Dr. J. Patrick Boyer, Q.C., amidst the stacks of Bracebridge Public Library

J. Patrick Boyer

          Patrick has worked as a typesetter, pressman, bookbinder, print journalist, television host, lawyer, university professor, member of parliament, and parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs in the Government of Canada. He has chaired parliamentary committees on equality rights, the status of disable persons, and electoral reform. His work for democratic development takes place in Canada and around the world from Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam to Bulgaria and Ukraine and Iraq.

          His university degrees include an honours degree with first-class honours in economics and political science from Carleton University, a master's degree in history from University of Toronto and a doctor of laws degree from the faculty of law at University of Toronto. He has also studied at Université de Montreal and the Academy of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands.

          Patrick has chaired a number of public policy organizations, from the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs to the Pugwash Park Commission in Nova Scotia dealing with nuclear disarmament. Following his wife's death in 1995, he founded the Corinne Boyer Fund for Ovarian Cancer Research and Treatment which today is the National Ovarian Cancer Association operating across Canada.

          Boyrer was born at Bracebridge March 4, 1945, as the second child of a librarian, writer and teacher, and a newspaper editor, author, historian and publisher, seemingly fating him to write a book about the institution that had first brought his parents Patricia M. Johnson and Robert J. Boyer together.

          That his family also included a 30-year chairman of the town’s library board in grandfather George Johnson, a long-term administrative secretary to the board in aunt Genevieve Johnson, and three generations of Boyers who supported the library through their family newspapers and public offices, respectively for James, George and Robert, as town clerk, mayor and member of the legislature, further help explain that Patrick Boyer’s predisposition to write this history of Bracebridge Public Library is a genetic condition beyond his control.

          Local Library, Global Passport: The Evolution of a Carnegie Library is his seventeenth book.

          Patrick, who multiplies his time by living at 2583 Lakeshore Boulevard West in Toronto, 59 Kimberley Avenue in Bracebridge and the west side of Browning Island in Lake Muskoka, can be reached at patrickboyer@sympatico.ca.