Squamish doctor awarded Order of Canada for years of public service

By Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun, August 6, 2009 8:01 PM

Dr. LaVerne Clifford Kindree has been admitted to the Order of Canada in recognition for more than 50 years of public service in Squamish, which in its length and depth can only be described as astonishing.

The citation for the award gives an indication of what the 87-year-old Kindree has meant to his community:

He was the Squamish region’s sole physician for many years, is the longest-serving coroner in B.C. history, was instrumental in establishing Squamish General Hospital, independently researched the prevalence of Lyme Disease in B.C., was a founding member of the Squamish Chamber of Commerce and was founding chairman of the Squamish Hospital Foundation

The citation skipped a few other things, such as the 23 years he spent on city council and his eight years as a director of Squamish-Lillooet Regional District.

But who’s counting? It’s a career that would have kept three people busy.

It began in 1948 when he and his new wife Norma, a registered nurse, stepped off a Union Steamship ferry to take up residence as the only physician in the Squamish region. Why did he go to a community which in those days had no road or rail access to Vancouver, and a population of about 1,500, dependent on logging?

“Well, they needed a doctor and didn’t have anyone to look after them, and I wanted to make something of myself,” Kindree said Thursday from his home, where he was presented with the award in a private ceremony on Wednesday.

“But as well as Squamish, I had to look after the Mount Currie Indian Reserve in Pemberton,” he added.

He and Norma worked as a team. “It was a partnership. She’d deliver babies when I was away in Mount Currie,” he said. The couple would have five children of their own and four foster children.

“One of the first jobs I did here was to get a hospital. There was no hospital when I came, but we opened one in 1952. It had 24 beds and I was the only doctor to look after it. It opened just in time for the polio epidemic,” he said.

That epidemic offered him the opportunity to observe and record how an isolated community was affected by an infectious disease.

“During the epidemic, I’d say 90 per cent of the community were infected with the virus, but only a few developed the disease and we had several pulmonary cases that had to be flown to Vancouver for iron lung treatment,” he said.

In 1988 his daughter Diane, a registered nurse, developed Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick in her West Vancouver garden.

At the time, her father believed she had the disease, but other medical experts pooh-poohed the idea that people could get the disease in B.C., he said.

This would lead him to a five-year private investigation and, with the help of Dr. Sanyet Banerjee, a microbiologist with the Centre for Vector-Borne Disease at the University of B.C., he proved that there were a number of locations in B.C. where the ticks that produce the disease were present.

Doing the field work with Diane to identify the ticks was the highlight of his career, he said.

They would trap mice and examine them for ticks, then examine the ticks to see if they were carrying the pathogens for the disease.

“We eventually proved there were 24 sites in B.C. that contained Lyme disease in ticks,” he said.

Today, 61 years after arriving on the coast, the Saskatchewan-born, now-retired physician is still trying to improve things in his community.

“We’re building a long-term-care hospital and we need to get a CT scanner. I’m on the Squamish Hospital Foundation and so far we’ve raised about $2 million for surgical equipment,” he said.

Given the scope of his career, Kindree said he would encourage newly qualified physicians to go into remote communities. “I think they should go to the places that need them,” he said.

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