“In the end, we’ll all just be a story” – Ken Battle made his worth remembering

During a tribute event on February 19, 2025, we honoured the extraordinary legacy of Ken Battle, a pioneer in social policy whose work lifted thousands out of poverty and changed how Canadians view our social safety net.

Alan Broadbent, Sherri Torjman, and Betsy Mann shared stories, reflecting on Ken’s life, his remarkable contributions, and the lasting impact of his work on communities across the country.

Maytree’s President, Elizabeth McIsaac, introduced the speakers.

Transcript

(Lightly edited for clarity.)

Elizabeth McIsaac:         

Thank you for coming out on this very cold February afternoon. We had good reason to come out. Good reason because we are getting together to remember someone who had a huge impact on the work that we share – and for many, on their lives, their histories – and someone who has made a giant impact on social policy in this country. Of course, I’m talking about Ken Battle. I’m not going to speak for very long. My name is Elizabeth McIsaac. I’m the president of Maytree, and I’m just here to say welcome and thank you for coming.

I’m delighted that we have three people, who are three of the people that knew Ken best, here to talk about why his life was so important, why his life meant so much to all of us, and why his life and work continues to have a huge impact on this country and everybody in it. We have three people. The first is the co-founder and co-conspirator of Caledon, Alan Broadbent. Second will be Sherri Torjman, colleague and co-conspirator of Caledon. And third, we have Betsy Mann, who I think goes back many, many years in friendship and probably co-conspirator of things we may learn about! I don’t know. We’ll begin with Alan Broadbent. Thank you.

Alan Broadbent:            

I want to join Elizabeth in thanking everybody for coming. Clearly, we’re a small gathering, and there are a lot of reasons for that. It’s the time of year – a lot of people responded saying they couldn’t come because they’re on a vacation or they had a work obligation. They couldn’t be here. I think if we were in Ken’s hometown of Ottawa, we probably would’ve had a larger turnout. And of course the snow doesn’t help. We appreciate the fact that you have made the effort to be here and join us. I think sometimes these gatherings can be a little bit small because we often forget people when they’ve passed from our view. Retirement takes people away in a kind of predictable way. Sometimes illness takes people away, abruptly or slowly, and they tend to fade a bit from our view. And I think that happened with Ken for a lot of us.

He had the relatively long experience of Lewy body disease, which affected some of his faculties. But as we’ll hear from others, it didn’t really take him away, didn’t take away the person that he was. Those of us who worked closely with Ken at Caledon and Maytree really wanted to have this gathering, even if it doesn’t have a big crowd attending, partly to keep the light shining on Ken’s enormous contribution to Canada, and to remember him as our friend. I am not going to read Ken’s resume. Elizabeth told me not to. I’m not going to remind you what he did for social policy in Canada, or what he meant for people with insufficient means to be able to live a life of dignity, because most of you know that. You know Ken, you know his work and you have your own story to share about how meaningful that is.

Most of you also have your own story to share about Ken’s sometimes goofy sense of humor, his unexpected fascinations with things like British sports cars, Norton Motorcycles – Bill Fitzpatrick can tell us about moped-ing around Europe and why Ken thought that was actually a good idea at the time.

Keith Banting couldn’t be here. He was going to be here to speak today; he’s got a terrible cold and he had to let us know this morning that he couldn’t be. One of the things he wanted to talk about was The Norton Motorcycle Incident, but he said that will have to keep for another occasion. I don’t actually know what that was, but I’m going to find out! And we’ll post it somewhere.

The other thing about Ken – he had this very funny unease in the company of those “smartest-guy-in-the-room” type people. I always thought it was funny because Ken never thought he was the smartest guy in the room. And if he did think that, he thought he was probably in the wrong room. He had these kind of really enjoyable personality traits that made him fun to be with, and a good colleague.

I met Ken 55 years ago at university, and got to know him some years later, around 1990, when we began to conspire to create a sharp instrument to address poverty in Canada, that built on his work at the National Council of Welfare and before that in the federal government. He was a great co-conspirator. We had a lot of fun figuring out what Caledon was going to be, what it was going to look like. We had, probably, a year of conversations just thinking about what that might be, how it might operate, what its values might be, how it would approach the work.

We spent a lot of time talking about that. He was a great colleague when we did found Caledon and it was up and operating. Sherri, I’m sure you will talk some about that. He was a great travel companion. We’d go around various places for meetings, and try and make a contribution through Caledon. He was a terrific thought leader in the sector, a terrific thought leader around this work. All of that added up to driving Caledon forward for a quarter century and making, I think, a significant contribution to social policy in particular.  Ken’s contributions to Canada have been immense. I think we should all be happy that he did that, happy we knew him, and that we could be working with him and be friends with him around all that.

As I said, Keith Banting couldn’t be here and really was very apologetic. I talked to Keith about three or four weeks ago. We saw each other at an event in Kingston, and he was really looking forward, in particular, to talking about their time together as graduate students at Oxford. Keith was a terrific contributor, in the early days in particular, of Caledon, helping co-chair the first big event we did, which was the Fiscal Federalism in Canada conference in Ottawa. He always was available and a good contributor. He was sorry not to be here. We are happy to hear from Sherri as a long-time colleague, as Elizabeth said. And then Betsy will wrap things up for us with her comments on Ken and in particular in his last few years. Sherri, I invite you to come on up.

Sherri Torjman:

Thanks so much, Alan, for those lovely words about Ken. He’s watching us now.

Ken Battle was the Mordecai Richler of social policy. Many of you who remember Mordecai Richler would know that he was a brilliant writer. He was called many things: a savage wit, caustic, curmudgeonly, controversial for sure. There was an LA Times writer who did a piece about Mordecai Richler, and he said, “For some people, he’s just a national treasure, but for others he’s a profound irritant.”

Now, before you pass judgment on my comparison of Mordecai Richler and Ken, let me explain. It was the morning after Mordecai Richler had passed away and Ken came into my office, as he did every morning with his cup of coffee in hand. But instead of starting with his usual, “Allow me to rant,” – which, did I have a choice? – but that’s how he started every morning. He had a big smile on his face. He had this just huge grin. And he said, “I just realized something. I’m the Mordecai Richler of Social Policy.” And we both laughed, of course, because it’s probably true. Then he said, “There. You can say that at my eulogy.” And I promised him that I would, never imagining that the day would actually come when I’d be saying that.

I first met Ken, very briefly, in 1986. He was a director of the National Council of Welfare. It was an organization that was advisory to the then-Minister of Health and Welfare. They had done a lot of work, published extensively, but Ken realized there was nothing in the country on the safety net, “welfare” as we called it then. It’s called social assistance today. He hired me to write the first national report on welfare. We had no information about this. There was no public information. It was all sort of – you remember, Michael, you would know – all hidden, kept away from the public, a very complex program. And Ken wanted to just take away that, remove that shroud of secrecy about it. He was determined that we would find out more about it: the grammar, the rules, the complex calculation of the rates. He felt we needed to know about it. Okay, fine.

He said, “I know this is going to be controversial and the minister will want to be informed about it, so I’m going to call a meeting of departmental officials and just let them know we’re going to be doing this.” I said okay. So he went to his meeting and came back literally, visibly shaken. I’ve never seen Ken really shaken like that. I said, “How did it go? How did your meeting go?” He said, “It was the worst meeting of my life. One (unnamed) official was so angry, he almost leapt across the table and choked me. That official was so angry, his face was so red, I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

I said, “Well, I guess we’re not going to go ahead with the project.” He looked at me directly and he said, “Are you kidding? The day the National Council of Welfare can’t write a report about welfare is the day they should shut us down. Of course we’re going ahead with that work.”

I went out and I got a lawyer’s letter to say that I had the right to collect information about publicly funded programs. We were watched constantly. It took the better part of two years to pull together everything, to get everybody on board, to figure out those complex rates. Thank goodness, Maytree continues that work to this day and does a beautiful job of continuing it. But it was not an easy ride.

Over the years, it was threatened. It almost shut down. We had to do a crowdfunding campaign to keep it going. It was really an incredible journey. I have to say that without Ken’s commitment and his fearlessness and his dogged determination to make sure that we understood that and helped people, we wouldn’t have had that resource that we have today. We really have to thank him for that, because I think it’s one of the most valuable resources that we have, right now, in the country, in terms of understanding our safety net in Canada.

I have to tell you, I was so scared to hand in the first draft of the report because Ken would go over everything with a fine-toothed comb. You can imagine. He would pour over every word. He took, I remember watching him, he took pen to paper, which we did in those days, and he was reading it and he crossed out an entire sentence. He just scratched it out. The sentence read, “The man was seeking employment,” and Ken scratched it out. He said, “The man was looking for work.” That was a very powerful lesson, in terms of how we communicate, not to use our fancy language and just say what you mean. While I continued to work on the welfare report, Ken was working away at something else. He kept saying, every day, “I have something very important here. There’s something really profound, but I’m not going to be able to publish it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.” I said, “If it’s that important, keep going and figure out a way to do something with this.”

I know he consulted with a lot of people, with a lot of friends who are probably here today. I’m sure he had lots of conversations with Keith, for example. He finally decided to approach Walter Stewart, who was editor, at the time, of Policy Options. And Walter was very interested in this piece. And Ken said, “But if you do publish it, I will lose my job for sure. This time, I will lose my job for sure.” And Walter Stewart said, “Well, no problem. You can use my pseudonym.”

In 1990, Policy Options published Social Policy by Stealth, by “Gratton Gray,” and social-policy-by-stealth became a major organizing concept for Caledon, for Ken, for Caledon, for all of our work. It really had to do with complex technical rules that nobody really understood and changes were being made that had profound impacts on people’s lives, but completely secretly, completely under the radar, and Ken identified that and worked with that concept.

What he was doing in his article, Social Policy by Stealth, was showing in particular the impact of partial indexation on income security programs in Canada, and in some cases like social assistance, the lack of indexation. He was showing how they were losing value, in real terms, every year and how it was impacting people. Thankfully, one of the individuals who became very interested in stealth was Alan Broadbent. You had your conversations, as you talked about, Alan, and honestly, you rescued Ken. I have to say, you took the muzzle off him. You did. He cherished that relationship. He cherished that you trusted him to speak out, that it was okay to do that.

He didn’t take that commitment lightly, or that responsibility lightly. He knew how special it was. Thank you for being interested in social-policy-by-stealth, because Ken continued to work in that area and he then applied it to the income tax system. I want to mention these two papers in particular, because Ken is really remembered for the work that he did on behalf, primarily, of low-income Canadians, but that really was not the only focus of his work. Everybody in this room has been affected by Ken’s work.

In 1998, he wrote a paper called No Taxation Without Indexation, and he wrote an accompaniment, a paper called Credit Corrosion: Bracket Creep’s Evil Twin. We had so much fun with titles and imagery, and it was really serious subjects, but a lot of fun. What he was trying to show through those papers was the fact that the Canadian income tax system had been partially de-indexed. What that meant was that the tax-paying thresholds were falling lower every year. More and more people were getting caught in these tax band thresholds. The value of the credits was falling, but nobody knew really. And he wanted to put the whole thing on a proper footing.

I remember at the 2000 federal budget lockup, he said, “Well, I hope that they’ll do one or two things. Maybe they’ll re-index one or two credits. It’s too big to do it all,” because we had been having some conversations with Finance. “It would be a policy miracle actually, if they did that.” In the lockup, I remember reading the budget. It said, “We are re-indexing the Canadian income tax system.” I spoke to the Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance at the time, “Am I reading this correctly?” He says, “Yes, Caledon will be very happy about this.” I thought, well, Canadians be happy. He did this for everybody. As I said, it’s affected everybody and it’s important to understand that it had a more widespread impact than is generally understood.

If anything, he’d probably want to be remembered for his work on child benefits. That was really his main concern. Anybody who had ever had a conversation with Ken will know that it didn’t matter what you were talking about, motorcycles perhaps, economic developments, political changes, blueberry muffins, Ken would bring the conversation back to child benefits. At the end of the day, that was all there was. I won’t go into the long and winding story about child benefits, I promise. I just want to mention two reforms that took place in the country that were the result of Ken’s work, and they were really, really important. The first had to do with the fact that we had had three different child benefits prior to the reforms that took place in the 1990s, a universal benefit, a refundable tax credit, a non-refundable tax credit.

It was a very, very complex mess, really, and not very transparent. And not very coherent. As a family, you had no idea what you were eligible for. It was impossible to know. And Ken wanted to simplify it. He always said – and Michael, you’ve worked with him extensively on child benefits, you know. He would say, “You need a cheque. You need to have a payment to families and what they see is what they get and they understand it.” He kept talking about a consolidation of these benefits into a single benefit, and it took a long time to get there. But finally that happened in the early nineties, 1993 I think it was, that that did happen. But there was another significant change that I don’t think is really well understood, and I want to just raise it here so that Ken’s work on this can have a broader audience.

The kernel of this idea came when we were working on the welfare numbers and I was showing him how different provinces were calculating welfare benefits, and some provinces were giving extra benefits to families with children, and it would vary by the number of children. If you had one child, you’d get one extra benefit – three children, you get three extra benefits. He was intrigued by this, and he started to call this “welfare-embedded child benefits.” It was a new insight at the time. Nobody had really talked that way, but what concerned him was, why weren’t we doing this for working poor families? Why weren’t we looking at child benefits? If everybody needed a child benefit, why were you just putting it on welfare and probably creating a disincentive for people to move off that program? We had worked on this “welfare wall” issue – child benefits locked in there was a real problem.

His idea was to take those welfare-embedded child benefits out of social assistance, out of welfare, move it over to the new integrated federal program, and the provinces would, in turn, reinvest their savings in supports and services for low-income families. This happened in 1998 under the National Child Benefit Initiative. What’s important about this, is that it was an important reconstruction of income security and social services in the country. Federal government doing income security, because they do that better than the provinces, and provinces doing services for families. It served as a basis for further recommendations that we made. That’s, in a way, an almost hidden change that was made in the country, or I should say it was a technical change that perhaps most people are not aware of, but a very, very significant policy change.

Perhaps what he’d want to be remembered for most is being the father of Erin Battle, his own child. He was so proud of her and her engineering career, and when Erin was happy, the office was happy, and when Erin was not well, the office didn’t feel well, and when Erin quit ballet without telling Ken, we could have closed the office for a month. I’m telling you, that was really disturbing for this guy who had driven her around North America to participate in ballet contests, and she decided one day just, no ballet! Well, that was the end.

I have to say, Ken was brilliant. He was fearless, he was brilliant. He was caustic and curmudgeonly at times, and controversial. Yes, and he was a savage wit, right, Jane? He was.

He was also compassionate, committed and kind. He was such an incredibly special person, and I just have to tell you, of all the almost 32 years of working together, I’ll just share with you one memory that always remains with me. At a meeting, a single parent came up to Ken and thanked him so much for the National Child Benefit, for the Canada Child Benefit because now she could feed her child. Now she could have a decent meal ready for her child. Ken remembered that story. He told that story to everybody he could at every possible occasion, every possible meeting because it deeply affected him, and he always told it with a tear in his eye. Doesn’t that just say it all about Ken? Thank you.

Betsy Mann:     

Thank you, Sherri. I think that people will find many of the same themes coming into what I have to talk about here.

In the end, we’ll all just be a story. Make sure that yours is worth remembering. When a friend of 55 years dies, and this comes through your Facebook feed, your brain is primed to look at it and to remember it. When, Alan, you asked me to speak here, those words came back to me: “In the end, we’ll all just be a story.” I thought I’d remember Ken, take this opportunity to tell you some of his stories. These are stories that he told me in the last year and a half when we were working on a project together to collect his memories. These were memories that were important to him and that, I think, speak to who he was.

I’ll start with a story Ken told me about a conference, where he was to make a presentation. I’m sorry, Keith Banting isn’t here because apparently Keith was at the same conference at St. Francis Xavier University. When Ken told Keith that he had four pages of text to do in his presentation, Keith said, “It’s too much.”

“But I have so many points to make!” Ken said. “Doesn’t matter,” Keith replied, “nobody’s going to be listening.” Now, I have to tell you, I have four pages here, but it’s 16 point type. You don’t have to worry. Ken told me, “I shortened my talk.” I promise you that I’ll follow Keith’s advice and Ken’s example and limit myself to just a few of the 40 stories that ended up in the red binder entitled Ken’s Stories. I wrote them down for him because I thought they were worth remembering, and Ken thought so, too. Sometimes when I’d arrive for my regular visit, we’d go to happy hour on Friday afternoons in the retirement residence, because you know that Ken liked his gin and tonic. He’d greet me by saying, “I thought of something else to tell you for our project.” Ken’s whole working life had been organized around projects, so here was another one for him to work on, and a printed report at the end collected in that red binder.

Ken’s memories that became stories in that binder, in that report speak to the interests and values that guided him, I think in both his professional and his personal life, his patient perseverance, his sense of humor and his love of fun, and of course his concern for the well-being of others. Not to forget the pride that he often expressed in his daughter, Erin. In his work, perseverance translated into an approach that, for which Ellen tells me, Dan coined the term “relentless incrementalism,” an approach that, as Sherri described, eventually brought success in his projects, in his work.

Professionally, his work was always related to causes of social justice. In his personal life, patient perseverance served him well when he received a diagnosis of progressive dementia. Where did that quality come from? Ken told me lots of stories about his childhood in Calgary when he would go out to the Stoney Reserve with his father, Robert, who was the Indian agent. Later, when the family moved to Ottawa, Robert became an ADM of Indian Affairs. Ken’s admiration for his father shone through in many of the anecdotes that he recounted.

Ken told me that when he himself became a civil servant, he asked his father, how did he do it? The stress of all those responsibilities and his family? His father’s response: “I just did it.” I think that’s how Ken managed what life served up to him. He just did it. Ken’s determination – and Sherri, you talked about his determination – his determination to maintain functioning in spite of his diagnosis, motivated him to walk outdoors as long as he could, to use the stairs in his residence as long as it was safe for him, to get up every weekday morning and go to his exercise class to keep himself going. But sometimes when “just doing it” doesn’t do the trick, a sense of humor is a great asset, and we laughed a lot with his stories. If you’ll indulge me, I’m just going to give you a few of vignettes. Maybe you can picture Ken in these:

Choosing to major in political studies at Queen’s because Professor John Meisel looked so cool in his rumpled brown corduroy suit and his slightly disheveled, longish hair. “Cool” was important criterion for Ken in 1966. Ken reading Seymour Lipset on his lunch hour at the summer job pouring cement, while the other regular guys are sitting around talking and smoking. That would’ve been our textbook, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Riding through Europe on a Vespa, with Bill Fitzpatrick in the summer of 1968, adventures which included starving in Madrid for a few days while waiting for more money to be sent by their parents. It’d be wired, of course, at the time, by their parents. They had the guidebook, Europe on $5 a Day, but somehow the calculation hadn’t quite worked out. In the meantime, they scrounged food and returned bottles for a few coins. When the money finally arrived at the American Express office, Ken remembered the thrill of not being hungry anymore. Ending a rather wild evening at the Press Gallery dinner in the eighties, singing (he said it was more like yelling), around a piano and then realizing that the booming voice beside him was Brian Mulroney’s.

Ken retained his sense of humor right to the end. Last fall, Kitty Slater, who also apologizes for not being here, Kitty Slater came with me to visit him, and she brought along photos of a road trip to northern Ontario. You’re nodding Dan, right? You know what’s coming. So they were taking a road trip with her husband, Stan McRoberts, who had grown up in Kapuskasing, I don’t know what took them up there, but there they went and Dan was there with his wife Ann. Our visit, Kitty’s and my visit took place just six weeks before he died, and the physical effects of Lewy body dementia were making it very difficult for us to understand what Ken wanted to say, but he definitely wanted to say something because he certainly remembered the trip.

It is strange, as somebody was saying earlier, dementia takes different effects on different people, and for him, those memories were still very present because he couldn’t stop laughing. Grumpy Stan, green Mustang, and goodness knows whatever had gone on in the bar that they just were posing in front of for the photo. Ken still found it very funny. I will miss Ken’s reminiscences and his easy laugh.

Ken told me lots of other stories about his childhood and teen years with his family, about canoe trips with Marcia, traveling with Ed, skiing in the Gatineau’s with a bunch of Queensies, going to China with Melanie to adopt Erin. Summer vacations with Erin. There were some about going to lockdown and being handed the paper, and the person who handed it to him said, “Well, you don’t have to read this. You wrote most of it.”

Through all of those stories, those qualities of patient perseverance and the sense of humor and love of fun shone through. I could tell you more, many more, but I promised I would be like Ken and shorten my talk. You could talk to me afterwards if you want some more. I will end with what his entry in Wikipedia focuses on, his concern for the well-being of others as shown in his commitment to social justice and his contributions to poverty alleviation in Canada. Ken was very proud of his achievements, but I think he would’ve been amused to see his bio and his photo on a Wikipedia page.

Where did his concern and commitment come from? Perhaps it was the example of his father’s dedication to public service. Maybe being rescued by his parents’ money in Madrid made him think about how to support people who didn’t have family resources to call on when they couldn’t afford food anymore. Certainly, it was his time in Oxford that had a great influence, and I’m sorry Keith isn’t here to talk about that. I’d like to read you, if you will indulge me again, something of what he said about that formative period of his life, I wrote down all of his stories in the first person. They were Ken’s stories, so when you hear “I” in what follows, understand that it’s Ken telling you the story:

Some kids from the Queen’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society tried to convince me to join and go to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. My answer? “I can’t do that. I have essays to write.” I seem to have been more interested in my schoolwork than in political action. Later, when I studied at Oxford, my supervisor was AH Halsey, a left-wing sociologist, and I hung out with a bunch of lefties. My academic work was influenced by the Fabian socialists. I admired them for dealing with political questions. They were leftist, but had a pragmatic approach to public policy. I guess that suited me better than the SDS version of the New Left. Later in my career, I continued to take a pragmatic approach in the direction I set for the Caledon Institute. It wasn’t writing just essays anymore. The papers we produced had a lasting influence on Canadian social policy, more influence than demonstrating in the streets.

Ken lived his commitment to social justice right to the end. As his sister, Ellen, noted in the comments she made for Ken’s obituary in the Globe and Mail, when COVID forced several lockdowns in his retirement residence, Ken was worried about the well-being and the income of the people who were working to help him make his life comfortable. He may have been, as his brother Murray put it, “a bit of an introvert,” but it didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking of the well-being of others. As you’ve noted, as other people have noted as well, his generosity and his kindness.

As I said, the main effects for Ken of Lewy body dementia were on his physical capacities. He remained interested and involved in what was going on around him. As we know, Ken had a brilliant mind and it gave him what geriatricians call “cognitive reserve” that he could draw on as his brain’s connections were breaking down. Eventually, just 10 weeks before he died, his physical losses required that he be moved from his two-bedroom suite to the assisted living floor of his residence. Murray and Ellen arranged for his furniture and many other items to be delivered to a Lebanese family that had just arrived in Canada. They had a house but nothing much to put in it. When I showed Ken a photo of the family that was a father, mother, two boys aged six and 13, sitting on the couch that had been in his second bedroom, I pointed out to him that the family would be benefiting from his work, the Canada Child Benefit.

He smiled and though his voice was fading, the words were very clear, “social policy on the ground.” That was the last story in the red binder. Our project was finished.

At the end, we’ll all just be a story, and I think you can all agree that Ken made his worth remembering. Thank you.

Elizabeth McIsaac:

Thank you, Betsy. Thank you, Sherri. Thank you, Alan. That’s the program as such. I think your finishing with stories is so important. It’s the legacy that we leave behind, and as Sherri spoke about the work of Caledon and Welfare in Canada, I’m thinking of my colleagues at Maytree who are currently reaching out to all of those departments right now to collect that data to make it transparent, and it is that legacy that is part of what we leave. We leave stories and legacy and how privileged we are to have been part of this. Thank you all. We are here for a while longer to, I think, tap Betsy for more stories. I think that was a promise made! Thank you again for joining us this afternoon.