Colourful daycare crusader was mentor to moms; Lucille MacKay remembered by friends as a larger-than-life personality
Times Colonist (Victoria)
February 15, 2008
By: Jim Gibson

Daycare crusader Lucille MacKay was a woman who got things done.

No one needs to look any further than the daycare programs and facilities at the University of Victoria, according to family and former colleagues of the woman who succumbed to pneumonia last month at age 71.

"The reason that UVic daycare is such a wonderful place and has such wonderful facilities is because of her push," says Shurly Mazerolle. The two met almost 40 years ago through Victoria's co-operative pre-schools.

When her mother joined UVic daycare in 1976, it was a single house off-campus, according to daughter Heather MacKay. During more than 25 years at UVic, her mother was able to wangle more space and programs from the university. UVic daycare now has three buildings, and programs for infants through 12 years.

"She was tenacious if she thought something needed doing; man, it got done," Mazerolle says….

Protesting wasn't particularly her mother's style, MacKay says. Instead, her activism involved more sitting on committees, doing research, writing letters, lobbying and approaching "the politician or person who needed to be educated on universal daycare."

At the same time, MacKay said, her mother looked out for her daycare moms, ensuring they applied for bursaries and kept up their course work. Her mother mentored hundreds of young women, often detecting untapped talent many didn't know they possessed.

"She'd say, 'You're good at this,' and you'd do it," Mazerolle says. That's how Camosun College's early childhood education instructor Colleen O'Dowd found herself giving children's art workshops in her 19 years at UVic daycare. At first, she tried to get out of presenting workshops, claiming stage fright, but Lucille would not listen. "I'd not be an instructor now if I had not given those workshops," she says.

O'Dowd suspects Lucille's own situation as a mother of four spurred her childcare advocacy. When the four children were young, she was directly involved in childcare programs in Kitsilano and later Whitehorse.

MacKay thinks her mother's early upbringing led to her later passion for childcare. "She was always concerned about children and the way they were treated."…