for writing this book. It will be considered to be ungentlemanly and unsporting…It has not been the style for Canadian politicians to write of their experiences…but I have been criticized before and I expect to be again. It will all pass.
Following a book tour, she hosted The LaMarsh Show a local TV program in Ottawa offering legal and political advice It was a hit, but she grew tired of the commute and after a year she walked away from it.
On Jan. 5, 1974, The Brunswick Four were kicked out of a bar and Judy LaMarsh heard of their complaints of police brutality and decided to help them. She refused any payment for her services and all charges were dismissed.
I went into much more detail about the Brunswick Four in my episode about the LGBTQ history of Canada from the spring of 2024, so check it out.
From 1975 to 1976, LaMarsh hosted CBC Radio’s This Country In The Morning, which was retitled Judy while she was host.
Around this same time, she was asked to chair Ontario’s Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry which held 61 hearings regarding violence in the media and its impact on audience and came back with several recommendations regulations, some of which were adopted by the government.
In 1979, LaMarsh published her first novel, A Very Political Lady, a political thriller based on her experience in public office. Once again, she was criticized. A sequel, A Right Honourable Lady, was released in 1980.
Sadly, time was running out.
In December 1979, feeling ill and having pain in her abdomen, LaMarsh was rushed to the Sunnybrook Medical Centre where she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
It was inoperable.
While receiving treatment at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, she received the Order of Canada from Governor General Edward Schreyer at her hospital bed.
On Oct. 27, 1980, at the age of only 55, the Bird in the Gilded Cage died.
Ontario Premier Bill Davis said, she would be remembered for her,
“absolute devotion and loyalty to the causes in which she believed.”
Journalist Peter C. Newman wrote,
“Judy LaMarsh endowed each of her many careers with energy, intellect and commitment. But to the end, she never gave up her essential gutsy humanity.”
On Oct. 29, 1980, the funeral for Judy LaMarsh was held in Niagara Falls.
Her pallbearers, all women, were lawyer Pamela Walker, Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women president Doris Anderson, British Columbia Judge Nancy Morrison, friends Edith Druggan and Florence Rosberg, and CBC broadcasting legend Barbara Frum.
She was laid to rest following a short service attended by 300 people including Ontario Premier Bill Davis former Ontario Lt. Governor Pauline McGibbon and Paul Hellyer,
LaMarsh was buried next to her parents in a graveyard beside the historic battleground site of Lundy’s Lane.
York University established the LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution soon after her death, the first research institute of its kind in Ontario. It remains open today and focuses on child and youth research.
In 1984, the Liberal Party established the Judy LaMarsh Fund, which provides funding to female federal Liberal candidates.
In 2021, CCGS Judy LaMarsh, an icebreaking tug, began operating with the Canadian Coast Guard.
