Madam Speaker, it is a great honour for me to rise today. It is a very difficult moment for me, but I want to pay tribute to my dear friend, Kirsty Duncan.
I do not think I have ever been in the House when we have had a round of speeches for a former colleague when the flag over the Peace Tower is at half-mast. Maybe we have, but it is an unusual moment. Today is the day that Kirsty's family is having a small ceremony. Her funeral is today, and as she would want, because she was so modest about all her accomplishments, it is a small, family event. However, the flag on the Peace Tower is at half-mast, as it should be. As so many of her friends and family who have posted notices have said, we are shattered, and our hearts are broken, as I think her husband Sven said, “into a million pieces.”
We think about politics and MPs who have served together, and it happened that Kirsty was elected in 2008, and I was elected in 2011. Through the grace of whatever House of Commons angels there are, I was seated right next to her. I was one seat behind her, and she was on the banquette. We were in the far corner next to the translators' booth in Centre Block; over in that corner now, here in West Block, it was me in the back row, Kirsty right in front of me and Justin Trudeau there. We would have lots of conversations.
The thing that is even more remarkable is that Kirsty and I had been friends for 15 years before either of us entered politics. I knew Kirsty initially through her work at Environment Canada. An odd coincidence was that for a brief period of time, my daughter was in child care in the same building where Kirsty worked. I was inspired by the member for Calgary Nose Hill and went back through some old text messages from Kirsty. I should not have done that before trying to talk. Kirsty always referred to my daughter, Cate, as “your wee bairn.” She would always say to me, through our lives, “How is your wee bairn?” I just looked back through some text messages where I had sent her pictures of my wee bairn with her wee bairn, of my daughter and granddaughter, and Kirsty had responded as one would expect: “Oh, your beautiful wee bairn.”
I want to reflect, as many members have. I want to give thanks for the heartfelt speech by the hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill, who already touched on some of the things I was going to say about Kirsty's work and her authorship of the book about the hunt for the 1918 flu virus. An extraordinary degree of intellectual curiosity led Kirsty, alone or almost alone among scientists, to wonder, now that we are experiencing climate change and some corpses in various places are thawing, if we could find a victim of the Spanish flu who had been completely frozen but from whom now, because of global warming, we could perhaps access tissue. We could perhaps find out more about the origins of the Spanish flu. It has been referenced, but it was an extraordinary effort of will to launch a global expedition to Spitsbergen, Norway, to get the help of the Norwegian government, to engage other scientists and to say this could matter. It was really a medical detective story that she led.
She accomplished so very much. I want to canvass what her family put in the obituary, the number of things they felt she would want to be remembered for and that she was passionate about: dance, music, art, sport, science and research and, of course, politics, as well as humanitarian causes that were also courageously championed by her husband, Sven.
Again, thanks to the member for Calgary Nose Hill for paying tribute to the extent that Kirsty's work on young women in sport who were victimized and sexually harassed was not swept under the carpet.
All of that makes for a person about whom someone could not say, even in summary fashion, what they gave the world.
Of course, she had an enormous joy for life, an exuberant embracing of life, and even with health challenges, she never felt sorry for herself. My God, what a hero she was. For the spirit of life, if there was ever someone for whom we could sing this at their funeral, and in my heart I am thinking of this, it would be her: “I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.” She had that spirit of dance, and Kirsty had pride, joy and love for her little students. Even as an MP, she kept teaching students in Highland dance, and it meant the world to her.
I am quite incoherent and overwhelmed, but I wrote to a few of her scientist colleagues because I thought it would be good in this place to have the words of scientists who worked with her.
I am first going to share what was said by one of Canada's leading scientists, Dr. Gordon McBean. He wrote:
Kirsty Duncan was an outstanding scientist who dealt with health and environmental issues including climate change. I first met Dr. Duncan in the 1990s when she was teaching climate change at University of Windsor and I was the Assistant Deputy Minister of the atmosphere-climate part of Environment Canada. I was very impressed by her scientific knowledge and leadership....
I was so pleased when she was elected in 2008 as she provided—