“Her core belief was that everybody matters. Everybody should have a place at the table. She could not live with the inequalities in this world and so she did something about it.”
That’s how Lois Little sees the legacy of Suzette Montreuil, a longtime Yellowknifer and Order of the Northwest Territories inductee whose advocacy on a wide range of fronts was sustained and formidable. Suzette passed away on Monday at the age of 63.
Little met Suzette when the two were young activists in the NWT’s capital in the 1980s. Moving to Yellowknife in April 1986, Suzette rapidly fell into a group that would go on to form Alternatives North, the social justice coalition that has for decades been an outspoken voice on matters environmental and social in the North.
With husband of almost 40 years Kevin O’Reilly, Suzette relentlessly sought change that would make the lives of every northerner better – he as an MLA, she as a union local leader, francophone education advocate and ardent champion of a living wage to lift people from poverty.
“There are very few teams like Suzette and Kevin. Kevin is an out-front kind of politician. Suzette, in her almost quiet advocacy, was just as political but in a different way,” said Little.
“When we have meals or sit around, it’s not little banter,” said O’Reilly of his wife. “It was often what are we going to do about this or that, or strategy or analysis. It was a fantastic partnership.”
“Suzette’s modus operandi,” said longtime friend and Alternatives North co-founder Sister Marie Zarowny, “was a quiet, unassuming, but persistent focus on what was needed to create a world in which everybody could thrive.”
Suzette was first diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2007, then lung cancer in 2023.
After living with cancer – and multiple rounds of treatment – for years, she passed away in the company of her children, Amber and René, and with her husband holding her hand.
People can pay their respects from 12pm till 1pm on Saturday, July 25 at St Patrick’s Co-Cathedral in Yellowknife. A mass follows at 1pm before she is laid to rest at Lakeview Cemetery. A celebration of life will follow in the fall.
“Our mom is my ultimate role model when it comes to maintaining a calm, zen, loving, and gentle yet strong disposition throughout all kinds of adversity,” her daughter Amber wrote.
“She faced her own health challenges with the same determination and faith as the world’s social justice issues, which she worked tirelessly to remediate.”
A just, caring society
Born in Mattawa, Ontario on August 3, 1962, Suzette Dora Marie Montreuil grew up in the francophone community of 2,500 people with parents Emma and Émile, older sister Micheline, younger brother Gérald and a vast extended family.
She studied occupational therapy at the University of Western Ontario and began her career in Ottawa before heading north, where she would spend decades on staff at Yellowknife’s Stanton Territorial Hospital.
Four days after she reached the territorial capital, she was introduced to Kevin O’Reilly at a meeting of Nuclear-Free North, a campaign group formed at a time of global nuclear proliferation.
O’Reilly had only arrived in the city a few months earlier. At the meeting in the Yellowknife Inn’s basement, he recalled this week, “it was pretty close to love at first sight.” They were married in January 1987.
For the rest of her life, Suzette would take on causes related to poverty, equality and the environment. She, O’Reilly and Zarowny created Alternatives North in the early 1990s, growing it into a voice that routinely challenged ministers, mines and economists to better support ordinary people and the world around them.
Suzette was brought up in a Catholic family. Zarowny, now a Sister of St Ann in BC, found Suzette’s work to be informed by a “belief in and commitment to the social teaching of the Catholic Church, a strong belief in the gospel imperative to create a more just and caring society.”
“I think anybody who knows Suzette in the North knows she lived that with every fibre of her being,” Zarowny said.
“She was completely committed to the common good,” said Bob Bromley, who, as a friend and territorial politician, witnessed Suzette’s ability to drive policy change on issues like poverty.
“She happened to have the smarts and the abilities to be effective in her advocacy and analysis, really adding to the data on which policy was based and critiquing government policy, leading the way on a lot of issues,” Bromley said.
“She was so effective at drawing in knowledgeable partners and collaborating with them.”
Suzette ran for territorial office herself in 1999, finishing second to Bill Braden in the Great Slave district. Her husband, first a city councillor, represented Yellowknife’s Frame Lake from 2015 to 2023.
“I think she could have done it inside the system, but she was also very effective outside the system – and we need both,” said Bromley.
“I could never have served as a city councillor with a young family without Suzette’s strong support and interest, and the same later in life when I became an MLA,” said O’Reilly, adding he in turn supported her work and advocacy.
That included Suzette’s longtime representation of French-language education in Yellowknife.
She served as the president of francophone daycare Garderie Plein Soleil for several years and was then involved for more than a decade as a board member and president of la Commission scolaire francophone, which oversees Yellowknife’s École Allain St-Cyr, which her children attended.
“During the first years of the Garderie Plein Soleil, it often had to move locations and there were lots of threats of possible closure. Suzette ensured – with the committee that was involved in the construction of École Allain St-Cyr – that they would find a permanent home for the daycare,” said Yvonne Careen, who spent more than a decade as the school board’s superintendent. Garderie Plein Soleil is now a part of the broader school campus.
Careen said Suzette ended up being able to see the benefits of her advocacy on a daily basis as the school expanded.
“It’s now home to 230-plus students,” she said, “in part due to her determination and her contributions.”
‘Strong, solid, beautiful friendships’
One day in 2007, presenting as an occupational therapist to a nursing class at Yellowknife’s Aurora College, Suzette found herself unable to finish a sentence.
The student nurses called an ambulance. Her husband cycled over. The following day, in Edmonton, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Multiple rounds of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment followed.
From that point, Suzette’s life became even more of a balancing act than it was.
Friends had already been amazed by her ability to combine parenthood, advocacy and her many pastimes.
“She had a breadth and depth of interests that was pretty incredible, given all the work she somehow was able to achieve,” said Bromley.
“She got into gardening all of a sudden and her house looked like a greenhouse in April every year with starter plants – she became a real enthusiast. The last few years, maybe five years or so, she got into quilting and produced some fine quilting products.”
Lone Sorensen has one of Suzette’s quilts, decorated with plants to match Sorensen’s own passion for gardening, which is her job in Yellowknife.
Sorensen remembers meeting Suzette when the two would each wear the same baby carrier while walking downtown to settle their young children. They got talking, became friends and started a play group – followed by their own singing group.
While O’Reilly considers himself “useless with music,” the house was full of it while Amber and René were growing up, and Suzette insisted they take piano lessons before urging them to expand their horizons.
“She encouraged me to pick up the guitar, which is something that I still do,” said René, a member of Yellowknife punk rock band HYFY.
“Song is really powerful,” he said. “I think it can be healing. It can illuminate.”
As her health worsened, particularly following her lung cancer diagnosis, Suzette still possessed a “drive and zest for life” that her husband found remarkable.
“Even though she was sick, she continued to work” for the betterment of people, Careen said. “Kudos to her. Kudos to her family that supported her throughout the last difficult few years.”
Her family this week said they reserved special thanks for the friends and healthcare workers who helped Suzette to live a life that was as meaningful and comfortable as possible in recent years.
“I think this last year in particular was such an example of how, although she strove with all her being to regain her various capacities that she had lost a year ago, she somehow was able to accept being cared for, and she brought people together in her weakness and in her need,” said Zarowny.
“Often we, I think, in our world, admire the strong and highly rate the accomplishments of people, and yet there’s also a strength and a value in those who are weak and are cared for, because they call forth the goodness of others, and that’s what really deeply inspired me during this past year.”
Sorensen had admired in Suzette the ability to advocate for herself just as she advocated for others.
“We asked her, how can we help? And she’s like, ‘Well, you can help by making some meals so I can rest a bit,'” Sorensen said, recalling one episode following brain surgery.
“I had a huge kitchen at that time, so we gathered eight of us in my kitchen and she even provided the recipes and some containers.
“I always appreciated that about her. We could give to her when she needed it, and then she would give to me or us when we needed it. It’s been very beautiful to have such strong, solid, beautiful friendships.”
Songs and memories
Asked to define Suzette’s legacy, some of her friends and fellow activists pointed to the existence of a territorial anti-poverty strategy she helped to bring into being. Others pointed to her work on a guaranteed basic income for northerners.
“Suzette and Kevin raised a pair of activists. That’s a pretty amazing legacy in my mind,” said Little, referring to their children. René said he is involved in the local Palestine solidarity movement and has helped to support people living in Yellowknife’s encampments.
“I feel very fortunate to have been raised by someone who had such strong values,” he said. “She really believed that people fundamentally deserve to be cared for, to have their needs met.”
“In no way is the job done,” said Bromley, reflecting on how he believes Suzette would assess the status of the fields she cared about the most, despite her accomplishments.
“In some ways, the job has gotten bigger, more challenging and more complex. Suzette was completely dedicated to the anti-poverty movement and did a lot of work with the government on moving things forward, and yet poverty remains an issue.
“There was so much more to do. She would have felt the same way, I suspect.”
Beyond her advocacy, Sorensen said Suzette’s passing leaves “a huge hole” in the community.
“There’s a very big open space missing now, but we still have the songs and the memories,” Sorensen said.
“Suzette wrote a couple of very good songs. One of them, Northern Skies, is lodged into all of us. It’s such a beautiful song. A week before she passed, we went to sit with her and sang that song. It looked like she was beginning to fade and be gone, but she came to for a moment when we were singing Northern Skies, and her lips moved as if she wanted to sing along. Right till the end, we were connected in song.
“On our last farewell to her on Friday, three days before she passed, I promised her that song would live on in my family and I would teach it to my grandchildren. We’ll keep singing that, and that will be like having her here again.”
