Early Life and Career
Davies was born in Aldershot, United Kingdom on February 27, 1953 and immigrated to Canada in 1968 with her family. She moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1969. Before being elected to Parliament, she participated in many grass-roots political organizations in Vancouver, specifically in the Downtown Eastside area. She dropped out of university to help Bruce Eriksen found the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA), an influential low-income housing advocacy group. She was instrumental in a campaign to save the Carnegie library which was later converted into the Carnegie Community Centre serving low-income adults. From 1994-1997 Davies was employed by the Hospital Employees' Union.
For 24 years Davies lived in a common law relationship with Vancouver city councilor Bruce Eriksen, who died of cancer in 1997. They had one son, Leif. In 2001 Davies became the first Canadian Member of Parliament to self-identify as a lesbian.
Read more about this topic: Libby Davies
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man’s life and work go on after his “death,” whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not.... There is no such thing as death according to our view!”
—Martin Bormann (1900–1945)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)