Stephen Owen after winning election in the Vancouver Quadra riding to sit as a Liberal MP, on Nov. 29, 2000.PETER BLASHILL/The Globe and Mail
Stephen Owen, a lawyer, civil servant and politician admired for his thoughtful and empathetic approach to some of the most difficult debates in British Columbia and Canada, has died at 74.
Mr. Owen held posts as B.C.’s ombudsman and served as the head of the Commission on Resources and the Environment. He also sat as the Liberal MP for west-side Vancouver Quadra, among many other positions.
But it was his work with CORE, which was created to find solutions to environmental battles over resource issues, that he regarded as the most intense and rewarding time of his varied career. It occupied three years of his life, marked by the massive anti-logging protests in Clayoquot Sound and an extremely polarized debate.
“He was burned in effigy by some. It was very hot,” recalled David Helliwell, a tech entrepreneur and environmentalist who became Mr. Owen’s policy director for the ministries he ran when he was a federal MP and cabinet minister in the early 2000s. “He talked about his work with the CORE commission a lot and about framing those hard conversations.”
It was Mr. Owen’s ability to listen wholeheartedly to everyone in a debate but also fight doggedly for what he believed was the right course that impressed many, Mr. Helliwell said.
“For such a tiny guy, he had so much strength and confidence to do the right thing,” he said. “He got a lot of flak for some things. But it didn’t break him down. He was unflinching.”
His favourite poem and moral anchor was a Rudyard Kipling piece that focused on staying steady amid conflict and the importance of being able to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
Mr. Owen died Wednesday at Vancouver’s Point Grey Private Hospital after several years of dementia.
As federal public-works minister, Mr. Owen set up the Gomery Commission to examine the Liberal sponsorship scandal; its findings proved ultimately damaging to the party.
As B.C. ombudsman, he ruled on some several contentious issues, including finding that then-premier Bill Vander Zalm’s principal secretary, David Poole, had exerted undue pressure on the province’s liquor-licensing branch to give a pub licence to a supporter of the premier’s party.
Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May described Mr. Owen as someone unusually dedicated to the public good and an early believer in fighting climate change. As public-works minister, he came up with the idea of changing the government’s purchasing strategies to make more environmental choices.
“He was genuinely a man of integrity and self-sacrifice who always sought solutions,” she said.
Mr. Owen’s son, Taylor, said he was an inspiration to many.
“My dad lived his life with an unwavering sense of decency, honesty and optimism, and believing unconditionally in the value and potential of public service – an approach to life that we can all learn from.”
Born to one of Vancouver’s prominent families – former mayor Philip Owen was his cousin – Mr. Owen went to the prestigious Shawnigan Lake School on Vancouver Island. He got a law degree from the University of B.C. in 1972 and a master of laws from the University of London in 1974.
But he didn’t pursue the kind of blue-chip law-firm life like his father, Milton, had. Instead, he and his wife, Diane, went to Nigeria with Canadian University Services Overseas to teach for two years. When the two came back to Canada, Mr. Owen became a legal-aid lawyer in Surrey and eventually director of the Legal Services Society of B.C.
He was appointed B.C. ombudsman in 1986 by an all-party committee, when the Social Credit government was in control. He was put in charge of the CORE commission in 1992 by then-NDP premier Mike Harcourt.
“Despite being described as a condo-dwelling, cappuccino-sucking tree-hugging yuppie … Steve developed a highly competent specialized team to develop a strategy for land use and related resource and environmental management for the province,” wrote Robert Gourlay in a frank and detailed profile of him in 1998 in The Advocate, a magazine specializing in law issues in B.C.
Mr. Owen was the province’s deputy attorney-general from 1995 to 1997, during the time of the Gustafsen Lake standoff between Indigenous protesters and the RCMP. He was first elected as the MP for Vancouver Quadra in 2000.
After resigning from political life in 2007, he took on the job of vice-president for external, legal and community relations at the University of British Columbia until 2012.
Along with his prominent positions, he was involved in many international efforts. During the eighties and nineties, he was a legal adviser to Amnesty International and travelled numerous countries to investigate and report on human-rights abuses. He was a consultant to the Canadian International Development Agency and developed human-rights conferences in Cambodia and Thailand. He was also a commissioner with the Law Commission of Canada.
In spite of that eminent résumé, his friends say he had a wonderfully mischievous side, great poker skills and a perpetual curiosity about everyone.
“His eyes were always open to new people, new ideas and everything around him,” Mr. Helliwell recalled. “His eyebrows were raised in anticipation that something truly amazing was about to happen, and he was happy to be a part of it.”
Mr. Owen leaves Diane and his two sons, Taylor and Jason.