Marilyn Churley is CHFT’s only lifetime board member who has also served as City Councillor and a provincial Member of Parliament. She credits her success as a politician to the training she got at Riverdale’s Bain Co-operative Apartments. Let’s see how she got there.
Raised in Labrador, she found her way to the west coast and then to Toronto’s east end in the early 1980s where she settled with her daughter. She walked past the Bain one year in December and marveled at how festive it looked, a reflection surely of its strong sense of community. She discovered it was a co-op, something she confesses she didn’t know a lot about. She applied and within a very short time, was admitted as a member. Because Churley was sidelined from work temporarily due to illness, the co-op provided her with a subsidy not long after she moved in. Although she was soon back on her feet financially and paid market charges, co-op life allowed her to maintain security of tenure with less worry than if she were a single out-of-work mom today.
It wasn’t long before Marilyn Churley got onto a Bain committee and began to find her voice, despite being a shy person. She recalls being nervous presenting on the committee’s behalf at Residents’ Council (the Bain’s name for its Board of Directors). Soon she was on the Council and then was elected its president. The co-op was in some difficult negotiations with CMHC for funds to retrofit and upgrade its buildings and through that process – ultimately successful – Marilyn Churley began to develop the skills that would lead her to a career in politics.
At the same time, Churley co-founded Citizens for A Safe Environment, a south Riverdale community organization lobbying to have the Commissioners Street garbage incinerator shut down due to its generation of dioxin and other carcinogenic chemicals. Those community efforts also stopped the building of a replacement incinerator, working towards cleaner air for the community. She learned what she calls the three-legged stool approach to effecting change: engaging with elected officials, with private citizens, and with the media.
Her local environmental activism propelled Marilyn into political life, first as a City Councillor (1988 to 1990), and then as an MPP in the provincial New Democratic Party government (1990 to 1995). In 1991, she was appointed Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, a position she held until the end of the Rae mandate in 1995. She stayed on as a provincial MPP until 2005. After Queen’s Park, Churley made two unsuccessful runs at a federal seat. She worked full-time for 10 years as a Justice of the Peace, and then continued part-time until her retirement in 2023.
When asked of her proudest political achievements, she noted the first was shutting down the Riverdale incinerator. A second one resulted from her role as an MPP. Years earlier, Churley had given up a child for adoption and through her considerable personal efforts, she was able to reconnect with him as a 30-year-old. She used her position at Queen’s Park to loosen the rules around adoption disclosure and was thrilled when the Adoption Information Disclosure Actcame into force in 2007, allowing others in her position an easier road to reunification. In 2015, she told her story in her memoir, Shameless, The Fight for Adoption Disclosure and the Search for My Son.
Although her co-op living was years ago, Marilyn Churley remembers it fondly as a time when she gained experience critical to her political life, including through serving on the CHFT Board in the 1980s and door-knocking to build the necessary support to convert a low-rise on Broadview into co-op, now Longview Co-op. For Churley, the secret to successful co-op living comprises effective communication, a strong board, and ensuring the community is a mix of incomes. The interdependence that results reminds her of the small community where she grew up where people looked out for each other, regardless of whether they were friends, just because they were part of the same community. Marilyn Churley wishes she’d spent less time worrying about what others thought of her as a young adult and that she’d more quickly reached the point of approaching life with an open heart and an open brain. We think she did a pretty good job of changing the world with her philosophy. CHFT named her an Honorary Lifetime Director in 2000.
