A Tribute To One Of Niagara, Ontario’s Unsung Heroes

 By Doug Draper

 Journalism, like any other job, has its share of ups and downs, and one of the ups for me has been the many people I’ve met across our region who have accomplished some pretty extraordinary things.

Percy McKay,always there to fight for re-introducing fish in a Lake Ontario we too often have laced with man-made poisons

 I’m not talking so much about people with big titles and positions – the makers and shakers in the community who often find ways of recognizing each other’s efforts through the bestowal of the obligatory service club awards, honorary college degrees, etc. I’m talking about ordinary people living their lives quietly on the side streets and back streets of our cities and towns. They are people who often don’t have big titles or a great deal of wealth,  but who work just as hard, with little or no compensation, to make our communities better places to live in.

 They are the people I call unsung heroes and they are the people who have so often inspired me the most.

 One of those people is Percy McKay who passed away at his St. Catharines home last week at age 87 following a year-long battle with cancer.

 If you are not a Canadian Auto Workers member in the Niagara area, or a conservationist or a veteran in this region of Second World War, you may wonder who Percy McKay was. I wondered too when he first called me more than two decades ago about stories I was writing at the time as an environment reporter for the St. Catharines Standard on high concentrations of toxic PCB chemicals the province’s Ministries of Environment and Natural Resources were finding in the flesh of fish and turtles in the lower waters of Twelve Mile Creek flushing in to Lake Ontario.

 “I’ve been out fishing on Lake Ontario with your dad,” he said to me that first time he called me on the phone, “and I am a member of the  St. Catharines Game and Fish Association.” The first part, about fishing with my father sounded good but the second one about the Game and Fish Association (a group he was a founder and director of) had me kind of worried about where this conversation was going next. I’d had other members of the association upset at me for writing about toxic chemicals showing up in the flesh of fish in Lake Ontario. They didn’t like that either but some felt the stories I was writing were putting a bit of a damper on their fish derbies and they wanted me to stop. But that was not why he called.

Percy called to tell me that he was just as concerned as I was about the PCBs in the creek and lake, and that he had some idea how they got there. Turned out that back in the 1950s, he worked at an old Ferranti-Packard plant (now long gone) in downtown St. Catharines off Bond Street and one of the practices back then was to dump all of the PCB-laden fluids from electrical transformers the company handled down a slope sweeping to Twelve Mile Creek.

 Was he willing to go on the record and show me where, I asked him at the time. Yes, he said, and his detailed account led to an Ontario Ministry of Environment investigation that found elevated levels of these poisonous chemicals on the ground where people could have come in contact with them. They were excavated from the site and transported to a more secure hazardous waste storage facility and Percy received thanks from the province for coming forward with the information when no one else would. “If this does anything,” Percy concluded, “I hope it helps the lake and the fish,” and I am sure it did.

In the years after that, I met Percy over and over again in my role as an environment writer. He was actively involved in the stocking of trout and salmon in Lake Ontario after their populations almost crashed from invaders like sea lamprey and, yes, those industrial chemicals we all liked to use in the middle part of the last century. He also played a lead role, voluntarily, in reintroducing wild turkeys (an all-but-extinct species) to our region. “It is through dedicated conservationists like yourself,” one provincial official wrote him, “that we will again hear gobbling in the Niagara tree tops.”

 I didn’t learn until years later that he was also a proud WWII veteran and member of Legion Branch #24 in St. Catharines. For his voluntary efforts there he received a letter, signed by then Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 2003 that read, in part; “Through your efforts to assist others, you have always demonstrated a generosity of time and spirit that serves as an inspiration to all of us.”

And so he did. His passion for community should inspire us all to get more engaged in our communities – to care enough to do our own part to make our communities better. The best tribute anyone of us could pay to a person like Percy McKay is to follow in his path.

 (Niagara At Large welcomes our readers to comment on this post. We only ask you to do what Percy always did and put your name on the line with your comment. And hey, if you have an unsung hero you feel should get a pat on the back in the greater Niagara region – whether that be in Niagara, Ontario or the Buffalo, Niagara Falls, New York area – do a little write-up and send in a photo of the person to drapers@vaxxine.com)