The Rev. Michael Creal, a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada, refugee activist and professor at York University, died August 23 at the age of 97. Creal had received the Order of Canada in June in recognition of his lifelong efforts on behalf of refugees.
The Rev. Bill Whitla, a friend and colleague of Creal for the last 50 years, describes him as a brilliant, compassionate man. From a missions trip reaching out to students at the University of New Brunswick in the 1960s to their shared time at Holy Trinity Church in Toronto where they housed draft dodgers and held dances dances for gay Torontonians in the 1970s, Whitla says Creal was prescient in the issues he devoted his life to—an early adopter and driver of now-widespread trends in social justice.
Sometimes that meant clashing with both church and civil authorities, Whitla says, including several investigations by the diocese of Toronto’s Board of Inquiry and—when it came to his work with refugees—the secular authorities. “This [work] doesn’t earn you a lot of brownie points with the law or with the people who are trying to establish coherent immigration policy. But it does a lot for the people who are … being victimized by an overly conscientious effort to have them excluded from the Canadian social scene.”
Creal was a founder of the Sanctuary Coalition, an organization which advocates for refugees whose claims have been wrongly denied by the Canadian government in the eyes of the Coalition’s members. Whitla says the coalition also has a history of providing safe houses for refugees to live in, preventing them from being deported while the coalition worked on their cases. This practice was not always popular with law enforcement, says Whitla, but Creal persevered.
“He laboured mightily on their behalf,” he says.
Creal took his advocacy for refugees as well as a host of other social justice causes with him to his work as a professor for the department of humanities at York University, where he worked beginning in the 1960s as a professor, and in positions including head of the division of humanities and founder of the school’s Centre for Refugee Studies. Creal remained a professor emeritus at York until his death.
As in his work with the church, Creal’s teaching was rooted in compassion for the vulnerable and a perspective on social issues that was decades ahead of its time, says Whitla.
“[My] daughter Rebecca took that course with him and she remembers it as one of the outstanding courses of her undergraduate career,” he says. “To her, it has been a formative thing.” Rebecca has since gone on to become a deacon in the Anglican Church of Canada and a professor of theology at St. Andrew’s College.
The other vital thing about Creal’s advocacy, says Whitla, was his compassion even for those who disagreed with him. Even during the times when Whitla says the diocese of Toronto was harsh with his criticisms and investigations of its work in the 1979s, 80s and 90s, “Michael sailed through those bringing a measure of peace and decorum and good humour—and an effort to hear the weight of the argument that’s on the other side and see how it could be put into palatable terms for all sides to hear and relate to. That’s the mark of a peacemaker,” he says.
