92 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 1 JANUARY 2021
Bay. Buz became an avid fly fisher. He regarded fishing as a skill, and not
as a means of sustenance. He took pride in landing a fly on a distant target.
He had a passion for fine art and became a collector. He did not collect to
amass a collection; rather, he acquired pieces he enjoyed that enlivened his
quarters. In later years, his habit of keeping a valuable work of art hanging
in his office was unsettling to his partners, who took solace in the hope that
few in Nanaimo would recognize the monetary worth of his paintings. He
was a lifelong member of the Nanaimo Yacht Club and is credited for being
instrumental in the resurgence of sailing in Nanaimo. Buz represented
Canada in the 1966 Worlds 505 Sailing Championship in Adelaide, Australia.
The Nanaimo Yacht Club always allowed him to cast off and to return to its
moorage under sail, which are tricky maneuvers. But Buz rarely “sailed”
under motor. Buz kept a pair of Lasers on the beach near the club. The idea
was to facilitate challenges to others: “Choose your Laser”.
In Nanaimo, Nancy Heath was involved in community and Liberal Party
activities. Ottawa had not forgotten her. In 1970, Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau appointed Nancy to the Senate of Canada. Although she sat as a
Liberal senator, she was an independent and strong-willed person. She
often voted against her party. Her senatorship entailed long stays in Ottawa.
Sadly, her marriage to Buz failed. They were divorced in 1973.
About one year later, Buz went on a skiing holiday to the Canadian Rockies,
where he met Margaret Christina Stewart, of New Westminster and
Edmonton, who was vacationing at the same lodge. They skied together,
getting lost. They married in 1975. They were inseparable until Margaret’s
death from cancer in 2017.
Buz’s focus in life was the practice of law. He was a perfectionist in all he
did, but primarily a perfectionist in his law practice. When he first started
to practise on his own in 1950, he was of necessity a general practitioner.
After Ralph (“Rafe”) Hutchinson joined him in the sixties, Buz became a
solicitor. He developed a busy niche commercial practice. It was not
uncommon for him to produce 10 or 15 drafts of commercial documents,
and this in the day before digitization, and before word processing. He
demanded of his colleagues at the firm the same attention to detail as he
demanded of himself. It was a matter of quiet pride to him that four lawyers
that he and his firm had attracted to Nanaimo to join his firm became justices
of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, that two other members
became masters of the Supreme Court of British Columbia and that his firm
continues in Nanaimo under the name of Heath Law. Heath Law today is
one of the largest firms on Vancouver Island.
Buz was active in his community. In 1960, he ran, unsuccessfully, for
election to the provincial legislature. He was a long-serving member of the