Year: 2005
Location: Canmore
Profile: Born and raised in Toronto, Cathy Jones trained as a diploma registered nurse and moved to Banff in 1977 where she worked in hospital emergency. She returned to Toronto in 1984 and became the director of surgical nursing at the Toronto General Hospital. She returned with her partner and later husband to Alberta in 1988 and opened a business in Canmore called Celebration of the Rockies, whose operation included devising and hosting heritage walks. She became involved in the Canmore Museum and she responded to miners’ requests to have displays that reflected the lives of the miners and their wives and families. Jones included the unions’ stories within those histories. She was a proud unionist herself who had participated in a nurses’ strike in Ontario to improve pay and working conditions for nurses. She remained thereafter a strong supporter of public health care without a competing private system. She argued that the limited supply of health care professionals made it impossible for competing systems to succeed, and so it was necessary to improve the funding and management of the public sector healthcare system so that it could meet all reasonable health needs of the population.
Keywords:Coal mining history in Canada; Coal mining and museums; Coal mining wives; Nurses and shift work; Nursing history in Canada; Nursing unions; Registered nurses.
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See also: Coal Mining in Alberta; Occupational Health and Safety in Alberta; Women and Work in Alberta