Michael Oliver R.I.P.

Written by  //  September 30, 2004  //  Absent Friends, Education  //  Comments Off on Michael Oliver R.I.P.

Dr. Michael Oliver O.C. 1925-2004
by Alan Hustak

Dr. Michael Oliver O.C., the Montreal academic who was the founding president of the New Democratic Party was a spirited idealist and economic socialist who worked to bridge the divide between French and English Canada.

The former academic vice-Principal of McGill University in Montreal and President of Carleton University in Ottawa, Oliver died Wednesday on the McGill campus moments after giving a presentation on trade unions in Canadian politics as part of a course he was taking at the Institute On Learning and Retirement.

He was 79.

His funeral will be held (Sunday, Oct 3) at St. Thomas’ Anglican Church 6897 Somerled Ave. in N.D.G.

Oliver was research director for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s, founding president of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and founding director of the Quebec studies program at McGill in 1963.

He also spent four years as professor of politics at the University of Papua, New Guinea. Read complete obituary and much more on Wednesday-Night.com

Michael Oliver, former NDP president and VP (Academic) of McGill
Oct. 6, 2004
(McGill Newsroom) Michael Oliver, the founding president of the New Democratic Party, died Wednesday at age 79. He had been McGill’s Vice-Principal (Academic) from 1966-72, then president of Carleton University for seven years.
Oliver’s association with McGill was longstanding. He enrolled in the University after the Second World War, and obtained his arts degree in 1948. After studying at the Sorbonne for a year, he returned to McGill for a master’s and PhD. He joined McGill as a political science professor in 1957, and started the French Canada Studies program. Among the first to anticipate the rise of Quebec nationalism, Oliver stated as early as 1957 that the province would have a profound effect on the country’s politics. When the NDP was founded, he helped shape its policy, and was unanimously elected its first president in 1961. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.

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