This is why Michael McCain, for one, nestles his mother’s approach to philanthropy in the contemporary mainstream of effective giving: “It reflects, to a large degree, where philanthropy has gone in the past decade. Great philanthropic leaders like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Bill Clinton have moved, and are moving towards, using their resources to make a difference proactively, rather than reactively … To be a catalyst, to have an impact … That’s not always been the philanthropy of the past.”

Certainly, Margaret’s overarching goal is nothing if not proactive. “I want to see a national early child development system in this country that’s publicly funded, publicly driven for the public good,” she declares.

And if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes some organization to assemble the villagers. “The formal planning for this began about five years ago,” she explains. “Wallace immediately put $25 million in as an asset base so that we could reasonably start to commit a million dollars a year to this issue … Then, I had to educate my family, so I brought in Jane Bertrand, the woman who had been one of the research coordinators on Fraser Mustard’s studies, to do a presentation. They were totally bowled over. Wallace fell in love with her. My kids were so impressed.”

Bertrand was not able to comment for this piece before press time, but in the acknowledgments of Early Years Study 3, the authors (McCain, Mustard and Kerry McCuaig, a policy fellow at the Atkinson Centre of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) testify that she had been “our brain trust through three Early Years studies. All have been shaped by her inexhaustible knowledge, contacts, skills and dedication … The authors do not have enough words to convey our gratitude.”

Today, McCain laughs, “Yeah, we call Jane our ‘Google Lady’. She’s a walking encyclopedia … She works maybe 70 per cent of her time for the Foundation as our program director.”

Still, if the architect of this endeavor is naturally proud of the people, system and structure she’s been able to erect, she is quick to admit that the learning curve has been, at times, steep. Even now, she all but dismisses the authority her name on Mustard’s reports invariably implies. “His work has had an impact around the world,” she says. “I’ve been flying on his coattails. And I’m not the only person. At his memorial service, at least 150 or 200 of the 500 people who attended would all have been his disciples … So when I say he gave me a mission, he did.”

Of course, a man so erudite and discerning must have observed, in so apt a pupil, the native affinities necessary to carry on his work in the public square.

Born Margaret Anne Norrie, in Amos, Quebec, “Margie” (as she was called) was the first of four children. Her father James was a mining engineer whose preternatural skills eventually landed him in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. Her mother, Margaret, was a professor of biology, dairy farmer, avowed feminist before the term was fashionable, and, later in life, a member of the Canadian Senate. As Margie said in an interview more than a decade ago, “My mother, after whom I was named, was something of a force of nature. She was constantly on the go, helping in the communities where she lived; giving people a piece of her mind from time to time. One of the worst crimes you could commit was apathy.”

Truly, Margaret Norrie Sr. wasn’t the kind of woman with whom one could trifle. And the stories about her iron resolve in Colchester County, Nova Scotia – where she and her husband settled with their kids before his death in 1945 – were legion. “When a census-taker once told her that he would refer to her as a ‘housewife’ on the official form, she snapped, ‘my husband’s dead and I’m a Jersey breeder’,” Margie once recalled. “Then there was the time when Mother tried to stop a road from being built through a woodland area. She not only joined the protest; she wound up leading it. Later when she won the Liberal nomination for Colchester County, she went up against none other than Robert Stanfield in the 1956 provincial election. He won, of course, but she loved every minute of it.”