Our community lost a great person last week here in Listowel. Someone who dedicated their life to the education of others… someone who was incredibly talented at their craft.
There are teachers that as a student in their class you are electrified by the way they share their knowledge. You gobble up all the tidbits you can sitting in their class, get excited about being there each day, and really dive into whatever subject the teacher is sharing with you. The flashy, polished communicators often fill this role. But there are also the teachers who leave you breadcrumbs of knowledge left to be picked up long after you are outside their classroom. Those teachers are just as life changing.
John Joseph Simpson passed away last week, and for the rest of this tribute, I will call him by the name almost all of us knew him by: Mr. Simpson. For me, Mr. Simpson fell heavily into the second category. When I signed up for OAC Politics as an LDSS student, I was signing up for an easy course to boost up that ol’ university application average. Here, 20 years later, it is easy to see that the person that I have evolved into today really started to find my wings sitting in that class.
Mr. Simpson sat at the front of the class, often reading the daily headlines to us from the Globe or the Star, using the stories of the time to start introducing young minds to politics the way it ought to be introduced – without the coloured lens of partisanship. Mr. Simpson taught a person to think for themselves while understanding that politics is a team game that will require collaboration and compromise. He taught about the dangers of blind partisanship…we spent a class going over the case of then Owen Sound-Bruce-Grey MPP Bill Murdoch as the last of a dying breed of politician. One who always put his community over party despite the personal political costs.
Over a decade after sitting in that class, I sat in Mr. Simpson’s backyard together with his wife Joyce and son Joe, asking for their support in my bid to become the Liberal candidate here in Perth-Wellington. That is not a short conversation… but other than long-term Conservatives Florence and Bryce Skinner signing up to support me, there were few people whose endorsement meant more to me during that time.
The last time I communicated with Mr. Simpson was in 2015 when the then Liberal government made changes to allow for the sale of beer and wine in grocery stores. He shared with me that he could no longer support me if I carried on with the Liberal Party because of a strong philosophical aversion to increasing community access to alcohol based on what he had observed in his life. Mr. Simpson had principles, and those principles superseded any political loyalties. It was one last breadcrumb for a former student, and by 2016 I had departed partisan politics for the independence of the farm.
Mr. Simpson was not a flashy, ‘cool’ teacher that made everyone in his class feel good in the moment. You could even make a case that he fulfilled some of the obligatory characteristics of a Hollywood-esque crazy professor. Mr. Simpson was an individual who knew who he was, knew what he loved, and knew that real knowledge could be best unlocked when the person themselves discovered who they really wanted to be.
He took a 17-year-old kid who was absolutely terrified of being an individual, spending the first 3.5 years of high school trying to figure out how to be more like everyone else, and took those shackles off. He taught me to love learning about random stuff, even if others were constrained by the modern construct of worrying about if that knowledge would land a better job or make more money down the road. He was one of the first who taught me that you have to love yourself if you are going to serve others.
Mr. Simpson, you will be missed. Missed by loved ones and family. Missed by the thousands of students who like me, were forever altered for the better sitting in the history hall listening to you read the Globe and Mail.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stuskinner@gmail.com or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
