Ron Butlin, the heart and mind behind the capital’s Victoria Day and Christmas parades, has died at 89.
Butlin was the charismatic volunteer chairman of both events for 21 years. He was recruited to run the parades after organizing B.C. Summer and Winter Games at the request of then-premier Bill Bennett.
In the last few years, Butlin toyed with the idea of stepping aside, but could never bring himself to do it. “He could not give it up — it was his life and that’s what kept him going,” said former Victoria mayor Alan Lowe.
Butlin prided himself on community, running the events on a shoestring budget, and he always bragged that each year was the best ever.
The 2014 Island Farms Victoria Day Parade in May will count as his last parade — in his own words, the best he had ever organized.
“After putting his heart and soul into the 21st Victoria Day parade, he was in and out of the hospital twice,” Lowe said. “He actually died peacefully at home Wednesday afternoon.” He had heart problems and other medical problems, Lowe said.
Butlin was born and raised in Calgary and has two daughters, Allison in Kelowna and Cheryl in Edmonton. He also has three grandchildren — Joey, Shara and Brent — and two great-grandchildren, Micayla and Jack.
“As busy as he was, and as involved as he was, and as passionate as he was about his various activities and commitments, his family always came first — his girls, my sister and I,” said daughter Allison Carlin. “Our well-being and our family’s well-being, that’s what I would say was really No. 1 for him.”
Butlin studied at the University of Alberta and owned his own business in Calgary, where he was a bankruptcy trustee, though many friends knew him as an entrepreneur. He came to Victoria in the mid-1990s.
Fellow businessman and philanthropist Mel Cooper said the Victoria parades are an amazing accomplishment and will go down as Butlin’s legacy. “We wouldn’t have had, in my view, the two big parades in the community that we have today if Ron hadn’t taken hold of them and brought in the great sponsor Island Farms,” Cooper said. Island Farms is the title sponsor for both parades.
In 1998, Butlin further increased the popularity of the Christmas parade by making it a lighted nighttime event, which he saw as a boon for downtown businesses because spectators turned it into a shopping day.
Somehow, Butlin organized the dozens of parade entrants each year without ever using a computer. As the parades grew, he continued to mail out registrations. The most high-tech machinery he had was a landline phone and a fax machine. “That’s what he relied on even until the last days. He was a man who did not like change,” Lowe said.
Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin praised Butlin for his sense of community. “It was a good life, a full life, and one dedicated to his community and making it better. He will be missed.”
Earlier in his life, Butlin was prominent in hockey circles. He owned the Calgary Spurs of the Western Canada Senior Hockey League and was in the Soviet Union during the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series while serving as president of the Western Hockey League.
Businessman Keith Dagg and Butlin were longtime friends. Replacing Butlin’s work on the parades will be difficult, Dagg said. “I can’t imagine anyone else doing it.”
