Margret Kopala

Margret Mona Kopala (born May 5, 1945) is a Canadian writer and public policy analyst from Ottawa, Ontario.
Early life
Margret Kopala was born in a farmhouse near the northeastern Alberta town of Glendon on May 5, 1945. It was Victory in Europe Day but her father, Raymond, the son of immigrant Polish parents, was still on farm leave granted by the Canadian Armed Forces so he could plant crops while awaiting a posting overseas. Her mother, Jean, the granddaughter of Ukrainian settlers who arrived from Bukovina in 1905, had returned to the maternal homestead to prepare for Orthodox Easter.
The eldest of two daughters, Margret and her sister Lillian spent their very early years in Bonnyville before the family moved to Edmonton. Attending Allendale Elementary School, she advanced a grade before attending Highlands Junior High where she became editor of the school newspaper. As a student at Eastglen Composite High School, she became its first girl president of the Student's Union.
Education
Kopala entered the University of Alberta as a pre-law student in 1962 before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature (1965) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drama (1967). Notable acting roles included the character Charlotte Corday in the Studio Theatre production and Canadian premier of Peter Weiss's The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ; Rosalie in Arthur L. Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I am Feelin’ So Sad, and Helen in Euripedes' The Trojan Women.
She also appeared in the Canadian premiere of Chez Vous Comfortable Pew, a theatre of the absurb play staged by Edmonton's Yardbird Suite and written by dramatist and poet Wilfred Watson who, along with his wife and another Canadian literary icon, Sheila Watson, further encouraged Kopala's work in the theatre.
Among her extracurricular activities at university, Kopala, Gary Carson and Lou Carmichael performed locally as a folk singing trio.
Early career
Moving to the United Kingdom in 1967, she was accepted for further acting training by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Having left her temporary position as secretary to the librarian at Lambeth Palace to work at the British Broadcasting Corporation, she decided to pursue a career in television production instead. As a production secretary in Arts Documentaries, she worked on a production about Lawrence Durrell’s Paris and a series on Victorian Architecture hosted by the then British poet laureate Sir John Betjeman. In the Drama Series department, she worked her way up to being a story editor on an episode from The Man Outside entitled "The Cuckoo's Nest," starring a young Anthony Hopkins.
She then left the BBC to join actor David Swift and Welsh filmmaker and actor Kenneth Griffith as a Director in the independent film company, Tempest Films. Formerly under the directorships of Swift, Charles Denton and Richard Marquand, Tempest Films under Swift, Kopala and Griffith negotiated a settlement from ATV for having suppressed Griffith's film "Hang Up Your Brightest Colours" whose subject was the Irish revolutionary leader, Michael Collins. Kopala subsequently worked with Griffith on "Man on the Rock," his documentary treatment of Napoleon’s last years on the Island of St.Helena, also for ATV.
While still resident in London, she returned to Canada as production co-ordinator of the Depression era prairie movie, Why Shoot the Teacher. She also introduced its London-based Canadian director, Silvio Narizzano, to its producer and then Edmonton broadcaster, Fil Fraser.
She returned to Edmonton again in 1979 this time to develop a feature film production based on the Canadian literary classic As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross. The death of both her parents, the birth of her son and a cross country move to Ottawa with her husband Robert Sibley, all within a few years of each other, prevented its completion.
As a stay-at-home mother of a toddler in Canada's capital city, she immersed herself intellectually in the politics of the day. When The Financial Post published her essay in 1990 about the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, an event that brought Canada to the brink of a constitutional crisis, her life took a new direction.
Political involvement
Citizen’s initiatives on the constitution led to her selection as an "ordinary Canadian" in the constitutional conferences leading to the Charlottetown Accord. She subsequently joined the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 1993. She then became President of its riding association in Ottawa West-Nepean as well as its candidate in the 1997 federal election, finishing third.
Kopala and her group eventually severed from the PCs in order to independently advocate and, along with Toronto's "Blue Committee," to lay the groundwork in Ontario for a united federal Conservative party. The West's United Alternative initiative then moved the unity agenda forward. When no Ontario candidate stepped forward to contest the leadership of the newly formed Canadian Alliance Party in 2000, Kopala initially declared her candidacy, from which she withdrew early in the process.
In the 2005 run-up to the 2006 federal election, Kopala sought the Conservative Party nomination in Ottawa West—Nepean. Member of Provincial Parliament and former provincial cabinet minister John Baird and party members Ed Mahfouz and Ade Olumide also sought the nomination, as did social conservative activist John Pacheco until he was disqualified. Baird won the nomination.
Writing
Between 2003 and 2009, Kopala wrote bi-weekly columns for the Ottawa Citizen on public policy issues about or from the perspective of Western Canada. After serving as Director of Research and Policy Development for the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, she then founded and served as President of the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform from 2009 to 2015.
Kopala wrote extensively on the subject of the mental health effects of marijuana. Her "Critique of the Drug Legalization Agenda: Why Legalization Will Increase Drug Use, Addiction and Crime" was published by the online magazine C2C Canada's Journal of Ideas in 2009.
Her first book, co-authored with CFRA Ottawa radio markets' commentator John Budden, was published in June 2015. The Dog Bone Portfolio, A Personal Odyssey into the First Kondratieff Winter of the 21st Century provides an overview of the post 2008 global economy with investment advice from experts familiar with the long cycle theories of the post-revolutionary Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff.
Personal life
In the eighties, she and her husband, political philosopher Robert Sibley, lived first in Edmonton and then, from 1986, in Ottawa where they currently reside. His first book Northern Spirits is dedicated to Kopala. They have one son.

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