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John Fraser can remember bumping into Donald Rickerd in the early 2000s at the entrance to Massey College at University of Toronto, accompanied by six university professors visiting from North Korea. Mr. Rickerd, a Massey senior fellow, was a beloved presence on campus, whose vast knowledge and connections had led him to become one of Canada’s leading experts on the isolated communist regime.
Mr. Fraser, who was Master at Massey, had a distinguished career as a journalist, including a stint as The Globe and Mail’s Beijing correspondent. That made him a valuable asset for Mr. Rickerd.
“I had this one claim to fame,” Mr. Fraser recalled. “When I was posted to China, I met the beloved leader [North Korea’s founding president Kim Il Sung] once and shook his hand.”
“So I stuck out my hand and these young guys from North Korea started crumpling because they thought they were that much closer to the beloved leader,” Mr. Fraser said. It turned out to be a great icebreaker for the North Korean academics, who spent a week in Toronto with Mr. Rickerd as their guide and mentor.
Mr. Rickerd was always sensitive to the challenges facing the graduate students he would befriend at his office or at lunch. “He had this incredible ability to listen intently,” Mr. Fraser said. It was no different with the North Koreans, even though they came from an insular totalitarian state. “He understood that they were in a kind of strange cocoon and that this visit to Canada was one of the few experiences they were going to have to the outside world.”
Mr. Rickerd, who died in Toronto on Sept. 6 at age 93, had a multifaceted and eclectic career, working as a lawyer, university registrar, foundation executive, royal commissioner, professor, Asia expert and board member. He then spent over 25 years at Massey and Trinity colleges and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy as a research associate and unpaid fellow, advising generations of students.
“Despite being in his 90s, he was genial and outgoing,” said Jack Cunningham, a fellow at Trinity, recalling that Mr. Rickerd had a storehouse of anecdotes. “He was a wonderful raconteur,” Mr. Cunningham said. “His curiosity was absolutely endless,” his wife, Julie Rekai Rickerd, added.
Donald Sheridan Rickerd was born on Nov. 8, 1931, in Smiths Falls, Ont., the eldest of two sons of Harry Rickerd, a railway dispatcher, and his wife, the former Mildred Sheridan, a teacher. Donald studied at local public schools before earning a BA in history at Queen’s and an MA in modern history at Oxford University.
Returning to Canada, Mr. Rickerd got his law degree at Osgoode Hall and began practising corporate law at Fasken and Colvin. But despite his abilities, it wasn’t a good fit. His boss felt he didn’t “hustle” enough.
“Cheating on billable hours was not for him,” his wife explained.
He moved to York University where he served as registrar and taught law and constitutional history in the university’s early years. It’s also at York where Mr. Rickerd met his future wife, a writer.
In 1968, Mr. Rickerd was hired as president of the Donner Canadian Foundation, then one of Canada’s largest foundations. It had been established by William Donner, an American steel tycoon who spent his later years in Montreal, dying there in 1953.
Mr. Rickerd transformed the foundation into a pioneer in progressive public policy, providing seed money for the North-South Institute, Dalhousie University’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies and the Native Law Centre at University of Saskatchewan. The foundation also bankrolled the initial years of the non-partisan Parliamentary Internship Programme, which still brings a dozen university graduates to Ottawa annually to work with backbench MPs.
“Donald Rickerd was decisive, quick-acting and generous and he ensured that the Programme was independent in its operations,” James Hurley, the Internship Programme’s first director, said in 2018. (Mr. Hurley died in March.)
Mr. Rickerd also became president of the William H. Donner Foundation, a sister organization in the U.S. He stayed with both groups until 1989. The two foundations subsequently took a rightward path, financing think tanks that promoted free-market values. The Donner Canadian Foundation still sponsors the Donner Prize for the best public policy book of the year.
After leaving the Donner foundations, Mr. Rickerd spent eight years running the Max Bell Foundation.
In the late 1970s, as the threat of Quebec separation soared, there were charges that the RCMP’s security service had engaged in illegal activities including break-ins, unauthorized wiretaps, even a barn-burning.
The federal government established the three-member Royal Commission on Certain Activities of the RCMP, headed by Alberta Judge David McDonald, to get to the bottom of the allegations.
Mr. Rickerd was appointed as one of the two other commissioners, and their deliberations became front-page news. He developed a reputation as a low-key interrogator of witnesses whose polite persistence got to the heart of the matter.
In one notable incident, William Higgitt, a former RCMP commissioner, was asked to explain how the RCMP could have drafted a letter claiming that the police weren’t intercepting mail when that’s exactly what they were doing. Mr. Higgitt responded that the letter was in reality accurate because the RCMP’s mail tampering was so rare that it “hardly would constitute a practice.”
Mr. Rickerd shot back, “What’s the difference between hardly constituting a practice and constituting a practice?” Frustrated with another non-response from Mr. Higgitt, he accused the RCMP chief of “a straight contradiction” of the facts.
After four years, with Mr. Rickerd commuting back to Toronto every weekend from Ottawa to run the Donner Foundation, the commission reported in 1981. Its chief recommendation led to establishment of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Mr. Rickerd’s range of endeavours appeared limitless. While running the Donner Foundation, he also chaired the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), helping it move from a deficit to a healthy surplus.
In 1976, Mr. Rickerd and his wife purchased an island in the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River, which included a sprawling home with 13 bedrooms and an adjacent tiny island. The two islands were joined by a small bridge. They called the place Zavikon. On one end of the bridge, Mr. Rickerd affixed a Canadian flag and on the other a U.S. flag. That fuelled a myth, still repeated by tour boat guides, that the bigger island was in Canada and the smaller one in the U.S. Both islands are in fact totally in Canada.
Mr. Rickerd would organize conferences on issues of the day and invite a range of international guests and students to stay on Zavikon. “If you came, you had to talk about your work and cook a meal from your home country,” said Ruediger Willenberg, a computer science professor from Germany who befriended Mr. Rickerd while working on his PhD at U of T, completed in 2015.
Mr. Rickerd was named to the Order of Canada in 1984 and received honorary degrees from Queen’s, Trent and Mount Allison University.
He leaves his wife, Julie; son, Christopher; and granddaughter, Astrid.
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