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Glenbow completes arrangement and description of Sheldon Chumir fonds
Jim Bowman, Glenbow Archives
Sheldon Chumir, 1940-1992, was a Calgary lawyer, businessman, and politician. His papers were recently donated to the Glenbow Archives by the Sheldon M. Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. A grant from the foundation made it possible to complete the inventory which can be viewed in Glenbow's Archives Finding Aids directory at www.glenbow.org/lasearch/findaids.htm .
Chumir was a truly unique, if not eccentric community leader. The son of Jewish immigrant shopkeepers, he earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Oxford University. In spite of his somewhat unkempt demeanor, in 1965 he was welcomed into the large and conservative law firm now known as Bennett Jones. His knowledge of tax law enabled him to parlay a small family investment into highly successful ventures in real estate development and petroleum exploration. An adventuresome investor, he was also a silent partner in rock concert promotions.
By 1976 his business successes enabled him to drop out of the stifling world of corporate law and establish his own practice. He specialized in civil liberties cases, which he often undertook without charging fees. He enjoyed defending a wide variety of social underdogs, such as mental patients denied access to their medical charts, criminal types who complained of police bullying, a political activist who wanted to see his CSIS file, and a religious conservative who wanted to home-school his children.
Always an advocate of human rights, in the mid-1980s he actively worked to expose and refute anti-Jewish activists such as Jim Keegstra, Ernst Zundel, and their lawyer Doug Christie. He accumulated large files of documentation on their beliefs and activities. But as a civil libertarian, he disagreed with some members of the Jewish community who wanted to suppress their freedom of speech.
Chumir was elected to the Alberta Legislature in 1986. He soon discovered that the life of a politician involved dealing with an avalanche of letters from constituents and requests for speaking engagements. He was not a master of organizational skills, and was constantly apologizing to his correspondents for delays in replying to them. The Liberal caucus at the time had only four members, but was highly effective, frequently hectoring the Tories with allegations of cronyism and financial mismanagement.
A shy intellectual, Chumir remained a bachelor. In his papers, enigmatically, there is no evidence that there was ever a romantic interest in his life. He did have his passions, though. He had an irrational attachment to his Triumph sports car, in which he was constantly receiving speeding tickets. He enjoyed dining in restaurants to such an extent that he didn't have a stove in his house (according to acquaintance Michael Dawe). He was a team player, active in amateur hockey and rugby circles, and was founder of the William Claude Dukenfeld Society, named in memory of W. C. Fields.
As it always is with arrangement and description of personal papers, it was fascinating to get a voyeuristic and intimate glimpse into the life of this person.
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