ELAINE RUTH DEWAR

(Laya Rifka bat Sholom v Munci Sarah) (1948 – 2025) Peacefully, surrounded by her adoring family, at Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital on September 18, 2025, three months after her 77th birthday. Born Elaine Ruth Landa in Saskatoon on June 18, 1948, the award-winning journalist and author didn't know she wanted to be a writer until she won a high school scholarship to a literary retreat. But it wasn't until the 1970s when she quit her first job as an editor at Maclean's that she finally dared to put her own fearless prose on paper under her married name, launching a 50-year career that often shook up the Canadian academic, business, and political establishments. An intrepid investigative reporter and the author of six non-fiction books, she would go on to win nine National Magazine Awards, the NMA President's Medal for Excellence, and the 2005 Writers' Trust Award for Non-Fiction, while periodically making headlines of her own. The daughter of Petty Davidner and Dr. Sam Landa, she was the descendent of unlikely prairie pioneers: Jewish refugees from Romania and Russia, who had been recruited by the government to homestead an agricultural tract known as the Lipton Colony north of Fort Qu'Appelle in the early 1900s, before Saskatchewan became a province. Her mother, a great beauty and gifted musician, was born there a year before her own mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic - an event that informed Dewar's 2021 book about COVID-19: On the Origins of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years. Her paternal grandparents later became the first Jewish family in Saskatoon, where her father was born. The youngest of seven, he went off to medical school in Manitoba but returned to marry and become one of the city's most prominent physicians. In the 1962 Doctors' Strike against Tommy Douglas' imposition of public health care in Saskatchewan - which ultimately led to nation-wide Medicare - he helped organize emergency medical services across the province. His second-born daughter, Elaine, watched that political ferment from an insider's seat, determined, she wanted to be a doctor just like him. Already chosen for a gifted students' program and besotted with science, she yearned to flee the city for university. By the time she had secured her father's consent by winning a scholarship to York University in Toronto, she had already found a new role model: French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. She joined a radical group called the New Feminists and later collaborated - even briefly sharing a house with some of the leaders in the second wave of the Canadian women's movement. But when one of her early magazine stories exposed the fissures in feminist circles, former housemate Judy Rebick denounced it as "yellow journalism." Elaine's response: "So much for sisterhood!" A lanky brunette beauty, she was in her second year at York when a friend set her up on a date with Stephen Dewar, a Scottish-Icelandic native of Saskatoon, whom she'd had a crush on since she was 12. He had come to her house to teach her older sister, Kahrellah, to play guitar. When they finally got together almost a decade later, he had just finished his MA at McGill and landed a job producing a public affairs show on CBC radio. They spent their first date arguing over Plato with such raucous delight that both knew they wanted the conversation to continue for the rest of their lives. In 1969, they married in a quiet interfaith ceremony at a Toronto hotel presided over by Rabbi Abraham Feinberg. Theirs was a 50-year partnership in the deepest sense of the word. Not only were they each other's closest confidantes and fiercest defenders, but she proved a savvy business partner and he edited every word she wrote until his death in 2019. Even in the final weeks of her life, she was still negotiating rights for one of his biomechanical patents through their WhalePower Corporation. They moved into a communal house, where one of Dewar's closest friends, Bill Cameron, then a Maclean's staff writer, recommended Elaine for her first media assignment: digging up statistics to back up a freelancer's claim the upcoming Montreal Olympics would be a financial flop. She promptly landed a full-time gig as the magazine's researcher/fact-checker and later rose to columns editor. But in the 1970s when Maclean's transitioned to a newsmagazine, she quit to finally begin her own freelance writing career. One of her chief outlets was City Woman, founded by her friend and former Maclean's colleague, Dawn MacDonald, whom she credited with "allowing me to invent myself as a writer." Arguing she could make more money writing for TV, Stephen convinced her to pen scripts for his nature documentary series, Lorne Greene's New Wilderness, co-produced by his friend, Chuck Greene, son of the Bonanza star, who provided his iconic baritone for the voice track. It went on to win three Emmys and a Gemini. Fund-raising for their production company piqued Elaine's interest in corporate culture, where, she realized, the country's real power lay. Her fearless business reporting exposed covert networks and cosy backroom deals, sending shivers through Bay Street. But it was her explosive 1987 story on the origins of the Reichman family's real estate empire in Toronto Life that left the most lasting mark, prompting a $102 million libel suit that was only quietly settled in 1990 after the magazine's legal insurance ran out. During those tense three years, she turned her sights on the burgeoning environmental movement and indigenous activists in Brazil's rainforests. After a solo trip to the Amazon, which sent her in pursuit of the powerbrokers behind the initial global climate conferences, she published Cloak of Green, the first of her non-fiction books, revealing what one reviewer termed "the dark side of environmental politics." Its archeological research led to Bones: Discovering the First Americans. By then, she had become adept at searching out and parsing the most complex corporate and scientific documents. That came in handy for The Second Tree, her study of the charged moral issues raised by breakthroughs in biology, such as cloning, which won the 2005 Writers' Trust prize for non-fiction. She was deep into her next project, Smarts, an inquiry into the nature of intelligence, including artificial intelligence and whether plants think, when Stephen Dewar suddenly fell ill. She spent the next years juggling research on his competing diagnoses with her investigation of the secret machinations in the Canadian publishing industry for The Handover, which was nominated for a Governor Generals' non-fiction award. After Stephen's death in 2019, she warded off grief by throwing herself into a probe of why two Chinese scientists with curious political connections had been hired, then fired, by Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forced to rely almost exclusively on peer-reviewed studies in Chinese and other medical journals, she produced one of the most formidable research feats of her career. No matter the hurdles, she never shrank from a challenge, whether in writing or life. Days before her death, she rallied for a brilliantly articulate CBC interview on her seventh and final book, to be published early next year. Entitled Growing Up Oblivious, it is a searing indictment of Canadian society, including herself, for failing to note the medical horrors being inflicted on the indigenous population, as well as serving as an unintentional memoir. She is survived by her beloved daughters, Anna and Danielle; sons-in-law, Timothy Gully and Brandon Birch; and three cherished granddaughters, Lilah and Grace Gully, and Luna Birch. Other survivors include her sister, Kahrellah Landa; brother, Murray Landa and his wife, Leslie; and nieces, Samantha Landa (and family) and Jaime Landa; and nephew, Alex Landa. Cousin and chosen son, Brian Bobroff, and her cousin and lifelong confidante, Patty Puterman, who, with her husband, Mikah, flew in from Israel to be at her bedside. The family wishes to thank Dr. Gillian Spiegle of Mt. Sinai Hospital and the extraordinary nurses and staff of Bridgepoint's Palliative Care team. A funeral service will take place at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, September 19th, at Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West, with interment in the Beit Olam section of Glenview Memorial Gardens in Woodbridge. A Celebration of Life will be arranged at a later date. Shiva information can be found at www.benjamins.ca Memorial donations may be made to Doctors Without Borders (www.doctorswithoutborders.ca) or Hennick Bridgepoint Foundation (via www.canadahelps.org)