Celebrating Bob Carty  (1950 – 2014)

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Tribute given by John Foster at St. Joseph’s Parish Church, Ottawa, March 10, 2014

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When you look at Bob’s CV you won’t find a list of academic degrees – not one. Yet one of his many dimensions of leadership was as an educator – the result of a combination of his natural intelligence and curiosity, experience viewed with “Desert Eyes” and collaboration.

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In the early ‘70s he transferred a model – experienced in Mexico – and engaged friends and Youth Corps veterans in a unique Canadian version. The Centro Nactional de comunicacion Social, or CENCOS, found in 1964 by Pepe Alvarez Icaza and Luzma Longoria, aimed to create a space which didn’t exist in mass media, where one could mmap what was going on insociety and the world with an eye to social justice and take account of people ignored by big papers and TV.

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The Canadian News Synthesis Project (or the “Radical Catholic Clippers” as we sometimes called ourselves) met monthly. Bringing their paper cutters and sheaves of clippings from press across Canada, each of us with an assigned sector (agriculture, finance, social movements, etc) to compare notes and build a joint picture of what was going on and who was making it happen.

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What did it mean for the poor, for women, for indigenous peoples, for Canada’s roles in the world? Identifying the frame the various media put on events and what interests those frames serviced.

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Hunched over the gestetner at the Scarboro Foreign Mission, the News Synthesis gang produced their monthly synthesis of reality.

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There were lighter moments, weekend retreats in Muskoka with guitars and song. Bob was at the centre of it all, questioning, provoking, adding, reflecting but building his own deepening analysis of society.

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At the same time, Bob and Frances were spending their Monday nights (for decades) with the Latin American Working Group or LAWG, another Toronto-based collective with roots in the mid-sixties, protestant youth and the anti-war movement. Long before Canada became identified with global resource extraction, colleagues in the Dominican Republic were raising questions about a Canadian mining corporation, Falconbridge, and its impact on their lives. Together with Louise Casselman, Tim Draiment and journalist John Deverell, Bob worked on a portrait and analysis of this Canadian corporation, yielding the book Falconbridge: Portrait of a Canadian Mining Multinational in 1975.

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This was just the beginning. Bob, with LAWG, became key resources for the churches and religious orders concerned about human rights and what their investments were up to. Bob worked collaboratively with colleagues in LAWG, and building years of connections with unions, Jesuit and other civil society collaborators in Latin America. It wasn’t just about corporations, but challenging the whole economic model, like that enforced in Chile by Pinochet and the Chicago boys who designed it.

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An educator, Bob was leading and learning through collective work and experience. Meanwhile, his partner Frances was devoting her life’s energies to human rights and refugee protection in the Americas. Motivated by a commitment to justice, empowered by partners and allies, they were a resource to so many.

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Bob has passed. We miss him in so many diverse ways. Yet the song goes on.