Rarely in the spotlight, he made sure there was one

Lawyer, judge, politician who helped found Westminster Housing Society, PTE, Charles Huband had ‘no concept of retirement’

By: Katie May

Even on his 90th birthday, Charles (Charlie) Huband was reluctant to retire.

By then, it had been six decades since he’d started practising law and 15 years after his mandatory retirement as a judge on the Manitoba Court of Appeal.

“His brain was churning and he had ideas,” says his youngest daughter, Barb Huband.

Finding the forced retirement ridiculous, Huband had returned to practising law after leaving the bench. But after turning 90, he closed his law practice. He died the next year, in June 2023, at age 91.

“He had no concept of retirement,” Barb says.

It was that kind of drive to work, to volunteer, to organize and to lead that posthumously earned Huband the Order of Manitoba.

While working in a law career that catapulted him to preside over the province’s highest court for 27 years, Huband got involved in local politics. He taught law at the University of Manitoba, he was instrumental in starting the Prairie Theatre Exchange and the Westminster Housing Society, he was leader of the Manitoba Liberals, and he still found time to serve up his famous lemon torte while hosting dinner parties that became a who’s who of Winnipeg’s legal and arts scenes.

“He was driven. And if you ask me, ‘Driven by what?’ I would say just driven by making the world a better place and by building community,” Barb says.

Before Huband was inducted into the Order of Manitoba, before he became a lawyer, a judge, a politician, and the co-founder of a community theatre and an affordable-housing charity, he was a minister’s son.

The family moved to Winnipeg from Calgary in 1948 when Charles was a teenager. He was born in Ontario, where his parents later returned, but when his father took a job as minister of the Westminster United Church, Huband was introduced to the city he’d call home for the rest of his life.

Huband, his parents and his three siblings lived in a manse beside the historic church (the large old house on Maryland Street has since been demolished). There he cultivated his competitive spirit, measuring up against his older brother Rolph. Rolph also became a lawyer, so their healthy competition lasted their whole lives.

At church, Huband met his future wife, Marilyn, who worked as a kindergarten teacher to put him through law school. The couple first lived in an apartment on Broadway before moving to the River Heights neighbourhood, where they stayed. They had three children, David, Nancy and Barb, and later, three grandchildren. He and Marilyn (known as Mickey) were married for 59 years. She died in 2013.

While the kids were growing up, Huband was building his law practice. He would often come home for dinner and then go back to the office to keep working late into the night. In the summers, when the family was enjoying time at their cottage at Lake of the Woods, Huband would arrive at the lake late on Friday nights and leave early on Sunday mornings to head back to work.

Always logical and practical, Huband could be stoic at home. His love of the arts drew him out, particularly his appreciation for works of Shakespeare and Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet. As a young man, Huband kept a notebook in which he wrote down, in neat, flowing cursive, his favourite passages from Hamlet, Richard III, Julius Caesar. He memorized the monologues.

“He could then stand in the middle of the living room and recite these,” Barb says. “He took care to memorize things and then proclaim them as art.”

He loved the arts, especially theatre — so much so, he started his own. His son David was taking classes at the Manitoba Theatre Centre school for children in the 1970s; when Huband heard the school was being shut down, he teamed up with then-theatre instructor Colin Jackson to start their own theatre space. Huband secured a lease on Princess Street for a dollar a year, and what is now Prairie Theatre Exchange was born in 1972.

“I’m an actor, and that’s mostly because of my dad,” said David Huband of Toronto, who said he was grateful for his father’s support and the passion Charles applied to everything he did.

“It’s amazing how many people he touched in different walks of life.”

Huband’s friendship with Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Colin Jackson spanned more than five decades.

“He was one of those people… who sees more in you than you see in yourself,” Jackson said. “That was Charles with me, and with many people around him.”

Those who knew Huband best — including Jackson, who became like part of the family — knew he would use all of the considerable resources at his disposal for a cause he cared about, even when the tools he had were simply his own two hands and a shovel.

Before his entry into Liberal provincial politics, back in the Unicity days when he contemplated joining the Conservatives (which never came to pass), Huband was a Winnipeg city councillor. Jackson recalled hearing stories of Huband’s reaction to getting phone calls late on winter nights from seniors frustrated about snow accumulation. He’d drive over, take the shovel out of his trunk and clear their walks himself.

Huband was attentive that way and “strategically very thoughtful,” Jackson said about his friend.

“He was seldom the one who was in the spotlight, but he’d be in the background, making sure there was a spotlight. Making sure there was electricity.”

When it came to finding affordable housing for low-income residents of West Broadway, Huband was just as willing to have high-level meetings with political officials “as he was to go knock on a door of a crappy rooming house to figure out who owned it,” says Mary Agnes Welch, chairperson of Westminster Housing Society, the registered charity Huband founded more than 30 years ago.

As a judge who lived in River Heights, Huband moved in relatively elite circles. (He loved fine dining, and started a fancy wine club in his spare time.) With a carefully handwritten “donor database” of friends, Huband used that social capital — as well as his own money — to fundraise and gather support for the housing society’s projects.

“That was the thing that I admired most about him, is that he used that network… and his own money — and he got everybody else’s money — to help actually make a difference,” Welch says.

Thanks in large part to sheer tenacity and his legal mind, he convinced slum landlords to sell their properties to the charity so the apartments could be converted into affordable housing units. Presently, the society is on track to have built a total of 121 such units.

He kept attending board meetings at Westminster United Church until two months before his death.

It was part of the ethos that kept him going.

“He said, ‘I go to church every Sunday, not because I believe in God, but because I believe in community,’” his daughter Barb says.

When Huband died, his family found his obituary among his things. They didn’t know when he’d written it, but there it was, all ready to go.

“He was that kind of guy,” Barb said. “He liked things done.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca