Peter Bryce and The White Plague

Mar29

According to the World Health Organization, World Tuberculosis Day is marked every March 24, on the day in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch announced that he had found the cause of tuberculosis, the TB Bacillus. According to the WHO site, at the time “TB was raging through Europe and the Americas, causing the death of one out of seven people.”

Once I saw that statistic, I understood more clearly why Peter H. Bryce had decided to pursue public health over neurology. He had studied in Paris with some of the pioneers of neurology, but then he came home to Canada and went into the civil service in order to work on public health issues, including TB. Public health held none of the prestige (not to mention compensation) of neurology and I had always wondered why he chose it.

But when I think of one in seven people, I think of a class of 27 students I teach at the moment. In that class, about four people would die of tuberculosis if this were the late 19^th century. In 1882, the same year Koch identified the bacillus, Bryce joined the civil service in Ontario and started working on the first public health code in Canada – a document designed to reduce such death tolls.

When Peter Bryce reported on the appalling health conditions in the Indian Residential School system in 1907, most of the deaths were caused by TB. By then, in most of Canada the death rate due to tuberculosis had been reduced dramatically. But in the IRS system nearly one-quarter of all children would die or were dying of TB. When the story broke in the Ottawa Citizen on November 15, 1907, the headline was Schools Aid White Plague – white plague being a popular description of tuberculosis at the time.

Tuberculosis impacted Peter Bryce throughout his life. A note in my family tree says that Peter’s sister Katherine died of TB in 1876 at the age of 17. Further, Bryce’s son Henderson died of TB on December 31, 1931 at the age of 42. Henderson was the only one of Peter Bryce’s six children who went into medicine. After graduating from the University of Toronto with his medical degree, Henderson went to Haida Gwaii and worked as a doctor in Port Clemons and later at Stave Falls in the Lower Mainland where a huge hydroelectric dam was being built. Later, he did a residency in surgery at the University of Chicago and became the head of surgery at Vancouver General Hospital before discovering he had TB.

Dr. Henderson Bryce, ca. 1914

This is where the story gets personal for me, because Henderson was my grandfather and this is my family’s story. Granddad found out that he had TB sometime after my Aunt Helen was born in 1916. At the time, wisdom was that he would have a better chance of surviving if he moved to a drier part of the world, and so Henderson took a locum assignment in Princeton B.C., where my father was born, before settling in Kelowna in 1920. It seems Henderson was in remission for much of this time, because he worked at Kelowna General Hospital for a few years, but by the late 1920s, the TB had re-emerged, and he was dying.

Grandmother Jessie, Aunt Helen, my father Bill and Grandfather Henderson Bryce, 1927

A few years ago my Aunt Helen (who was 15 in 1931) told me she remembered taking the ferry up Okanagan Lake to meet her Uncle Bill, who had been sent by Peter Bryce (my Aunt called him “the old man”) to be with his brother, and to take the body back to Ottawa for burial. Shortly after my grandfather died on New Year’s Eve 1931, Uncle Bill transported his body back to Ottawa by train, arriving in time to hold a funeral service on January 9^th.

A few days later Peter Bryce came home and told his family he was leaving to take a trip to the West Indies the next day. On January 12, he got on the Empress of Australia at New York City, and two days later on January 14, 1932, Peter H. Bryce died in his cabin, alone.

It is a tragedy that a man who did so much for so many, died alone at sea with the knowledge that the very disease he had spent his life fighting, had killed his son. But for me the real tragedy is that my father lost his father at the age of 13, and moreover watched his father die so slowly and painfully. The ravages of TB have the power to reach across generations, as so many in the Indigenous community know all too well.

A 15-year-old Canadian girl died of tuberculosis in January this year. Her name was Ileen Kooneeliusie and she was from the hamlet of Qikiqtarjuag in Nunavut. Andre Picard in the Globe and Mail writes about her death and the high prevalence of TB in the territory (in the interests of giving credit where it is due, the story was first told by Nick Murray of the CBC). In Canada, 4.7 people out of every 100,000 die of tuberculosis. In Nunavut, the rate is 229.6 per 100,000. It’s a disease that can be stopped, but early detection is a key, and Picard notes that this child’s death was caused by cultural and language differences

The mother of Ileen Kooneeliusie said that the principal barrier to getting care for her daughter was an inability to communicate the severity of her condition – because none of the nurses at the clinic spoke Inuktitut. She was not taken seriously. The language gap, and the condescension of health workers from away, have consistently been identified as an impediment to care in Nunavut and other Indigenous communities.

Peter Bryce would not be surprised.

At the Bryce family plot in Beechwood cemetery

The documentary film Finding Peter Bryce is currently in post-production but it needs funding to be completed. If you are interested in contributing, you can give through our partners, the Canadian Public Health Association and receive a tax receipt in return. Go to How to donate to the Film to find out more. Click here to see the promotional trailer. If you have other questions, suggestions or thoughts, please contact me at andyj.bryce@gmail.com

Pictures from the Past

Feb11

At first my research into Peter Bryce was part of a larger genealogical project. My father did not talk much about his family and I’m not sure he knew that much. But I was curious about them and over the years I had been encouraged by my mother.

“You should look into those Bryces,” she said. “They’re a very interesting family.” My mother formed friendships with some of the women of the Bryce family, especially Katherine Best. From her, my mother collected a file of information. After my mother passed away, I got her box of research, including a full Bryce family tree complete with birth and death dates, written in my mother’s hand. I made copies of it, and still use it to this day when yet another cousin pops up and I have to figure out how we are related.

When I began looking into the Bryces, the only thing I really knew was family’s roots in Canada lay in Mount Pleasant, Ontario. So I began my genealogical research with a simple internet search, using keywords like Bryce, Mount Pleasant, and so on. One of my first finds was this picture.

brycebros-corrected

The description from the Brant County Public Digital Archive says This photograph depicts three of the Bryce brothers at the time of the golden wedding anniversary of George Bryce, Sr. in the 1890s. His two brothers who sailed to North America, and later settled in the United States, came to visit him. One of these men was my great-great-grandfather, George Bryce. But which one?

After reading more from my mother’s files and doing more research, a picture of the Bryces emerged. In 1843, my ancestor George Bryce, his wife Catherine, and his two brothers left their home in Doune, Scotland and emigrated to North America. Scotland was in the midst of the Highland clearances and the brothers likely thought their prospects would be better in the new world. George was a blacksmith, and his brothers were bakers so they had skills which would be useful in the United States or Upper Canada.

They sailed to New York City and made their way up to Upper Canada through the Erie Canal, and then across the Great Lakes. After scouting out his prospects, George set up shop in Mount Pleasant, Upper Canada – a community in the midst of prosperous farms, all of which would need the help of a blacksmith at one time or another. The other brothers moved to the United States.

George Bryce Sr. became an important figure in his community. He was prominent in the Presbyterian Church, and chaired the board to construct the building which still stands on Mount Pleasant Avenue. He was also the Justice of the Peace, and his obituary in the local paper shows attendance at his funeral was overflowing. George Bryce led a full and generous life, the kind of life he could not have led back home in Scotland.

I made an educated guess and decided the man on the right was George Bryce. He was heavyset, like a blacksmith. He also looked like George Bryce Jr. from the next generation – Peter Henderson Bryce’s brother (the Bryce family carried on the tradition of naming descendants after their ancestors for many years – there are many Peters and Georges). The other two men didn’t look like they had done the heavy labour of the blacksmith. But I kept looking at the faces, trying to imagine who they resembled among my brothers and cousins.

It would be enough for an immigrant family to Canada to have a child like Peter H. Bryce who would make such a distinguished contribution to his country. But George Jr. also made a major contribution.

George Bryce Jr.

George Jr. earned a degree in theology at the University of Toronto in 1871, before striking out for the frontier prairie city of Winnipeg where he arrived shortly after the first Riel Rebellion. George founded and was the first minister of Knox Presbyterian Church, and was involved with the founding of the University of Manitoba, while writing histories about Canada and Manitoba.

About a month after I published the photo of the three brothers on a genealogical site, I was contacted by a distant cousin in Chicago who was also descended from one of the brothers. She explained that I had the people mixed up – George was the man in the middle looking at the camera with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. The man on the left was Willie, who had moved to Cincinnati, and the man on the right was Peter Forbes Bryce. This was a picture of the three adventurers who fifty years before had sailed from their home to make their fortune and now here they were, old men celebrating their success.

George Bryce, Sr.

As I go through this journey to find Peter Bryce, I always feel the presence of my mother. She knew I was interested in history and genealogy, and was careful to plant the seeds that led me to find this story. So, on what would have been her 91^st birthday, I tip my hat to Mom and thank her for many gifts, the story of Peter Bryce included.

Joan (Cottrill) Bryce

Peter Bryce Anticipates the Modern Welfare State

Dec18

Over the last few weeks I have been laying out the history of Peter Bryce’s involvement with residential schools and public health in Canada’s early years. I have made the argument that he is one of the key figures in both of these fields and that he is one of the unknown characters of Canadian history. But on my last post of 2016, I want to advance that argument one step further, to say that Peter Bryce’s actions anticipated Canada’s modern welfare state.

The woman who has said this most clearly is Megan Sproule-Jones. In 1996 she published Crusading for the Forgotten: Dr. Peter Bryce, Public Heath, and Prairie Native Residential Schools in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. In this article she outlines the rise of the public health movement and its impact on the Indigenous community through Peter Bryce’s efforts. It turns out Bryce was not alone in his approach to solving the problems of Canadian society in the late 19^th century. He had grown up in a prominent Presbyterian family in Ontario, and was a member of a movement called the Social Gospel which had emerged from the pulpit-driven religion of his father’s generation.

“That movement emerged in response to Canada’s transition from a rural society to an urban one,” says Sproule-Jones. “For those Christians the gospel was a call to action. They felt an obligation to help those in society who may not have been able to help themselves. Those Christians formed organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association, the YWCA and the Salvation Army. They were all out there working to deal with issues like poverty, hunger, poor sanitation, and poor housing.”

For Peter Bryce, public health brought together his two great personal influences: science and religion. By using the fundamentals of scientific research he could prove how public health measures could result in social change and uphold a sense of morality and justice – good public health is for everyone since no one group in society is totally isolated from the rest. The problem for the public health movement was that the federal government had remained resistant to legislation and public policy surrounding public health. Going to work for the federal government in 1904 would have been an important step for Bryce.

“They were trying to lobby the government for changes in legislation and they believed firmly that government had a role to play in insuring the health and welfare of all Canadians,” says Sproule-Jones. “They were never very successful in convincing the federal government of that so I would imagine that when Peter Bryce had this opportunity to take on the role of Chief Medical Officer, he would have been very excited because he would have been right in there with the people would have been framing public policy and legislation that could have affected change. I’m sure that would have been his hope when he took on that position.”

Perhaps Bryce knew that he would have a difficult path in the federal government. At Queen’s Park he held considerable influence, but in Ottawa he would have to answer to layers of bureaucracy above him, and he would be working for a government whose main focus was economic expansion. It is little wonder that he met resistance, but as Cindy Blackstock says, “Someone had to be first – someone had to blaze that trail, and that person was your great-grandfather.”

“I think Peter Bryce really anticipated the rise of the welfare state in Canada” says Sproule-Jones. “He was a very strong proponent of government intervention. He believed quite firmly that the government did a have a role to play in the health and the well-being of Canadians. He was calling for government intervention in Indigenous health and Indigenous education at a time when many people really still believed in a more ‘fend-for-yourself’ approach – a laissez-faire principle that people should really be able to look after themselves.“

To put this in perspective, when the Social Gospel finally ran out of steam in the 1920s, it left a vacuum filled by the Canadian Commonwealth Federation in 1932. The CCF’s early leadership included figures like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, both of whom had been figures in the Social Gospel just a few years before. The CCF, and later the New Democratic Party would be effective advocates for the modern welfare state, and without them social benefits such as socialized medicine may never have happened.

I will be taking a break over the holidays but will be back with more about Peter Bryce in the new year.

The Twin Legacies of Peter Bryce come together in the Walkerton Tragedy

Nov27

I first met my cousin Mary Robinson-Ramsay in August 2014 at a family reunion at David Bryce’s cabin. Mary was from Walkerton, a central Ontario village notorious for an outbreak of E coli from a contaminated town well. She told me she had been on Walkerton Council in the years leading up to the outbreak in May 2000, and had brought up concerns regarding the water. As I listened to her in that hot noisy cabin I realized that the legacy of Peter Bryce lives on, and that’s when I decided to do a film on him.

Peter Campbell and I went to Walkerton two years later to interview Mary for the film Finding Peter Bryce. This was the first stop on a five day whirlwind filming trip in southern Ontario. We arrived in Walkerton after a five hour flight and a pleasant drive through miles of farmland. Walkerton is a prosperous small town along the banks of the Saugeen River and it was hard to believe that this had been the site of such a tragedy.

walkerton

Mary had been a witness at the Walkerton Inquiry, and she was mentioned in the report. On page 236 it describes how Walkerton council had received a report from the Ministry of the Environment which expressed concerns about its water purification system and how the report ended up on the council agenda as an information item.

At that meeting, Mary Robinson-Ramsay, a municipal councilor, expressed her concern about the PUC’s non-compliance and the detection of E. coli bacteria. From her standpoint, the solution to these problems was to provide what she termed ‘regular and on-going technical expertise.’ She identified the options of either retaining a consulting engineer to take supervisory responsibility or hiring a municipal director of public works.

Council ignored her. “Their attitude was ‘oh you’re the new kid on the block,’ and I was a new councilor,” she told us. “So their answer was ‘we’ll get the water guys to look at it.’ But I don’t think they understood fully my concerns.”

Mary knew better because she had grown up being conscious of water quality.

“As a General Practitioner in a small town my Dad was also the medical officer of health and the coroner,” says Mary. “One of my Dad’s duties was to test wells in the area, so sometimes that was a conversation piece around the supper table about a well he was concerned with. I was probably more aware of water than most kids were.”

Mary Robinson-Ramsay

Later Mary and her husband worked in South Africa, where clean water is not a given: “In the country you had to be careful, there was Bilharzia and other diseases around and you had to be more aware.”

Most of us in Canada take for granted that we will have safe, clean drinking water. But it wasn’t that long ago that drinking water wasn’t that safe or clean. Devastating outbreaks of water-borne disease were common in the Canada’s early years. It wasn’t until Peter Bryce and the public health movement established clean water standards that the situation began to change. As well, in the 1880s and 1890s Peter Bryce faced pressure from many councils to relax standards. One editorial, written in 1904 when Bryce left the Ontario civil service for the federal government said “Dr. Bryce has always turned a deaf ear to salubrious legislators who came with appeals of this kind and was even willing to gently explain that such a request was unintentionally criminal.”

The results of not meeting standards are devastating, as the Walkerton tragedy so well illustrates. In a town of 5,000 people, there were five deaths, and at least two thousand other people who became seriously ill. The two men responsible for the tragedy were found guilty of a charge of common nuisance. One spent a year in jail, while the other spent five months under house arrest. The town of Walkerton had to replace parts of its water system.

Peter Bryce’s twin legacies come together in Mary Robinson-Ramsay’s story. His legacy to the country is a public health system that has helped it prosper and grow. The legacy to his family can be seen in his descendants – Mary’s father is only one example of a descendant who went into medicine. In another branch of the family is an uninterrupted line of five generations of people in public health. But Mary’s story describes another, more important legacy – and that is one of telling truth to power as she describes in the clip below.

There is one footnote to leave you with – according to Health Canada there are 138 boil water advisories in 93 First Nations communities in Canada outside of British Columbia. It seems the standards of clean water which most of us enjoy, are not being met in Indigenous communities. There is still much work to be done.

The documentary film Finding Peter Bryce is currently in post-production but it needs funding to be completed. If you are interested in contributing, you can give through our partners, the Canadian Public Health Association and receive a tax receipt in return. Go to How to donate to the Film to find out more. Click here to see the promotional trailer. If you have other questions, suggestions or thoughts, please contact me at andyj.bryce@gmail.com

Peter Bryce and the Golden Whistle Award

Nov20

goldenwhistle

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
– Albert Einstein

It’s a wonder anyone blows the whistle on wrongdoing; whistleblowers never fare well in the aftermath. Take the case of Alan Cutler, for instance. He was a senior procurement manager at the Ministry of Public Works and Government Services Canada in the mid-1990s when he noticed irregularities in the spending of federal government funds in Quebec. We now know these irregularities as Adscam, or the Sponsorship Scandal. Auditor-general Sheila Fraser found about $100 million in fees and commissions was paid to communications agencies in what now looks like a program which was basically designed to generate commissions for these companies.

And Alan Cutler? In a 2012 article written by journalist Michael Harris, Cutler reveals how he was being watched for insubordination after he blew the whistle. “For three months, they let me rot. Every working day, nothing to do and no one would take my calls. I spent the mornings writing numerals on a pad — 800, 801, 802 … and then crossed them out in the afternoon. I was literally crossing out time. I played out chess openings in my mind. They wanted to nail me for insubordination, so I remained silent. They were watching everything so I didn’t even read a book. They were listening to everything so I never made a personal call. I went home with blazing headaches and ended up on stress medication.”

Cutler was relatively “lucky” (if you can call it that) – many whistleblowers face worse financial, professional and personal losses. Eventually he moved on to another ministry, and was exonerated by the Gomery Commission. On the other hand, Cutler’s boss, Chuck Guite spent 3 and a half years in prison and the scandal helped bring down the federal Liberal government in 2006.

5th Annual National Golden Whistle Award

Peter Bryce and Alan Cutler are both recipients of the Golden Whistle Award, presented by Canadians for Accountability and Peace Order and Good Government. Peter Bryce first blew the whistle on health conditions in residential schools in 1907. That’s when he reported that 24% of all children in Indian Residential Schools on the prairies were dying of tuberculosis. He submitted his report to the head of Indian Affairs, Frank Pedley in June 1907. Pedley and his assistant, the infamous Duncan Campbell Scott, did nothing with it while Bryce issued the report to all MPs and church leaders. Eventually it was leaked to the Ottawa Citizen which published the details six months later in November 1907.

That’s when the report’s recommendations were called into question and a campaign to undermine my great-grandfather’s credibility was started by Scott. Eventually, when he took over Pedley’s job in 1913, Duncan Campbell Scott told Peter Bryce that the department no longer needed a public health officer, and there was no need to continue issuing reports which showed how poorly the department was handling the public health of Indigenous people.

Bryce took another shot at it in 1922, after he had retired from the civil service and was no longer bound by confidentiality agreements. In his short book The Story of a National Crime, Bryce recounted his time at Indian Affairs, and blamed the inaction on health issues on Duncan Campbell Scott. Bryce also outlined how he had been treated by the federal government. From the beginning of his tenure in 1904, Bryce had advocated for a ministry of public health. Eventually in 1919 the government called on him to draft legislation for just such a ministry, but it denied Bryce the honour of being the first deputy minister in 1920. Instead, the government retired him in 1921 and put him on a pension worth about ¼ of his annual salary.

The Indian Residential School program devastated the Indigenous community in Canada for well over one hundred years. As well, the effects of the system will linger for many years to come, even though the last residential school was closed in 1996. Just like all whistleblowers, Peter Bryce paid for his revelations financially, professionally and personally. But we as a society owe Peter Bryce, Alan Cutler and all whistleblowers a debt of gratitude, for as American president Dwight D. Eisenhower said “a people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

The documentary film Finding Peter Bryce is currently in post-production but it needs funding to be completed. If you are interested in contributing, you can give through our partners, the Canadian Public Health Association and receive a tax receipt in return. Go to How to donate to the Film to find out more. Click here to see the promotional trailer. If you have other questions, suggestions or thoughts, please contact me at andyj.bryce@gmail.com

Big News to start the New Year

Jan2

I have some great news to start off 2016 – we (Peter Campbell of Gumboot Productions and I) are finalizing a collaboration with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) to produce a 20 minute educational film about Peter Bryce. Of course, I am thrilled about this; the primary reason I embarked on this journey to find Peter Bryce is to give my ancestor the recognition he deserves. Putting this kind of material in front of school children goes a long way to meeting that goal.

We plan to have this production ready by the end of March, and that means we have a busy few months ahead of us. We are still working on the full documentary and we need to complete one more principal shoot in the spring. I will be spending much of this winter organizing that shoot, and finding funds to complete the longer film as well as writing and producing the educational film.

This educational film caps off a tremendous year for us. In March, we attended and filmed the naming ceremony for the Waakebiness-Bryce Indigenous Health Institute at the University of Toronto. We followed that up with a week-long shoot in Ottawa where we filmed the unveiling of an historical plaque honouring Peter Bryce at Beechwood Cemetery, visited Peter Bryce’s home in Rockcliffe and interviewed a wide variety of people, including Ellie Kerr – a grand-daughter of Peter Bryce who is perhaps the only person alive who remembers him.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about Charlene Bearhead, one of the key figures in this initiative. We first met her at the unveiling ceremony at Beechwood. Charlene is the Education Lead at the NCTR and it is her job to collaborate with Ministries of Education, school authorities, and Universities. She also supports the work of educators across the country to ensure that the critical truth about the history of Indian Residential Schools and reconciliation education are being delivered in classrooms.. Charlene told us how excited she was about the documentary, and followed up that conversation with a meeting in the fall – and that’s when the educational film really began to take shape. Her advocacy and appreciation of the story of Peter Bryce has given us extra momentum going into 2016, which promises to be an important year in the journey to find Peter Bryce.

How a High School Student Challenged the Historical Record

Aug6

I love this story for three reasons. First it shows the power of the Internet – there is just so much information out there that if you can find a way to leverage it, you can contradict a famous authority on a subject. Second, I love the poise this young woman showed in responding to the criticisms of her work. And finally it reminds me that history is often incomplete, if not totally incorrect and that goes right to the heart of why I decided to do a documentary on my great-grandfather.

When I began my research I realized there wasn’t even a public building named after my great-grandfather Dr. Peter H. Bryce, and the only public recognition I could find for him was the Peter H. Bryce Award, established by the First Nations Caring Society. One of the most satisfying aspects of working on Finding Peter Bryce has been watching the recognition grow. The School of Public Health at U of T has established the Waakebiness Bryce School of Public Health, and very soon Beechwood Cemetery. which is Canada’s National Cemetery, will be unveiling an historical plaque in Peter Bryce’s honour. I’ll be there with a film crew to witness the event and it will become part of Finding Peter Bryce

But I digress – back to the article. It’s a great read about contradicting the narratives of the past – enjoy!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/01/the-teen-who-exposed-a-professor-s-myth.html

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Media Teacher and Producer

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