Friday, September 28, 2018
To Virginia and Doug's other surviving family members, please receive my sincere condolences for the tragic passing of Doug after a horrendous bout with brain cancer. I had lost contact with Doug several years ago and I had some differences with him but, ultimately, I look back with fond memories of my working relationship and friendship with Doug when we were both involved in dozens of community health service assessments.. I always enjoyed his dry sense of humour and his honesty in his assessment of social, political and economic circumstances in which we were all embroiled. His magazine SaskTrends monitor was extremely valuable to many fields of practical research. His supportive statistical work was enormously helpful on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Aboriginal projects. Few would argue with me when I say that Doug was a very sweet and kindly guy whose mathematical brilliance was only overshadowed by the basic, layman's clarity with which he was able to explain "what the numbers indicated" regarding so many issues. One thing that might well be overlooked in memorial comments is that, while Doug's skills and easy and congenial relationships with people would have made it possible for him to build an extremely lucrative, multi-employee business or assume highly paid positions in an existing business, both of which would have made him a very affluent man, Doug's basic motivation was that of an honest, master craftsman: offering work of high quality to his customers at modest and realistic prices. In what matters in this life, Doug was far richer than if he had instead centred his life on material gain.
