Simma Holt Memoirs Chronicle Lifetime of Fighting Injustice

Ever feisty but compassionate, idealistic yet realistic, and never afraid to call a spade a spade...

Simma Holt holds a copy of her new book, Memoirs of a Loose Cannon, at her book launch on November 6 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Cindy Chan/The Epoch Times

OTTAWA—Ever feisty but compassionate, idealistic yet realistic, and never afraid to call a spade a spade, distinguished journalist and social crusader Simma Holt inspired her fans with spirit and punch at the launch of her memoirs in Ottawa on Thursday.

The last six and a half decades have seen Mrs. Holt building successive accomplished careers as a journalist, politician, public servant, political advisor, and author.

The common threads have been caring about others and creating justice, as chronicled in Memoirs of a Loose Cannon.

“I was born to care,” said Mrs. Holt, now 86, at the book launch at Library and Archives Canada. She was born in 1922 in the small town of Vegreville, Alberta to a Jewish family that immigrated from Ukraine in the early 1900s.

She explained that her philosophy of life is known in Jewish tradition as tzedakah.

“It’s charity. You give without people knowing you give, and you don’t look for credit. You do what is humanly right, and you have to care about other people, no matter what they are, what their skin, what their problems.”

“The one thing I will not tolerate is injustice. I fought [for justice] my whole career in journalism,” she said.

Respectfully Called a ‘loose cannon’

After graduating from the University of Manitoba in 1944, Mrs. Holt began her career with the Vancouver Sun.

In the newsroom of that era, “being a girl in a man’s world …  sexist and everything, that was the toughest part,” she said.

Yet it made Mrs. Holt more determined, or “more arrogant,” as described by Toronto Sun founder and columnist Peter Worthington, who wrote the introduction to her book and spoke at the launch.

Calling Mrs. Holt “the only octogenarian teenager I’ve ever met,” he recalled that “Simma gave as good as she got” and “she used to dig up stories that nobody else could match.”

She was given the tough jobs, such as the labour beat and then the crime beat, where she saved three convicted murderers from the gallows. Their sentences were commuted after she uncovered evidence and contacted the minister of justice.

After 30 years in journalism, Mrs. Holt joined the Liberal Party and served as a Member of Parliament in the Trudeau government from 1974 to 1979.

She was Canada’s first female Jewish MP and first female vice-chair of the House of Commons Justice Committee.