Cathleen

June 23, 1943 – February 21, 2016, aged 72

Cathleen Ann Rosenberg was born June 23, 1943 to Horace Donald Rosenberg and Anna Maria Rosenberg (née Scheuer), in Guildford, Surrey, England. Her family had taken the road that so many take, fleeing pogroms in Europe. They ended up in England, where her parents met and married, moving to Newfoundland following the War (2nd) with their toddler daughter. They were strong Communists, always supporting the community. Her mother’s facility with languages, her doctor father’s love of awful puns, violin and gardening were all evident in Cathleen.

Cathleen attended university at Memorial, Edinburgh, and Carleton, meeting Brewster through her activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and soon marrying him, in 1964. Cathleen’s activism wove together common themes of healthy communities and people. Her early years in the international peace movement in Toronto also involved the Rochdale community and the fight against the Spadina Expressway. Upon moving to Nova Scotia, her focus shifted to women’s liberation, as a founding member of the Pictou County Women’s Centre in Nova Scotia – and after moving back to Toronto, as Executive Director of the Toronto Assaulted Women’s Help Line. During her fifteen years in Nova Scotia, she also developed her admirable skills as a potter, ran a successful sheep farm with her family, organized the Sheep Producers of Nova Scotia’s annual Sheep Fair, and for many years, contributed a weekly Farm Diary to the local noon program on CBC Radio. She worked through the early years of the larger feminist movement, from “consciousness-raising” gatherings to ongoing collective learning of how to bring women of all classes, races, sexual leanings – and men – into a more egalitarian society.

When Cathleen and Brewster moved to BC in 1995, Cathleen began to integrate her commitment to social justice with her farm background. She was instrumental in founding the Mission City Farmers’ Market, the Sorrento Village Farmers’ Market, and the BC Food Systems Network, and served on the board of the Certified Organic Associations of BC (COABC). With her daughter Rebecca, she also edited the COABC magazine. Her work in creating the BC Food Systems Network notably involved holding space for Indigenous Food Sovereignty. Upon her return to Ontario in 2006, Cathleen was elected Chair of the newly formed Food Secure Canada, served on the management team of the People’s Food Policy Project, and was chair of Just Food Ottawa and the Ottawa Food Policy Council.

For 25 years, Cathleen worked alongside Brewster as editor, co-writer, illustrator and designer of The Ram’s Horn newsletter, which had a worldwide following, as well as editing his books. Her illustrations were both witty and insightful, elucidating the often complex analysis they accompanied.

With everything she involved herself in, Cathleen committed herself fully, applying her considerable energy to building a participatory, feminist path for people to connect and make positive change together to bring about the vision of a just and peaceful world she held so clearly. The work of her hands will be held by many on a daily basis, in the pottery she made.

Cathleen was profane, loving, witty and intense. She gave her all to everything she did, from cooking to love to organizing. She was a great singer and cook, and fed many both spiritually and physically with great joy.

Brewster

July 21, 1933 – December 1, 2025, aged 92

Brewster Beattie Kneen was born July 21, 1933 to Harold Fitch (Hal) Kneen and Carol (Bobo) Darrach Kneen (née Beattie), in Cleveland, Ohio. The family were part of the American dream; Hal’s management role in Lincoln Electric gave Brewster his first glimpse into the world of industry, albeit with an unusually equitable company. Upon leaving high school at the beginning of the Korean War, he signed up for the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, as a way to avoid active service and finish his degree. That led, during his tenure at Cornell University, to a tour with the Navy, including a shore leave in pre-revolution Havana. It would have been one of his first experiences with extreme inequity, reinforced by a later shore leave in Japan, where it became clear to him that what they were defending was extreme inequity. During this same period, he became more influenced by the Christian peace movement, finding it aligned with his sense of justice. “Is it possible that the hope embedded in faith may have a role in enabling resistance to the political and social forces pushing us…?”

Over the next several years he travelled through Europe, attended university in Edinburgh, and spent the summer of 1958 with the International Brigade building roads in Yugoslavia. This began his long connection to the true socialist uprising of the Prague Spring. He eventually returned to the US, and completed a degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he found the kind of social justice-centred ecumenism he lived for the rest of his life. It was also here that he got involved in non-violent organizing and direct action for civil rights and nuclear disarmament. He connected with people like AJ Mustie, the Berrigan brothers, and Alice and Staughton Lind, among many others.

In the early 1960s, Brewster worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist organization. In 1963 he and other activists gathered a group of older and younger peace activists and young New Left – including Cathleen Rosenberg, a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Ottawa. They talked politics and poetry all night. They married two days before her graduation from Carleton University in 1964.

As a sensible woman, Cathleen flatly refused to live in the USA, and after some shenanigans they settled in Toronto, becoming part of the Rochdale experiment, the Latin American Working Group and CENSIT, The Centre for the Study of Institutions and Theology, a leftist Christian group well aligned with the Liberation Theology of Latin America. Cathleen worked freelance and as a host for the CBC.

Fast forward a bit: the kids were born in Toronto (1966 & 1968) into a wonderful community. But Brewster’s itchy feet were calling him to find something that better expressed his complex understanding of the world. His university work on the role of sugar in global development, in shaping the food system and in both creating and shoring up an inequitable global economy was shaping his own thinking. “We knew what the food system looked like in theory and from the consumer lens,” as Cathleen used to say. “What we needed was to understand it from the farmer’s side.” So in 1971 they sold their Toronto house and bought an 80-acre farm in Brookland, Nova Scotia.

More shenanigans: the family got kicked out of both local protestant churches because Brewster’s radical Christianity refused to bend the knee to having flags in church, or to the racist commentary of the preachers. When Highways wanted to build a bigger three-way intersection up the road and wanted to cut down the Three Pines (venerable, beautiful local landmarks), Brewster and Cathleen got the entire community in the way of the project and got the road moved. At the outset of the family’s 15 year sojourn on the farm, the RCMP would park on the hill opposite and watch the comings and goings through binoculars until their “cover” was busted by a neighbour bringing them tea as the fall weather was getting colder. Given the amount of skinny-dipping and general nudity, they probably got an eyeful.

More seriously, this time was formative to their ongoing work. Working with a group of local sheep producers to entirely change the marketing of local lamb through the creation of Northumberlamb Lamb Marketing Co-operative (1982-present), founding the Pictou County Women’s Centre and Transition House, creating a Sheep Fair and keeping the kids out of school so they could read the encyclopedia and farm – all of it was grist.

During this time they started The Ram’s Horn as a way to document and discuss issues affecting sheep farmers. It fairly quickly morphed into the “Journal of Food Systems Analysis” that it ran as for the next 25 years. Brewster’s first book, From Land to Mouth, came very much out of what he learned from the farmer’s perspective.

It’s hard to separate the work, writing, and speaking that Brewster did from the work he and Cathleen did together. They worked so closely together even in their different fields. She was his primary editor, and they egged each other on throughout their work. Cathleen was the web-builder, the manager and organizer. Brewster was the agitator and writer (which isn’t really fair, as she was a hell of a writer herself!), and the one who always pushed the “who really benefits” envelope.

There’s one thing that all of this misses: Brewster’s puckish humour and sense of the divine manifest in the world. He taught his daughter to see magic all around, to be related to the natural world. He built fairy houses and made up stories. He taught his son carpentry and mechanics – and how to organize, as he spent evenings organizing sheep producers, talking about personal, family, and farm issues as well as how many lambs they would have ready for market. Brewster’s engineering mind found outlet in building things and teaching his kids how to think through a design and delight in the work of their hands.

What really comes through in their work is a commitment to building a better world, one where social justice and community are central, and where profit is driven from the room in a hail of stale bread. Which is then picked up and used for pig food. They both thought deeply about the idea of vocation, and strove to make a difference in everything they did. They envisioned utopias and believed that humans are basically good, communitarian folk if we can get out from under the individualist capitalist superstructure.

Always ask who benefits. Never abandon hope. Never abandon each other.