Glen Korstrom

Pivotal moments in the sparkling career of Grace McCarthy can be found etched in the stonework of Vancouver’s best-known landmarks.

For not only did she play central roles in creating the Vancouver Exhibition and Convention Centre and the SkyTrain transportation network, she saw that lights were strung across Lions Gate Bridge.

The proudest accomplishment of the 79-year-old former deputy premier, however, was not hewn of steel and stone, she said in a BIV interview.

Instead, it was the instrumental role she played in ushering in B.C.’s Protection of Children Act in the 1970s. That legislation created tough penalties for child abuse and created Canada’s first helpline for children.

McCarthy’s business career began when, at the tender age of 17, she founded and started to grow a chain of flower shops to five locations. “When you’re that young, you don’t realize what the hurdles are. You go into it with great ambition and you don’t have enough experience to know what other people have experienced. So, you just forge your own way,” she said. “When I discovered that there were problems on the way, I just worked over top of them. That’s how I did it.”

Things have changed enormously since McCarthy founded Grayce Florists Ltd. on East Hastings Street in 1944. For one, sexist prejudices such as the one that decreed that a woman required a man to act as a guarantor so she could have a phone line are consigned to the distant past.

McCarthy approached business conservatively and never asked her father to co-sign a loan, which would have been a requirement in those early post-war years. Banks did not lend money to women back then, she said.

“Women were so discriminated against. Things have changed dramatically since I started in business and in politics,” she said.

Ask who her biggest mentor was and without skipping a beat, she’ll say her mother, Rietta Winterbottom.

“She was very supportive and incredible,” McCarthy remembered. “When I told her that I wanted to start a flower business and leave school to do it, right away she was supportive. She realized that this was my goal and I wasn’t going to change my mind.”

McCarthy deftly moved from operating five successful Vancouver flower shops and what she believes was the first school of floral design in Canada, the B.C. School of Floral Design, to being an extremely successful politician.

She served six years as the Vancouver Park Board’s vice-chair and then spent a further 22 years as a Vancouver MLA. She headed the ministries of economic development, tourism and human resources.

The heartbreaker came when Rita Johnston nipped her 941 to 881 on the second ballot in the race to lead the governing Social Credit Party in 1991.

McCarthy is best known for her pivotal role in creating the waterfront exhibition and convention centre and the SkyTrain construction, and for executing the controversial decision to sell the former Expo ’86 site to Chinese billionaire Li Ka Shing for $145 million. Another coup was to get lights on Lions Gate Bridge in 1986.

“I was able to get private funding for that,” she said. “The people from Britain who owned the British Properties, the Guinness family, paid for that lighting. We couldn’t really ask the taxpayer to pay for lighting a bridge because we were in recession.”

B.C. Finance Minister Carole Taylor told BIV recently that she fondly thinks about McCarthy when she drives over Lions Gate.

Taylor, a former IWIB award winner, believes some people make too big a deal about McCarthy’s gender and that what was most amazing about her was her positive energy and can-do attitude.

If McCarthy were premier today, her priority would be education, she said.

“I would make sure that every family has the opportunity to learn computer skills,” she said. “The government could make credible financial deals leasing computers from companies. It’s a small thing but I think the computer has an unbelievable ability for education.”

McCarthy’s retirement years have included sitting on boards such as Health Mor (the makers of Filter Queen vacuums), the BC Bearing Group, the Salvation Army and the B.C. Paraplegic Association.

Though she never completed a university degree, she is proud that B.C.’s major post-secondary institutions (University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and British Columbia Institute of Technology) have all granted her honorary degrees.

She also has an honour almost unheard of for a B.C. cabinet minister: a highway named after her in a foreign country.

McCarthy’s former Little Mountain constituency had the highest percentage of Jewish residents of all B.C. ridings. She built a loyal following through her actions and she made headlines when she walked out of a private gathering because government colleagues were telling anti-Semitic jokes.

The Jewish National Fund honoured her in 1993 at a fundraising dinner and decided to name the highway in Israel for which they were raising money, the Grace McCarthy Highway.

Since then, McCarthy has co-founded and aggressively raised funds for the CHILD Foundation with her daughter Mary Parsons and HSBC Bank Canada president and CEO Lindsay Gordon.

The foundation’s acronym stands for Children with Intestinal and Liver Disorders (CHILD). It helps fund research to find a cure for ailments such as Crohn’s disease, which has afflicted one of McCarthy’s three grandchildren.

“Grace is a remarkable lady,” said Gordon, whose son has Crohn’s disease. “She’s very empathetic towards people because of her history in both business and politics in the province. She’s extremely well connected.”

gkorstrom@biv.com