After three decades in journalism, Joan Leishman became involved with PEN Canada and Toronto’s Romero House for refugees. Ms. Leishman, 67, died on Aug. 3.Courtesy of family
Joan Leishman was a globe-trotting journalist, a champion of refugee writers in Canada and a tireless human-rights advocate. She spent more than 30 years in the employ of the CBC, in radio and television.
In 1992, she opened the broadcaster’s first South African bureau as the apartheid era ground to an end after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, which she had covered for CBC. While based in Africa, she also covered the Rwandan genocide. Earlier in her career she had worked as a freelancer in Mexico City when a massive earthquake devastated parts of the city.
In 1997, her fluency in Spanish and a profound interest in Latin America led her to be named CBC’s Latin American bureau chief, covering stories concerning trade, human rights and environmental issues from her Mexico City base. Over the years, her voice became familiar to Canadians.
Upon her return to Toronto, she continued her CBC work at The National and at the national radio news service, where she specialized in providing contextual international stories to Canadian listeners.
Ms. Leishman also became deeply involved as a mentor and advocate for refugees, particularly writers in exile from troubled countries, working with PEN Canada and Toronto’s Romero House for refugees.
She died Aug. 3 in Toronto after falling down stairs while gardening at her home. She was 67.
During a storied career with CBC, Ms. Leishman covered major global events, including the release of Nelson Mandela and the Rwandan genocide.Courtesy of family
Joan Alice Leishman was born Jan. 17, 1958 in Seaforth, Ont. She grew up on a farm near Belgrave in Huron County. She was one of 10 children of farmers Ruby and James Leishman.
At F.E. Madill Secondary School in Wingham, Ont., an English teacher she admired encouraged her and classmate Mary Anne Alton to write for the school paper. The two young women got the journalism bug; Ms. Alton became a CBC producer and then an independent documentarian herself.
As she recalled, “Joan was a year older and I looked up to her.” The budding journalists also had some of their work published in the local Wingham Advance Times newspaper. The two shared a special bond: They both grew up on farms.
“That’s why we became friends. We never had to explain what it meant to grow up that way, the freeedom, the challenges,” Ms. Alton said. “… She was the first person in her family to get a university degree.” Ms. Leishman earned hers in journalism from Ryerson University. By 1986, she joined CBC.
Jeffrey Dvorkin was head of CBC Radio News in 1992 when Ms. Leishman was assigned to South Africa. “As I recall, she came to us with the idea,” he said. “Joan was part of the vanguard of our foreign correspondents, many of whom were women. She was a quiet leader of that group. She brought a new sensibility to the role, a feminist sensibility, not militant, but feminist. She was utterly professional. I never worried that the stories were too much for her. As a manager, she made my life easier.”
Mr. Dvorkin has great admiration not just for Ms. Leishman’s journalism, but also for the manner in which she transitioned to advocacy work. “It was a logical progression. … There are journalists who feel they must try to correct what they have seen in the field. In keeping with the way she conducted herself as a journalist, she did so in a professional manner. She had been a witness to history. She chose to be an activist in history.”
Ms. Leishman often offered up the basement apartment of her west Toronto home near High Park to refugees. Shams Erfan, originally from Afghanistan and imprisoned in Indonesia, is the most recent example. Shortly before her fatal accident the two had gone shopping and chatted at length. “She was very sad about the world situation, the children of Gaza…” Mr. Erfan said. Later that day, he happily shared a sumptuous surprise meal prepared by Ms. Leishman.
“She was courageous and non-stop in ensuring that you are not treated less than someone born in this country with privileges. She was very bold about that opinion. It made you feel you had hope.”
A few days earlier, Abdulrahman Matar, a refugee writer from Syria who had been imprisoned and tortured during the regime of Bashar al-Assad, chatted on the phone with Ms. Leishman regarding plans for a continuing series of public readings by writers in exile that she helped organize and sometimes hosted. The sessions have taken place regularly at Hirut, an Ethiopian jazz club in east Toronto, though the next session will occur at Toronto Reference Library this autumn.
Through that initiative and a table at Word on The Street Toronto, Ms. Leishman and other PEN advocates helped bring the voices of writers in exile to Canadians.
Ms. Leishman was ‘fiercely determined to help people get to Canada,’ said Margo Kelly, whom she worked with at the CBC and at PEN Canada.CBC Still Photo Collection/Supplied
Ms. Leishman “was the first Canadian journalist I met in Toronto. Two of my friends were dropped off to stay at her place on our way in from the airport,” recalled Gezahegn Mekonnen Demissie, a journalist and filmmaker from Ethiopia and current chair of PEN Canada Writers in Exile. Mr. Demissie was profoundly moved by Ms. Leishman. “She saw Mandela come to power. She covered the genocide in Rwanda. She helped explain Africa to Canadians and the world. She is part of African history. I respect her.”
Many refugee writers and their advocates mourn Ms. Leishman’s shocking demise. “She was fiercely determined to help people get to Canada,” said Margo Kelly, who worked with Ms. Leishman at CBC and then joined her at PEN Canada.
Brendan de Caires, executive director of PEN Canada, shared the following by e-mail about arriving chez Leishman with a refugee from Iran: “I vividly remember lugging a huge suitcase through Joan’s front door… Hoda and I were nervous, unsure about what ought to happen next. We needn’t have been. Joan fixed us cups of tea and soon we were chatting in her backyard as though we were part of the family.”
“It came naturally to her, this ease with displaced and vulnerable people, as many exiled writers in our little group can attest. What impressed me even more, however, was the modest way she handled it all, as though such opening your life to a complete stranger were as natural as breathing,” he said.
Over the past few decades in Toronto, Ms. Leishman, in addition to continuing at CBC, from which she retired in 2022, and her advocacy work, was a very committed, loving and patient grandmother. One of her daughters, Thandiwe Adriana Smith Di Felice – who Ms. Leishman and her husband, Daniele (Danny) Di Felice, adopted in South Africa – said Ms. Leishman was basically a “co-parent” who took her grandsons regularly for sleepovers and bird-watching expeditions.
Ms. Smith says her mother always reminded her “to see the glass as half full rather than half empty.” She was happy that her mother began to take some time for herself in recent years, particularly an ambitious scuba diving adventure in Indonesia.
Over her lifetime, Ms. Leishman brought together a passion for journalism which led to a successful international career and a devotion to social justice and the cause of refugees. She witnessed pain and cruelty out in the world. She converted it into compassion.
In 2023, PEN Canada awarded Ms. Leishman the Marie-Ange Garrigue Prize for her advocacy work. “She had a deep well of empathy. She was an attentive listener. She comforted people by just listening to them. It made her a good journalist and advocate,” said Ms. Kelly, “She was determined to make a difference in the world.”
Joan Leishman leaves her daughters Thandiwe and Lauren Di Felice, her grandchildren Daniel, Dante, Logan and Hunter, and seven siblings. She was predeceased by her husband in 2010.
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