VANCOUVER – Kathleen Sinclair is best known to Canadians for her political ties, as the mother of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife Margaret and the wife of an influential Liberal MP, but it was her role as a matriarch that was closest to her heart, according to one of her daughters.
Sinclair, 92, died peacefully of old age on Vancouver Island at a Saanich, B.C., nursing home Thursday, said Betsy Dening, one of her five daughters. Sinclair was also a grandmother to 11 – including Quebec Liberal MP Justin Trudeau – a great grandmother of 13 and a great-great-grandmother of four. She loved her family – and especially babies – more than anything, Dening said.
“Every picture that I find of her, she has babies and children all over her and we’re at a beach or we’re sitting in the garden. She was just so loving,” Dening said.
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Sinclair was born Kathleen Bernard in Penticton, B.C., in 1920. She earned the nickname “Bubbles” for the amount of them she produced when she was a baby, Dening said.
She went to high school in West Vancouver, where she met her husband, James Sinclair, a Scotsman who fought with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War for the first three years of their marriage, Dening said.
He considered the “Bubbles” moniker undignified and always called her “Kathleen.” But the nickname stuck, as her nieces and nephews always called her “Auntie Bubs,” Dening said.
James Sinclair was first elected as a Liberal MP for North Vancouver during the war, in 1940. Kathleen Sinclair and another MP’s wife from Vancouver were the first two spouses to pack up their families and move to Ottawa, Dening said.
“Otherwise, they’d see their husbands once a year when they came on the train,” she explained. “We have wonderful memories as a family of five girls being on the train and sitting up in the dome car and having our own big suite . . . it was a nice way to travel.”
Sinclair enjoyed travelling with her husband, who often went to Europe on business, Dening said.
“The first time she flew to England, she was on a plane where they made the beds for you at night.”
But the West Coast was always home for Sinclair, and when her husband left politics in 1958, the family returned to North Vancouver, where she was active in the church community and as a volunteer at Lions Gate Hospital.
James Sinclair died in 1984 and Kathleen moved to Victoria in 1990. She is survived by her five daughters: Heather, Janet, Rosalind, Margaret and Betsy, and her three generations of grandchildren.
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