Maureen Prinsloo, the former longtime Scarborough city councillor who championed community-based policing while serving as Toronto’s police services board chair in the mid-1990s, has died. She was 79.
Her family said she died peacefully Saturday in a Toronto palliative care facility after a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer earlier this year.
Prinsloo was chair of the preamalgamation Metro Toronto police services board, now known as the Toronto Police Services Board. She also served as deputy chair of Metro council, which governed Toronto’s six municipalities, and chaired the Board of Governors of Exhibition Place.
On Sunday, friends and former colleagues remembered Prinsloo, who was born in South Africa and came to Canada in 1965, as a no-nonsense, honest, and conscientious politician whose willingness to speak truth to power sometimes worked against her.
“She was very open and trustworthy. Maureen played it straight,” said longtime friend and former colleague Carol Ruddell, who served with Prinsloo on Scarborough council in the 1970s.
Ruddell said Prinsloo always studied meeting agendas and did her homework. “She always had the facts. She was diligent, and that almost doesn’t sound like a good enough word.”
Former Liberal MP and Metro Toronto chair Alan Tonks, who worked closely with Prinsloo in the 1990s while she was deputy chair of Metro, praised his former colleague’s loyalty, sense of humour and dedication — attributes that commanded respect from political friends and foes.
“You always knew you were getting the straight goods when she would partake in debate. People would listen to her,” Tonks recalled Sunday. “She wasn’t standing up to hear herself talk. She was up there to deliver a message and her message was usually one of inclusiveness and strengthening a sense of community.”
It was that care for her community that got Prinsloo started — rather unexpectedly — in politics. Following a torrential rainstorm in 1976 that resulted in widespread basement flooding in Prinsloo’s Scarborough neighbourhood of Bridlewood, she resolved to find the cause and make sure it never happened again, recalled her son Wayne Prinsloo.
Following countless meetings with Scarborough officials, the city finally agreed to build a nearby water retention pond to divert water away from basements. Her persistence and passion impressed then city of Scarborough councillor Ron Watson, who encouraged her to run in the next municipal election in 1978.
So she did, and she won on her first try.
After serving a decade on Scarborough council, Prinsloo made the jump to Metro council, where she served before making a run for mayor of Scarborough in 1994. Prinsloo lost, coming in third behind Marilyn Mushinksi and Frank Faubert, who served as mayor until amalgamation.
“She was disappointed, because she was well respected in the neighbourhood and wanted to do more,” said her son, Wayne, on Sunday. “But she just moved on because she was very positive. She took things as they came.”
It turned out her run for mayor wasn’t to be the end of her involvement in municipal politics.
In 1995, Prinsloo got a call from then premier Bob Rae, asking if she would like to be appointed to Metro Toronto’s police board to replace outgoing chair Susan Eng? Prinsloo jumped at the chance and was promptly elected chair.
Former metro councillor Brian Ashton, who served with Prinsloo on the police services board, said Prinsloo was an ideal choice at that time, given the board’s recent tumultuous relationship with former police chief Bill McCormack.
“I thought it would be nice to get a chair that could consolidate gains and provide stability. And in my mind, that was Maureen Prinsloo,” Ashton said.
Tonks credits Prinsloo with putting community policing on the agenda, a practice that has become a hot-button issue today.
“She was totally dedicated to making policing reflect the values and strengths of an integrated and non-discriminatory society,” Tonks said.
But after only three years, political machinations resulted in Prinsloo being ousted to make way for longtime board member Norm Gardner, a friend of then mayor Mel Lastman.
On Sunday, Lastman called Prinsloo a “wonderful woman who just wanted to do good.”
“I know she’s going to be terribly missed by her family,” Lastman told the Star. “She was just a very nice kind woman who would come down tough on nonsense. It’s tough love, and that’s important.”
After her stint on the police services board, Prinsloo retired and threw herself into various community initiatives, serving on the boards of charities and retirement homes.
Most recently she was the chair of the board of Scarborough’s Jack Goodlad senior citizen residence.
Prinsloo leaves behind three sons, Mark, Ian and Wayne, and seven grandchildren. Her husband, Christo Prinsloo, died in 1990.
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